🇫🇷 Turning the tide on plastic: Creation and art from waste 🇨🇦 | Earthrise

Cheap and versatile, plastic is used for everything. The problem is, it's also indestructible. As a result, it piles up in landfills where it leeches toxic chemicals into soil and groundwater, or ends up in the ocean affecting wildlife and getting into food chains.

Approximately 268,000 tonnes of plastic float in our oceans - that's five trillion individual pieces. If nothing changes, it is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic by weight than fish in our oceans.

earthrise travels to Canada to meet people dedicated to clear plastic waste from our oceans, and to France where a movement is afoot to get rid the country of oil-based plastic.

Turning the tide on plastic in Canada

Canadian organisation Ocean Legacy is not only collecting and recycling plastic waste from the coastline of British Columbia but also fostering creativity and creation.

Since the organisation's start in its plastic-reduction endeavours, the team has collected over five tonnes of plastic from beaches around the country. The problems with plastic pollution, however, are not only surface-deep.

Aside from the unsightliness of waste on beaches around the region, ocean wildlife is also quietly, yet majorly, suffering.

"When plastic reaches our oceans, it tends to act as little sponges so any chemicals that are in the water, it will begin to absorb these chemicals in the plastic pieces and this is very toxic and very dangerous for marine life," says Chloe Dubois, one of Ocean Legacy's founders. "Every day, we're finding the new animal or whale that's been washed ashore with stomachs full of plastic."

Land animals are also at risk, with wildlife mistaking fishy-smelling plastic waste that has washed on shore to be its food source.

Ocean Legacy goes a step further with their clean-up operations, taking the pollution issue full circle by engaging companies in the recycling process, allowing them to breathe new life into gathered plastics.

With high-profile names, such as artist and author Douglas Coupland lending their support to the plastic pollution movement, the future promises many possibilities for making an environmental difference.

France's plastic purge

Across the Atlantic, a plastic-waste movement is also stirring in France, as a ban on single-use plastic comes into force by 2020. France's plastic pollution problem is significant, with only 25 percent of all plastic recycled and the rest ending up in landfills or illegally dumped.

With between one to five billion plastic bags floating around France, the country has been trying to make environmentally sound decisions to cut down on its waste for a number of years now.

Enterprising scientists are also working on ways to fill the plastic bag gap in the market by producing "bio-plastics" made out of materials including seaweed and sugar cane.

Algopack is a startup creating plastic from seaweed. Since its start in 2010, the company sells 40 tonnes of 100-percent bioplastic made from hundreds of tonnes of seaweed each year.

"The great advantage of seaweed is that it is renewable and it's unlimited - we don't need to harvest seaweed on the field and it's fully biodegradable. It goes back to the sea," says Algopack's president, David Coti.

As the plastics ban looms, commercially competitive products are currently being experimented with, and Algopack, among others in this relatively new sustainable "plastics" industry, is trying to keep costs down in order to retain brand loyalty.

One thing is for certain, while France's ban is a bold political decision in the right direction, it will take much more of the same to turn the tide on plastic waste before it is too late for our planet.

[tomkelly]

I like seeing the plastic to oil converters. Couldn't the heat come from burning plastic too? Certainly that is a good solution for remote islands

[fanofmany]

Not everyone could do this but I would pay extra to use organic plastic... and I definitely would buy flower pots more often for the sake of the environment plus I would also place more importance on the environment versus the need to have flower pots in my home or garden lol. But unlike others, environment > convenience/cost for me. Again, not everyone could do this.

[MrTomtomtest]

4 months to decompose clearly isn't enough, who wants to be changing their flower pots every 4 months ? They should aim for 10 to 50 years.

[bobmarshall]

So you make fuel by heating plastics by burning fuel ????
Seems like chasing the tail to me and you can't produce energy by using energy. The only way it can make any environmental sense is by using wind or solar electricity. And does the process use up all of the waste, or is there still residual material left behind?
Why not just use the plastic waste for high temperature incineration to produce electricity? This process creates few emissions with modern equipment and technology and leaves little residue.
As far as turning old plastics into art, well this is very limited and uses more energy, so it seems impractical and cannot be considered a realistic answer to the problem.

[aquaknight]

one of the biggest problems we have is that we have to get real about the situation. mass production spends a great deal of plastic constantly yet we think that some art, hobbies and even laws are going to fix.
we need;
1. innovation/creating a safe plastic alternative.
2. massive industry that can process as much plastic as all the factories combined pump out both in the manufacturing process and the product. and it would still be highly doubtful to be fast enough save the planet.
3. a force akin to the military, fire department, police with the specific goal to hunt down plastics.

anything less is just delusion, i mean, people cant even find a garbage can for the sake of the planet but you think they will volunteer or make enough art to make a dent?
The truth is that this is simply another symptom of the massive social problem called extreme inequality. does that suffer it cant, does that can dont suffer it.
when we understand that the economy is just another means of communication, money in banks is like disconnected phones or muted voices. Wallstreet moves money from bank account A to bank account B and makes money, and this madness they call progress. A world where mankind cannot attend mankind's needs.

study all the problems that society is facing and you will notice one condition in all of them, not enough manpower because man is the only resource that runs on money. every dollar in a bank is someone not doing something somewhere and in an age of billionaires, how could they not be part of the problem?

who has more effect on the earth, the singular ant that walks it or the massive far away sun that radiates it?

billionaires and their corporations are a problem as massive as they are, we just get paid to ignore it.
remember, we are talking about plastics.

[rgolianeh]

in the northern countries people should be convinced to not to have kids. Humans aren't a cold climate animal. As long as people live in the north the planet will continue to have environmental issues i think.