You're Being Lied To About Ocean Plastic | Truth Complex | Business Insider

when many people hear about ocean plastic it's usually in the context of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the idea that there was this giant trash island in the ocean was one of the things that got so many people paying attention to Ocean plastic in the first place the Great Pacific Garbage patches in the open ocean you cannot see land anywhere nearby so when you see pictures like this where there's clearly mountains or maybe islands in the background that is obviously not the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and then when you start looking you see that the

majority of these are fake most of these are probably honest mistakes but then there are other ones which are obviously photoshopped like this one which is clearly just using a picture of a landfill or something the question here is what does this thing actually look like if it doesn't look like any of this and why is everyone using photos of it that are of something else these photos are just one example of all the things we get wrong when we talk about the patch and about ocean plastic in general the plastic isn't coming from where

you think we're blaming the wrong people for it and there are devastating sources of microplastics that hardly anyone is even talking about I've spent the last few months diving into the research and interviewing experts and I'm here to tell you that you're being lied to about ocean plastic so what does it actually look like well in Short news sites and blogs use fake photos because the real thing just isn't that exciting to look at it's this giant swirling Vortex of plastic it thins out at the edges it moves every year and plastic is constantly being

added to it it was talked about as another shame on us kind of thing and it was assumed that it must be all of our daily household plastic that was in the garbage patch it's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch it's mostly plastic pulling what we all throw away basically the framing was like we've all been bad and now there's this big patch here a study from 2022 looked at the macro Plastics this stff bigger than 5 mm in the garbage patch and found that 75 up to 86% of it was from the fishing industry

I think a lot of news coverage probably thought there was no harm in laying on a little bit of guilt about plastic cuz we all do buy and use it every day but guilt mongering like that can still be dishonest and making people feel defeated does not help we've been doing that for a while now and it has not addressed the plastic pollution crisis when I first started talking to experts about this I encountered one thing I really was not expecting there's actually a debate going on over whether we should clean this thing up at

all once it is in the ocean it is connected with marine life um and um it's too late to remove it that's Martin teal he might have a bit of a bold take on this but he's not alone in thinking that at a certain point plastic becomes part of the ecosystem once we throw away plastic it's not ours anymore and other life absolutely colonizes that plastic some Studies have shown that nearly a hundred species can live on plastic and make that plastic their home and so being careful about how we clean that plastic up is

really important to protecting and preserving the ecosystem more research has actually come out about the garbage patch being teaming with life and actually that Coastal species are hitching a ride all the way to the garbage patch and then thriving there scientists have also found plastic eating microbes that can turn polyethylene into CO2 although in small quantities that said it's not a settled question yet some plastic leeches toxic chemicals some of it gets eaten by animals and contaminates the entire food chain we don't fully understand the tradeoffs between leaving plastic in ecosystems versus taking it out

anyway back to those photos if the pictures we keep seeing are not of the garbage patch what are they the two most widely shared images of the patch are this one and this one a photographer named Caroline power took those off the coast of Honduras in 2017 so this particular crisis was actually close to land not far out to sea in reality the garbage patch is less polluted than many coastal zones which might actually be good news because researchers also think it's more effective to clean plastic from coastal areas than from garbage patches that are

far out to sea it's actually really interesting that the furor over ocean plastic the Panic about it started with the garbage patch because the garbage patch is kind of this exceptional thing it's mostly fishing gear it's far out to sea it's difficult to clean and it's really not representative of the ocean plastic problem as a whole closer to shore you see more of what you'd expect water bottles wrappers all kinds of consumer packaging but how it actually gets there is often misrepresented when you Google how does so much plastic end up in the ocean the

main result you find over and over again is littering to show you what I mean here's an educational video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration where does Marine debris come from Marine debris comes from many different sources and enters the ocean in many ways intentional littering and dumping are a big cause of marine debris sometimes the trash goes directly into the ocean like when Beach go don't pick up after themselves and there are other examples of this all over the Internet so this page for example it's called how does plastic end up in the

ocean and the number one reason it puts is that we're throwing plastic in the bin when it could be recycled and number two is littering both of those are just not a majority of the problem here this is the European environment agency and it says poor waste management and careless littering on land are two of the main causes of the problem littering is responsible for a very small percentage of the overall plastic in the environment um based on this graph from the oecd you can see um littering is this teeny tiny blue bar here and

mismanaged waste not including littering is this massive one at the bottom mismanaged waste includes all the things that end up either in illegal dump sites or burned in the open or in the rivers or oceans or wherever the focus on littering specifically it's an easy answer because obviously there's nothing wrong with discouraging people from littering but it focuses on individual people's bad choices rather than systemic forces that are basically flushing plastic into the ocean every minute mismanaged waste includes everything that escapes formal Waste Systems so they might end up dumped they might end up burned

