Plastic People

This is the story of a new world,

a world that begins in the mysterious,

and invisible universe of atoms and molecules,

which combine countless numbers to form everything we see and touch.

It is the story of how man, investigating nature,

has learned from nature's examples

to join these same atoms and molecules to form substances

never before seen under the sun.

These new materials are the world of plastics.

The world that nature forgot.

We discovered these miracle materials.

We didn't ask the right questions. We just said, "Wow!

Look what this stuff can do. It's so cool."

And now we're realizing we made some big mistakes.

Microplastics are possibly the most serious type

of pollutant our society has ever created.

These invisible particles have been found

on the highest mountains, in the deepest ocean sediments,

and now we're finding microplastics

wherever we look in the human body.

And once these tiny particles are in our bodies,

they're oozing their toxic ingredients

on a minute-by-minute basis.

We know that the chemicals that are in plastics

could create health problems like obesity,

or diabetes, or heart disease, or fertility problems,

or possibly even cancer.

It's a conundrum we find ourselves in.

We got a figure out how to deal with that conundrum.

Every day, I start my day

by putting plastic in my eyes, and it's crazy,

because I literally see the world through a plastic lens.

I started investigating plastic about 15 years ago.

That's when people started looking at the Great Garbage Patch,

and then we started noticing that it was impacting animals.

One of the first things that we saw was the bird carcass.

It was shocking. There was probably as much plastic in the bird

as there were bones left in the bird.

So, for me, it was realizing

that a lot of plastic was disguised as food,

and a lot of animals have started eating a lot of those plastics.

But in fact, human beings have much more contact with plastics

than your average animal will.

I think about brushing my teeth with plastic bristles.

They're in the dust, so, we're actually breathing microplastics.

One study found that it's in about 83 percent of the drinking water

that comes out of our taps,

and of course, microplastics are in the food that we eat.

We are slowly turning into plastic people.

And scientists have been studying plastics

and the impacts of plastics on our environment,

on the planetary body.

But what we really need to start doing now

is looking at the impacts on the human body.

And that's what I'm going to do.

Plastic, plastic, plastic.

What are plastics?

Are they animal,

vegetable,

or mineral?

Plastic is by and large a derivative of petrochemicals,

so it's not a coincidence

that many of the big plastics companies in the world

are actually branch plants of big oil companies.

We pump the oil out of the ground.

We crack that oil into different types of chemicals.

Those chemicals are polymerized so that those molecules

are connected to create different types of plastic.

That whole process creates its own pollution,

including climate-warming gases.

Those many types of plastics are made into different products

that are shipped worldwide.

One of the things that's hard to wrap your brain around,

when it comes to the plastics industry,

is how astronomically huge the numbers are.

Over 1.5 billion plastic bottles

being bought around the planet every day.

Two million plastic bags

are used every minute on Earth.

The end result of this is about 400 million tons

of plastics that are created every year.

Almost half of all plastic produced

goes into single-use items.

Today, even the biggest oil companies in the world are admitting

that we're going to be using less oil in the years ahead.

And if you can't burn oil in cars,

if that market is disappearing

over the next few decades, what will you do with that product?

Well, increasing the plasticization of the human life

is where their oil is going to go.

Plastic companies are talking about tripling plastic use

in production over the next couple of decades.

So, it's a double whammy as a product

that is contributing to the global warming problem,

and creating this toxic exposure problem.

Some of the work that we're doing here, at the University of Minnesota,

is urban air sampling.

We're finding particles in our sampler with snow and rain.

Plastic is just everywhere,

and this is the evolution of this discipline

is that we started off looking at big things,

but now we've got these teeny, teeny, tiny little flakes.

And we're trying to understand how these materials flow

and then, yeah, where do they eventually come to rest?

And if they do, how long?

I mean, you look at something like a plastic bag,

the cereal bag,

and when you look really closely at it

under an electron microscope,

you can suddenly see all these little particles

that are just about ready to shed.

That's a little bit of the rolled-up adhesive.

Yeah. Imagine having that for breakfast.

- Hey! - Hey. Good to meet you. Hi!

- It's so good to meet you, too. - Yeah. At last.

- Yeah, come on in. - Thank you so much.

I'm looking forward to finding out

what you actually discovered in my home.

So, what we do is we take a sample

and we reduce the volume,

and then we stain it.

And that causes the synthetic polymers to fluoresce.

So this is from your house dust.

Some of these are fluorescing. They're pretty easy to...

- Spot. - To spot, yeah. And, so...

those are very likely synthetic polymers.

- And this is just a speck of dust. - I know.

So, if this is from one speck...

- How much is in the house? - I can't even begin to imagine

- how much is in the house. - Right, right.

I'm fortunate that I've been able to kind of test

some things just for fun.

- This is some dried mucus from... - Wow!

the nose of a small person

that I happen to live with. And...

- This is a... A booger. - Yes. Yeah.

Look at this. Look at all that. There's red threads in there,

that would definitely not be a human hair.

There are so many different kinds of contaminants

that are in consumer products.

We just assume that they've all been completely tested

and that they're completely safe, and we bring them into our homes,

and we just... We live alongside them.

And we think that they're doing us absolutely no harm,

when that isn't necessarily the case.

There's so little transparency.

- This is plastic. - Yeah, it's a dollhouse.

We are conducting an experiment,

and the entire population is involved.

We can try and kind of safeguard our home,

but it's a global commons issue. It's everywhere.

You go out into the world, and you're going to be exposed to it.

I've taken some samples of snow that's fallen in my backyard,

and found tiny fragments of plastic particles in it,

and when I came home, I told my children

to not catch snowflakes.

It's hard to wrap your head around, but virtually

every molecule of plastic ever created

still exists somewhere on Earth,

in some stage of degradation,

because this stuff never disappears.

It just goes from being larger pieces of litter

to tinier and tinier particles that become microscopic.

The definition is just, a piece of plastic

less than five millimeters in size.

So, a pencil eraser and smaller.

Somebody buys the bottle,

the bottle is used for a few minutes.

The bottle's discarded.

Once it's in the environment, it is broken down by sunlight,

by the action of waves, by the passing of time.

It starts to degrade into these tiny particles

that are so light,

and they come down in the rain, they accumulate in our food,

and we're absorbing them into our own bodies.

One of the largest sources of microplastics

into the environment is mismanaged waste.

Aside from large items breaking into smaller items,

one of the most common sources is paint from buildings and boats,

tire dust from cars, bikes, planes.

As we wear clothing that's increasingly plastic,

those fibers shed,

go down the drain,

wind up in the local lakes and rivers,

and those fibers are a big source of microplastics as well.

There are estimates that suggest that anywhere

from 10 to 20 million metric tons of plastic

are leaving our land and going out into the ocean each year.

Now, some of that will stay on the surface,

and float, and travel quite far.

Some of it, as it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces,

can go up into the atmosphere and travel globally that way.

Some of it will sink to the bottom.

It is eaten by almost every level of the food chain,

and now we're starting to understand that microbes colonize it,

and so, in and of itself becomes this habitat.

So it's atmospheric currents, global dust cycles,

the water cycle, the carbon cycle.

It's sort of becomes part of these planetary cycles.

This part of the Mediterranean Sea is the most polluted part