Broken (2019–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Recycling Sham - full transcript
Corporations market single-use plastic products as recyclable. In fact, much plastic recycling ends up as landfill - or on beaches in Southeast Asia.
Pure rubbish!
It's filthy rubbish.
Imported rubbish.
Polluting our land, our water,
and our air.
We don't want this in our country.
We have enough of our own.
The world is drowning in plastic.
Plastic is in the streets.
It's in the water. It's everywhere.
It's a huge global crisis.
By 2050, there's going to be more
microplastics than fish in the oceans.
The threat
is actually getting worse every year.
There is some smoke there.
Every morning, we can smell
some plastic smell in the air.
And the solution
we've always been taught will fix it
is actually a false promise.
We can't recycle our way
out of plastic pollution.
The plastics industry
has really sold us a bill of goods.
The petrochemical industries,
this is big money for them.
Right beyond the bridge,
you'll see Exxon Mobil.
Anytime anybody's filming
or photographing the plant
or anything like that,
Exxon just likes to know
what's going on, so...
We're up against some
of the most well-funded, ruthless,
cut-throat Industries on the planet.
And they are actively trashing the planet.
Plastics are essential
to the modern world.
We eat and drink from them.
We wear them, shop with them,
and our life-saving medical devices
are made from them.
They are a marvel of modern life
and convenience:
strong, flexible, and cheap.
As you can produce it
relatively cheaply,
you can mold it
into thousands of different things.
Plastic packaging has huge benefits
in terms of
protection of food, cosmetics.
And so the technologies
for producing plastic packaging
have pretty much spread around the world.
But the problem with plastics
is that they never really go away.
Plastic is durable. But it's also terrible
because it takes, really, a couple
of hundred years to biodegrade it.
There are also serious concerns
about plastic's impact on our health,
from the way it's made
to how we use and dispose of it.
The materials that are in plastic
often are toxic.
It's tied to a whole series
of human health problems.
And every single year,
more and more plastic is being produced.
Plastic production around the world
has exploded
over the last several decades.
We are seeing a doubling
of plastic manufacturing every decade.
Today we have 380 million tons
of plastic produced every year.
If it goes on like this,
the whole world will be full of plastic.
Why and how has something
so embedded in our daily lives
become such a huge problem for the world?
To answer that question,
we need to look deep into the roots
of our relationship to plastic itself.
How we created and molded it,
but, even more,
how it has come to mold us.
For years,
we've been told that the solution
to disposing of all this plastic waste
was simple.
Just recycle.
So every week, we have
three collection vehicles that show up
at every residential household.
One picks up the garbage,
which goes to a landfill,
one picks up the recyclables
in a split cart,
and that we process, and the other
is for compostable materials.
I'm Kimberly Scheibly. I'm the Director
of Compliance and Customer Relations
at Marin Sanitary Service.
Marin Sanitary
is a waste management company
hired by this California county
to collect and sort recyclables,
including plastics.
This is all the containers,
the plastic bottles,
the plastic jugs, the glass,
the aluminum cans,
steel cans, bimetal cans, tin foil.
Uh... Things like that should be here,
not things like film wrap, cling wrap.
We do not recycle plastic bags.
Plastic bags are actually
the bane of a recycler's existence
because they clog the machinery.
Places like this are called
materials recovery facilities, or MRFs.
MRFs collect and sort plastic waste
into bales,
which can then be sold
to recyclers around the world,
who melt it down and turn it
into something they can sell for a profit.
These bales here will go to market
and will be made into other products.
Recycling plastic
is a big global business,
valued in 2018
at around 37.6 billion US dollars.
After we find somebody to buy it,
it'll go to the Port of Oakland
where it goes to whoever is buying it.
But recycling plastic
is a lot harder than we might think.
For one thing, a lot of the stuff
people throw in the bin is not recyclable.
My name's Martin Bourque.
I'm the Executive Director
of the Ecology Center.
We're here at the recycling yard
in Berkeley, California.
Here's a highly recyclable
plastic container.
This would get made into plastic lumber
or bender board,
maybe tubing.
But a lot of things
really aren't recyclable,
no matter how much we want them to be.
People just want to throw, you know,
everything in, and, you know,
they wish it was recycling.
So we call it "wish-cycling."
Here's some "wish-cycling" for you.
Here's an umbrella.
I wish it was recyclable.
It's not.
There are actually thousands
of different kinds of plastic,
which makes recycling it
extremely complicated.
Each type
has a different chemical make-up,
and can only be recycled
if it's not mixed up with other kinds.