they might end up in the environment we're not even talking about landfills here if it's landfilled that's managed waste according to the oecd 82% of macroplastic leakage into the environments that's Land Air and sea is the result of mismanaged waste putting so much emphasis on individual choices also takes the pressure off of the companies whose products so often become plastic waste we know from Beach cleanup data that Coca-Cola has been the number one plastic polluter for 6 years in a row producing 11% of all the Branded plastic pollution found on beaches and just 56 companies

are responsible for half the world's branded plastic pollution so I read Coca-Cola's sustainability report and most of the emphasis for their Solutions is on recycling so is recycling the key to stopping plastic from getting in the ocean spoiler alert no but it's more complicated than you might think we know at this point that big lies were told about Recycling and they were told because the Plastics industry had a PR problem in 1969 there was a quote from the American Chemical Society saying it is always possible that scientists and Engineers will learn to recycle or dispose

of waste at a profit but that does not seem likely to happen soon on a broad basis and boy were they right globally recycling rates are less than 10% and they've been stuck that way for decades now keep in mind the amount of recycled plastic we make globally has quadrupled in 20 years we're recycling more than ever it just can't keep up I think we need to show a graph here so if you look at what goes into the ocean items that actually have a chance of being recycled are hard plastics made of just one

thing this report calls them rigid monom materials but you can see they make up just 18% of plastic leakage into the ocean these other two massive categories they make up a vast majority of the plastic in the ocean and those are just not widely recyclable items you might hear people say that they're technically recyclable the technology exists but it's just not economically viable and it's not being done at a large scale so the industry has known at this point that mixing together different types of plastics makes them unrecyclable they've known it for more than 50

years and they've just kept doing it but either way what we're looking at is less than a fifth of ocean plastic having even the potential to be recycled so graphs like this really brought it home for me that this is one of the biggest lies about the ocean plastic problem is that somehow we can recycle our way out of it when such a tiny fraction of what's going into the ocean is even maybe recyclable we need to talk about different ways to solve this problem recycling was doomed to fail because it was given an impossible

task and the impossible task was to just keep up with Limitless plastic consumption however it's not exactly completely fake either and that's something I'm encountering more and more in my everyday life when I talk to people about this there's been so much coverage of recycling being a scam that people think it doesn't matter at all that they shouldn't even triy the reality is that headlines saying recycling is a scam or totally fake are misleading you know it gets framed as an either or either we only need Recycling and only recycling will fix this problem or

um recycling won't fix this problem at all we should absolutely give up on it and I quite simply disagree it is not an either or it is a yes and yes we need Recycling and we need overall reduction one of the reasons recycling hasn't worked so well is because of low collection and sorting rates and convincing people that it's totally fraudulent will just make that problem worse so pet plastic number one and HDPE plastic number two are legitimately recyclable though the rates of plastic recycling for like all Plastics is less than 10% for those two

plastics it's closer to 30% and we could double that in the US by just doing a better job collecting Plastics we just need to stop thinking that recycling Plastics gives us license to consume as much as we want and stop accepting the industry line that is perfectly circular it's meant to be a last resort for Plastics we can't eliminate and it still comes with some environmental trade-offs there is no hiding the fact that our uh recycling system is not working very well right now um but that doesn't mean we should give up on it um

if anything it means that we need to invest in it and make it work as you can see this is messy we want magic pills and silver bullets a perfect solution for all these problems and that's just not going to happen and it's about to get Messier because we need to to talk more about microplastics so microplastics are incredibly hard to wrap your head around you see numbers in the billions and they're measured in terms of particles and it's just it's sort of impossible to Envision what that even means or how bad it is from

Europe so much microplastic goes into the environment that it's the equivalent of everyone in Europe throwing one grocery bag into the ocean each week then in the US it's triple that number though microplastics are 11% of all the plastic that goes into the ocean each year when you look at just High income count that number goes up to 62% scientists keep finding them in new places and then that makes the news and now it's in the new cycle so much that it's almost become kind of a meme with people joking about like microplastics for dinner

and whatever you might see so for a while we were thinking maybe that maybe the main problem here was polyester and plastic clothing but then we started having more data come out about tires um the tires on cars shed microplastics like crazy estimates vary but tires Can Shed between 10 and 16% of their weight over their lifetime that means each tire on a car loses a kilog or 2 lbs of Tire dust over its lifetime we also know that the heavier a car is the faster its tires wear down which means the more microplastics go

