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

Plastic pollution is getting worse — despite widespread public awareness of the problem, massive investment in recycling, and years of pledges to stop polluting. So what do we get wrong when we talk about ocean plastic? A lot, it turns out.

Business Insider Producer Elizabeth McCauley dives into the scientific literature and talks to experts to find out how we actually solve this problem.
If you want to check out the sources for this video, we made a reading list for you.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:08 - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
04:36 - Littering
07:05 - Recycling
10:32 - Microplastics
13:53 - The Solution
17:44 - End Credits

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[ItaloBarbiero]

In short: Corporations blames us individuals for their waste mismanagement. Gotcha.

[bonedigger]

Plastic drinking bottles never used to be a problem here in the US till they removed all the drinking fountains. Free water was everywhere, every store, every park, everywhere. Find out who paid to have them all removed and you got your bad guys.

[JukkaSundell]

Title says "You're Being Lied To About Ocean Plastic", i was waiting to see when she mentions, that 90% of ocean plastic comes from 3 rivers in Asia. It never came.

[thisworldhasgonemad]

I work in manufacturing. The amount of waste that gets thrown is INSANE!!! Companies do not recycle their waste. It all gets thrown into the trash. I have always cared about the environment, but after working in manufacturing, I have come to be very vocal about how waste by companies is destroying our planet far more than what any single consumer or household could do. There are no rules for companies in how they get rid of their garbage. I worked at a lumber company, all of the wood came wrapped in plastic. We wrapped all of our built units in plastic. You mess up, you throw it in the garbage and start over. All decking material, plastic, got thrown in the garbage. We would have 4 massive dumpsters taken away every other day. That was just one company. The amount of waste is staggering.

[danb]

Living in China atm. The amount of plastic wrappers and individual packaging is mind boggling. Never have I seen this many wrappers anywhere and I lived in Europe and the US before. I wonder what's the percentage of plastic consumed by China alone

[PowAngel]

For more than 35 years society was sold into the concept that ground water was polluted, and unsafe to drink, which caused a transition of people depending upon bottled water, leading to the increase of plastic pollution.

[Mr.E.D.]

I used to work at a bottle making company. We had a pretty high recycling goal like 10% of the platic in our bottles needed to be made of recycled material. So we ground up in house the defective and good bottles that we had on hand and used that (not imported plastic). Just used extra electricity, manpower, and money with no extra benefit to the environment .

[elizabethransom]

Oddly missing is the fact that plastics, unlike glass or aluminum, cannot be recycled indefinitely. Yes, we should improve recycling programs. However, eventually all plastic ends up as garbage. If research shows otherwise this should have been stated. If not, it seems like this fact was deliberately missing from a video titled "you're being lied to..." in order not to discourage people from recycling, perhaps?

[maidenminnesota]

How about the myth of plastics "recycling", where we ship our plastics overseas (of course) for "recycling", but as soon as the ships are unloaded the "recyclers" promptly dump it in the ocean, rather than actually recycle it? They literally push it in there with bulldozers, then take the money and run. Guess which continent this takes place in.

[NestlaysChaulkolateChips]

This is the same with all recycling. All these companies are pushing the responsibility on individual consumers, but most of the damage is done by them. Even if each individual is hyper conscious, it will not make a dent on what the companies are doing. We need to do our part AND hold these corporations responsible

[manci.manwlhs]

I turned 40 years old this year. I still remember vividly that milk, water, juices and other containers were made of glass and later Tetra Pack. One by one they switched to plastic. The amount of plastic we use nowadays is not just staggering but completely unnecessary. Like I have recently seen cookie cutters made out of plastic. Like what the heck?

[graememckay]

Im a Scotsman born in '73 and growing up everything was in glass bottles. We drank water from the tap, We filled the empty bottles with water to take with us. We laughed, as kids, at the idea of spending money on bottles of water. We used to get paid for returning glass bottles to stores. The manufacturers stopped the scheme because they weren't getting enough glass bottles returned to make it viable.

[cardsharkz]

The problem is that in most countries of this world there simply is no real existing waste management. All garbage gets dumped into the next river or forest, and after the next rain season it is washed into the sea. No amount of recycling or reducing consumption in Western countries will change that. If our governments really want to change something, they should build garbage processing facilities in the emerging world.

[JohnSmith-locn]

"You will eat bugs, not use water, own nothing and pay more taxes to save the planet.... so that we can keep poluting it as much as we want and stay rich"

[JohnSmith-opls]

Saying we shouldn’t try to clean it up because some animals made a home on some plastic is a comically bad attempt to use concern for nature against people.

[LucyHoward-kyjz]

"We just need to stop thinking that recycling plastics gives us license to consume as much as we want." Definitely! Reduce, reduce, and reduce.

[madrush]

I live in a small cottage on the beach in Oregon. The beach is literally my front yard, so I'm constantly picking up garbage. The majority of what I pick up is fishing industry trash (some coming all the way from Japan) and firework debris from beach-goers.

All summer beach-goers illegally set off their own firework displays and leave behind the remaining bits: plastic, paper, cardboard, clay. I've never seen a single display where the debris was picked up. That's pretty irresponsible. How would you like it if I threw a giant firework party in YOUR front yard and didn't pick up afterwards?

Over the years, I've noticed more and more small pieces of plastic that wash up with each tide change. They are so small and there are so many that it is impossible to pick up. They're obvious to the eye because of the many bright colors. I know these aren't considered "microplastics, " but they give me a sense of how pervasive and serious the problem is. Boo on Dow.

[mutchheritage]

One thing I've been very curious about is the amount of plastics dumped into the oceans by country. If I go to the east coast, west coast and gulf coast in the USA, the amount of trash I see is very menial verses what I see in the Phillipines and other Asian coastline, where waste management infrastructures are nill. I think Americans and European countries have a complex that we are causing all the problems in the world, and we are so busy trying to fix them with taxes and self flagulation that we can't even see clearly to the meaninglessness of these penitent actions.

[lukefleming]

I find it odd that no one said China...

[МладенЈанковић]

A plastic bottle cannot be made into a new plastic bottle, but a glass bottle can be made into a new one countless times.