The difference between
this piece of plastic
and this piece of plastic
is actually quite significant.
You can see this one squeezes and flexes
a lot easier than this one.
This has completely different properties
and additives in it than this one.
So when these come together
at a manufacturing facility,
it makes it nearly impossible for them
to make anything out of it.
These should go straight
into the landfill bin,
straight into the garbage bin,
and not in the recycling bin,
until we have a better solution.
In fact, most plastic
isn't getting recycled at all.
The calculations are today
that 9% of all the plastic
ever manufactured has been recycled.
The rest of it has been buried,
burned, dumped in the environment,
or is sittingin a landfill
if it's contained.
In many other countries that don't have
an adequate collection system,
a lot of dumps are on the edge
of wetlands or streams.
They flood, that then flows
into the rivers and the ocean.
It's like one garbage truck of plastic
just being dumped into the oceans
every minute.
Every minute of every day of every year.
How much of that can we really sustain?
Most people don't realize
that plastic is made from fossil fuels,
like crude oil or natural gas.
The vast majority of it comes
from petroleum products,
especially through fracking these days
and natural gas,
which is the basic fundamental
building block for most of the plastic.
Companies like Dow Chemical,
Chevron, and Exxon Mobil,
known collectively
as the petrochemical industry,
take these basic ingredients,
combine them with other chemicals,
and turn them into a kind
of raw plastic known as resin.
We're talking about Dow, Dupont, 3M.
These are the companies
that take those resins
and turn them into usable plastic pellets,
or flakes, or precursors
for bottles and cans,
or maybe they actually manufacture
different kinds of packaging.
Although plastic has been around
since the beginning of the 20th century,
the petrochemical industry
really took off after World War II.
Consumers were ready to spend,
and, thanks to plastic,
had a never-ending array
of affordable goods to choose from.
The shoe industry for ladies' high heels.
The toy industry, sporting goods.
As plastic became cheaper
and cheaper, it became really commonplace.
Housewares, the electrical industry.
The biggest shift was when
the major beverage companies
consolidated
their manufacturing processes.
They were really looking to scale up
and have sort of these mega-centers
where they could mass-produce
and mass-bottle beverages
that they could then ship regionally,
nationally, even internationally.
This was the birth
of what we now call
"single-use plastic."
Single-use plastic is your plastic bag,
your clamshells, your coffee cups.
You go into a restaurant
and you get a single-use plastic straw.
You order takeout food,
and it comes in a single-use
expanded polystyrene container.
You know, five minutes after
a consumer's done with it,
now it's "trash".
With the enormous amount
of single-use plastic being produced
and consumed,
it did not take long for all those
bottles, packaging, and shopping bags
to start littering our roadways,
choking our rivers,
and washing up on our beaches.
In 1971,
this commercial, sponsored by a group
called Keep America Beautiful,
appeared on TV.
Some people have a deep, abiding respect
for the natural beauty
that was once this country.
And some people don't.
People start pollution.
People can stop it.
The ad was considered a crucial moment
in the burgeoning environmental movement.
But what people did not realize was
who was actually behind the campaign.
Keep America Beautiful was funded
by the beverage industry.
They were able to change the message
and the mindset.
It was you, the consumer, have
the responsibility to solve this problem.
Not we, the industry who produce
the package has the responsibility.
The messaging worked.
And people began paying more attention
to issues like litter and recycling.
Recycling was really
one of the major first things
of the new environmental movement
in the 1970s.
Nonprofits and community members
and environmentalists started recycling
in earnest.
The plastics industry
was right there with us
and paying very close attention.
Plastic manufacturers realize that
if they could convince everyone
to recycle plastic bottles and packaging,
they could keep selling
more and more of it.
And so the American Plastics Council
created the chasing arrows.
You know, this triangle
to indicate recyclability.
This was their voluntary effort
to allow people to sort plastics
into different categories,
one or two of which
were actually recyclable.
Only numbers one and two plastics
had buyers who were willing
to recycle them.
But the threes, fours, fives,
sixes, and sevens
had no market whatsoever.
So, you know, they were taking what was
sort of true for number ones
and number two and saying,
"It's true for all of it."
And then they went around, city by city,
and really did this major campaign
where they got recycling programs
across the country to add
all plastics to their programs.
What that told the average consumer
was it's all being recycled.
In fact, even today,
it's only the ones, twos, and fives
that get widely recycled,
and there's barely a market
for the others.
So that was a realgreen washing move
on their part.
By 1990,
over 10,000 communities in the US alone
had established collection programs.
A full-blown recycling infrastructure
was taking shape.