out into the environment so that means like the big SUVs Americans tend to drive really big cars those are creating higher numbers of microplastics it's estimated that 9% of all plastic pollution going into the ocean is from tires and right now there's just no way of catching it so textiles remained a problem then we added tires to the list but the craziest thing is that after that a report came out that said that there was a new source of microplastics we hadn't been calculating correctly and that if their math was right it created more microplastics

than all the other ones combined more than tires and personal care products and clothing combined and that source is paint so according to this report about 40% of paint ends up in the environment and the craziest thing is that 37% of paint is plastic polymers like the composition of paint is plastic we're painting our w s with plastic when I heard that lots of microplastics came from paint I had assumed it was mostly from ships but actually Marine sources were not even a majority of the microplastics that end up in the environment and a lot

of it is from buildings about half the paint applied in European lower inome countries will eventually leak to the environment that is mind-boggling to me all these things are basically modeled estimates it's really difficult to measure microplastic so people end up doing this sort of complex mathematic modeling to figure out how much paint gets Shed off of these every day objects even if this estimate is wrong and it's half that or a third of that paint is still a huge source of microplastics in the environment that's been wildly underestimated ultimately the disconcerting vibe that I

get from all of this is that we know there are huge sources of microplastics out there but we could discover a new one tomorrow that's even bigger there are also a whole other type of microplastics that come from things already in the ocean breaking apart a recent study found that the color of the plastic actually makes a big difference in terms of how fast that happens so red green and blue Plastics become microplastics much faster than white silver or black removing pigments from plastic would also make them much easier and more valuable for recyclers but

of course mixing red caps and green bottles and all of that would mean Brands giving up some of their brand power so now we're getting to the really big questions how do you compel massive institutions that benefit from plastic to change their ways over the years we've seen both governments and corporations make pledges to reduce their plastic Footprints over 5 years there was a 60% increase in these pledges and in that same time a 50% increase in plastic pollution that's nuts a 50% increase in 5 years these pledges simply haven't worked plastic use is still

set to Triple by 2060 at this point it might seem hopeless but we're actually in a pivotal moment in 2022 UN member states passed a resolution very ambitiously called end plastic pollution for the past few years they've been working on a Global treaty I've spoken to Independent scientists who are at these negotiations and they all talk about the same thing reducing plastic production this may seem painfully obvious but we have to go through the data a bit because it's been weirdly controversial for a long time now to say that plastic production leads to more plastic

pollution if you map out plastic production since 1950 and map out the amount of plastic going into the ocean since that time you get two lines that track each other very closely and this is true even for individual Brands a 2024 study found that the more product that Coke Pepsi Nestle and other companies made the more of their branded trash washed up on beaches even though making less plastic seems like a really clear answer this idea is still tearing apart these negotiations there is a big group of countries supporting the obligations to reduce plastic production

but we also have a very small group of countries that are styling progress in these obligations and this small group of countries are the Petro States people think that we are negotiating a waste treaty but in reality we are negotiating the future of fossil fuels the center for international environmental law where danela Works analyzed the guest list at these talks they found petrochemical and fossil fuel industry lobbyists outnumbered scientists at these talks sometimes 3 to one these industries are fighting hard because they're counting on plastics for their future growth the fossil fuel industry is using

all types of tactics to intimidate and to harass so as soon as we landed in Otawa in April um we started to see Billboards all over the city defending Plastics and with kids in a hospital with a masks of plastic uh for oxygen which we are clear that this we're not targeting this kind of of of elements with are asked for production reduction inside the talks industry Reps don't want to talk about lowering production they want to talk about Recycling and waste management of course recycling is important and we don't want to say that we

don't need recycling but but if we want to make recycling something that actually works we need to bring production to more sustainable levels there's no way that recycling is going to keep up with the levels of production that we have today every scientist and activist that I've spoken to about this issue wants two things to reduce plastic production and to simplify the chemicals that go into Plastics there are about 16,000 chemicals used in Plastics today most of which are not regulated by international law and getting that number lower could not only improve safety but also

make recycling much more effective I don't know how this is all going to turn out or if plastic production is actually going to go down but I do know dowo a chemical company and one of the world's largest suppliers of the polymers that go into single-use Plastics seemingly doesn't have plans to slow down anytime soon Plastics right now pnsp um silicon and uh Coatings I I think we have a pretty good line of sight since 2019 we've seen a 20% increase in in volumes in Plastics I think Plastics is going to continue uh to see

solid U volumes and we've got cost advantage in the long-term trends for plastic say the growth is going to continue to be there if you're wondering where I got all this information check out the link in the video description I'm sharing a reading list of all the reports that I use to put this together and for more truth complex subscribe to Business Insider on YouTube