- One garbage truck holds about 10 or 20 metric tons of stuff we don't want any more.
That's also how much plastic waste ends up here every single minute.
That means by the end of this video, 16 more truckloads of plastic waste will find its way to the ocean.
And by the end of this year, at least 550,000 truckloads will end up in the big blue.
That's not good.
Really smart people are trying to do something about this problem.
That is good.
But what if I told you that 30 million pounds of trash is how much human beings put into the ocean in just 15 hours?
Yeah.
There'll be many numbers and statistics in this video that may shock or even scare you.
But the point is not to discourage you or anyone working to clean up the stuff from our oceans, beaches, rivers, and backyards.
It's simply to put the unthinkable hugeness of the plastic waste problem into scale, because if we don't understand the truth of what we're up against, we can't fix it.
And we can fix it if we take the right steps.
And I'm just gonna come right out and give away the ending, cleaning up plastic waste is a great thing, and we should keep doing it, but it's impossible to clean our way out of this problem.
So what can we do?
(lively music) Hey, smart people, Joe here.
Plastic is everywhere.
It's more than just (glass breaking) (cat meowing) that.
It's all over this room.
It's in the phone or computer you're using to watch this video.
It's in my car, it's in our clothes.
It's in our walls.
It's in space.
A world without plastic would be a world very different from this one.
- Just one word.
- Yes sir.
- Are you listening?
- Yes, I do.
- Plastics.
- Plastic is a pretty loose term for one group of materials that can be molded, using heat and pressure.
They're polymers made of long chains of repeating chemical units.
In plastic, those units are mostly molecules of carbon and hydrogen.
Plastic has completely rebuilt the civilization, even though it's only been around less than two centuries.
The first plastic was made from a mix of natural and synthetic ingredients.
And 50 years later, we cooked up the first fully synthetic plastic.
And things got pretty crazy.
World War II inspired the invention of new plastics used in everything from military vehicles to parachutes, to radar insulation.
We needed strong, light, cheap materials that lasted a long time and plastics were perfect.
And the products that we built with them made everyday items cheaper, more available and more disposable.
Thanks to plastic, we've been able to make and do all kinds of stuff.
I mean, without plastic, the world might never have had these.
I actually probably could have lived without that.
Plastic has allowed us to make materials that are cheap, useful, and easy to replace, with one big catch: plastic doesn't biodegrade, which means even though it's really easy to throw away, it's really hard to get rid of.
A plastic bottle in a landfill can take 450 years to break down.
Since its invention, we've produced more than 8.3 billion metric tons of new plastic in the form of little plastic pellets Like these.
That's enough plastic to fill more than 5,000 Giza pyramids.
By the way, those little plastic pellets they're called nurdles.
I just thought you should know that.
Stop being such a nurdle.
If we keep making more and more plastic at our current pace in the next 20 years, we'll make as much as we've made in the last two centuries.
And the amount of plastic going into the ocean could double compared to today.
by 2050, the plastic in the ocean could weigh more than all the fish.
We make an unbelievable amount of plastic, but doesn't it just get recycled?
I mean, what are all those blue bins for?
Well here in the US, just 9% of glass that gets recycled and only 10% of that gets turned into something that can be recycled a second time.
Globally, We're only recycling about 15% of plastic that's produced.
In places like the US and Europe, a lot of plastic ends up in landfills.
That's out of sight.
That will sit there for hundreds of years or more.
Before we go any farther, we need to talk about something we don't hear very often.
You see the plastic pollution problem isn't just this kind of a problem.
It's also this kind of a problem.
Plastic pollution is more than just litter.
Plastic is made from fossil fuels, which means plastic is also a climate and greenhouse gas problem.
Today, over 90% of plastic polymers are made from extracted fossil fuels, like oil and natural gas.
About 6% of all the oil we use on Earth goes to making plastic.
That's about as much as all the airplanes in the world use.
Extracting, refining and transporting fossil fuels to make plastic emits the equivalent of almost 25 million cars worth of carbon every year.
And because we're using more plastic every year, by 2050 this stuff will account for 20% of total oil consumption.
I mean the next 20 years, plastic alone could account for 15% of the carbon that we can safely emit every year.
If we want to keep warming under two degrees Celsius, whop.
Now the emissions from plastic will last decades or centuries, but the plastics themselves will last much longer.
Scientists have found plastics in snow on Mount Everest, in Earth's deepest ocean trench, even in Antarctica.
Everywhere there's earth or ocean, we find plastic.
Then you may have heard about giant accumulations of plastic waste, like the great Pacific garbage patch, a floating collection of garbage, roughly the size of France.
Maybe you're imagining a big island of packaging, styrofoam coolers and fishing gear.
But in reality, this is the great Pacific garbage patch.
It's mostly micro-plastic, pieces less than 20 centimeters across.
See, out in the open sea, as larger pieces of plastic get pummeled by wind and Sun and saltwater, they're broken up into smaller pieces.
One 20-centimeter piece of plastic can become more than 60,000 pieces of micro-plastic and not all that plastic is on the surface.
Many small plastics are pushed by currents and hitchhike their way towards the ocean floor, along with other waste from poop to animal parts to other pollutants.
Some of our trash is even becoming part of living organisms.
Plastic has been found in the bodies of more than 2000 species.
That means everything from tiny plankton to ocean giants.
That plastic moves around the food web and can even end up on our plates.
Of course, plastic pollution also ends up in places like this.
And just like ocean plastic, beach plastic is more than just bags and food wrappers and that beach ball you forgot to take home after your last vacation.
This is Henderson Island in the South Pacific.
It has one of the highest densities of plastic pollution on the planet, which is pretty weird because no one lives there.
Around 38 million pieces of plastic junk have found their way to this island.
Scientists have uncovered toys here from the '80s and '90s, plastic that got its start on every continent except Antarctica.
Plastic isn't just on the beach here.
It is the beach.
There are around 4 billion pieces of micro-plastic in just the top five centimeters of sand on the island.
Now, if you live in a place where a garbage truck comes by once a week and carts off your trash and recycling, it's hard to understand how all this happens.
70 to 80% of plastic waste that winds up in the ocean escapes from rivers and coastlines.
And we used to think 10 or so major rivers were responsible for most of that.
But according to recent studies, more like 1500 rivers play a part in dumping plastic into the sea.
How?
Well, to put it simply, about 2 billion people on Earth don't have access to waste management.
There are no fancy trucks coming by to pick up their waste.
So a lot of their trash ends up in the environment, but the people in those countries don't generate as much plastic waste.
The US where nearly everyone has access to modern waste management, is still near the top 10 when it comes to ocean plastic pollution.
That's because we simply use so much more plastic than the rest of the world.
Each year, an average American creates 130 kilograms of plastic trash.
So, although only a tiny fraction of what we throw away leaks into the ocean, a tiny fraction of a big number is still a lot of waste.
And we also ship a lot of our plastic trash overseas, especially to places where they already lack good waste management.
So it has a high chance of escaping into the environment.
Just because your plastic trash is out of sight, and out of mind, that doesn't mean it's out of the way.
It's pretty clear that we have to find a better way to deal with our waste.
So can we clean our way out of this?
I want to say I fully support ocean cleanup projects, but how much plastic waste are they really picking up?
Well, 30 million pounds of plastic is three 10 thousandths of the plastic waste made by just the United States in a single year.
And it's just half of the plastic trash that's entered the ocean, just in the form of masks, gloves, and all that other medical waste solely due to the COVID pandemic.
What's clear is it's probably impossible to use nets to filter trash out of the ocean without scooping up marine life, too.
One analysis of a large ocean skimming project found it to clean up just 5% of ocean plastic.
By 2150, it would have to run 200 big diesel ships, 24/7 during that time.
And that's a lot of extra greenhouse gas emissions to clean up a tiny piece of the ocean.
That's why many are focusing their cleanup efforts closer to shore, like on beaches or in harbors or rivers.
But there's also the question of what do we do with the plastic that we do collect.
Because most plastic we harvest from the water is actually so contaminated, we can't recycle it.
And remember, a lot of the plastic that is recycled just becomes more single-used, unrecyclable plastic stuff.
It's like solving one problem, but creating another.
So how do we solve all of this?
Here's the bottom line.
We have a very complex relationship with plastic and there is no silver bullet to solving the plastic pollution problem.
Experts say that really the entire system of how we use and dispose of plastic needs to change.
Here's eight things we can start doing today to change our plastic future.
Reduce how much plastic we make and use by getting rid of unnecessary plastic stuff, not over-packaging things in too much plastic and offering more reusable and refillable options.
Substitute plastic with paper and compostable wherever we can, particularly when it comes to food packaging and flexible plastics like bags.
Design more products to be recyclable because not every type of plastic is equally recyclable.
We need to make more stuff out of the types that we can process into new stuff.
This would also make recycling cheaper and more economical.
Today, almost a quarter of the world's plastic waste isn't even collected.
So we need to scale up waste collection, especially in lower-income countries, which means giving four billion people access to waste management by 2040.
Today only 20% of plastic even enters the recycling pipeline and only 15% actually gets recycled.
So we have to expand recycling capacity by double.
And we have to make recycling cheaper and more profitable than putting stuff in landfills.
We also need to use chemistry to figure out how to convert one plastic type into another plastic type or even convert plastic into other useful hydrocarbons like fuel.
Of course, we will never be able to recycle everything.
So we also need to build places to safely dispose of the rest, where it can't escape into the environment.
Finally, we need to reduce the amount of waste that we export to lower-income countries, where it can more easily leak into the ocean because, I mean, shipping your pollution to someone else's backyard, that's just not cool.
Your parents raised you better.
And I did too.
These are big steps and each has their own challenges and trade-offs.
But if your goal is to stop putting plastic into the ocean and to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases you put in the atmosphere along the way, these are the things that experts say we need to do soon.
By reducing, substituting recycling and disposing of plastic in these ways, we can cut our total plastic waste by 90% by 2040, and lower ocean plastic pollution by 80%.
That's 125 million metric tons of plastic waste that doesn't make its way into the environment.
Cleanup projects are great and they bring attention to the problem, but it's pretty clear that most of the real answers are much farther upstream from oceans or rivers.
Like literally the only way to clean up the oceans long term is to clean up how we live on land.
I mean, if you were on a sinking ship, you wouldn't try to mop up the water without plugging the hole first.
And that's why experts agree we need to stop making so much plastic in the first place, and recycle more of what we do make.
You know, the more I think about it, I cannot get over how bonkers it is that we use one of the longest lasting substances ever invented for some of the shortest possible uses we can come up with.
I mean, we've been to the Moon, people.
We can do better than putting plastic wrap on a banana.
It can sometimes feel like these big global issues are out of your reach.
Like you live in a system where you can't make any change, but this is a place where maybe some of it is actually in your hands.
I mean, you're armed with this knowledge, so share it, people.
Talk about this with your friends and family.
Tell your local government this stuff is important to you.
Your voice matters.
And there are places where your choices actually can make a difference here.
Whenever you can choose something that isn't made out of plastic, or at least a plastic item that can be used over and over, do it if you can afford it.
When it comes to your clothes and your food, whatever you buy on Amazon at 2:00 a.m., support companies that are producing alternatives to plastic and tell companies that aren't that you'd like to see them try harder.
But it's not up to any one of us individuals to solve a problem this huge, even if you're Mr.
Beast or Mark Rober.
Governments got to do their part, too.
I mean, come on.
- Well, we're waiting.
- If we're going to get out of this hole, we have to work to stop digging the hole deeper.
The best part of this is we've got almost all the tools we need to solve it.
We don't need to wait for some new earth-shattering technology, and now you've got the knowledge.
All that's left is to do it.
Stay curious.