The US plastics industry is investing
more than 1.2 billion dollars
in plastics recycling.
It also began to catch on
in other countries around the world
where collection and recycling of plastics
became the norm.
But soon it actually became
easier and cheaper
for the developed world to sell
that plastic to one country.
China.
China has been the biggest place
for recycling of scrap plastics.
China had everything
the plastics recycling industry needed:
a huge industrial infrastructure,
a massive low-wage workforce,
and a robust shipping industry that could
cheaply import containers of plastic scrap
from all over the globe.
Also, recycled plastic
was cheaper than buying new.
If one-use scrap plastic,
recycle material,
they can save a lot of money.
The rest of the world was thrilled
to get rid of their plastic garbage.
And make a little money doing it.
China said,
"We will take
all of these low-grade materials from you
so you don't have to handle them anymore.
And we'll pay you
a pretty good price for them."
Thousands of recycling plants
sprung up across China,
processing millions of tons of plastic
every year.
They were running around the globe,
buying up every single scrap of plastic
that they could get their hands on.
So for 20 years,
they expanded their infrastructure
and all of our industrial nations'
internal infrastructure for recycling
was undermined as a result.
By 2017, China was buying
nearly three-quarters
of the world's plastic scrap.
My name is Yao Hai.
I have worked in the plastic industry
for 20 years.
Here I own a plastic warehouse
and the Tai-Ming Factory.
In this sorting workshop,
the staff clearly sorts out
the mixed materials
into different grades and reusable types.
Here they are packing
the sorted materials.
For lots of recyclers,
the main objective is to find
the most efficient way to recycle.
But this most efficient way doesn't mean
this is the most environmental way.
Many Chinese recyclers
were disposing of their excess waste
by burning it,
which was causing massive air pollution.
With the start
of the Summer Olympics in Beijing
less than three weeks away,
Chinese officials began an aggressive
new effort to reduce pollution.
The Olympics in China really drove home
the environmental issues associated
with industrial growth in China.
It wasn't just, you know,
the world seeing it, but it was
their own citizens seeing
just how bad air pollution had become.
All that rubbish: China bans the import of waste.
China launched
an aggressive anti-pollution push,
cracking down on what it calls
"foreign garbage."
China has introduced a ban
on recycling many types of plastic waste
from abroad to try to reduce pollution.
On July 18th, 2017, China announced
that they were going to effectively ban
imports of plastic scrap
and severely limit most other recyclables.
They were finished serving
as the recycling bin to the world.
At first, I didn't accept the plastic ban.
Now, we see the blue sky and white clouds.
We gradually realized and accepted
what the government did.
When China actually started
enforcing policies
and said "no" to a bunch of materials,
mainly mixed materials,
that sent the world into a tailspin.
America is suddenly facing
a recycling crisis.
We're seeing recyclers across California
struggling to find a place
to put their recycled materials.
Already huge bundles
of recycling turned down by China
are piling up in Hong Kong.
The impact of China's ban
was felt almost immediately
in cities and towns all over the US,
Europe, and around the globe.
There's now a rush
to try to sell the stuff to India
and other countries.
Plastic waste began piling up.
There are piles and piles of recycling,
taller than anyone you've ever met,
and as long as a football field.
What was the world going to do
with all of this plastic?
The waste has to go somewhere.
Waste from the developed countries,
US, Europe, Japan.
It won't be going
to another developed country,
it will be going to developing countries.
And we thought
that Southeast Asia would be
the next dumping ground.
No place has been more impacted
by the China ban than Southeast Asia.
Steve Wong is one of the most successful
plastic recyclers in the world.
For this material, I don't know whether...
Before the ban,
Steve owned dozens of plastic
recycling factories all over China
and had an estimated net worth
of more than 900 million US dollars.
My quantity imported into China
account for
seven percent of the total import
of scrap plastic imported in China.
That was a really lucrative business.
But now that China shut the door,
everything is different.
The total import of plastic scraps
dropped almost 99%.
So we have to sell our property,
to sell our asset, to sell factories.
But I believe in recycling.
The opportunity is still there.
Steve and his colleague, Tony Wong,
have traveled to Malaysia to explore
new business opportunities.
Looks like business is good.
Yeah, Mr. Yeong's business is quite big.
He has clients from mainland China
and many other places.
Today, Steve and Tony are visiting
one of Steve's new business partnerships,
a plastics recycling plant
in the central Malaysian city of Ipoh.
- Hello!
- Hello!
Long time no see.
This plant is owned by SK Yeong,
a Malaysian recycler of Chinese descent.
My factory's total area is four acres.
The total revenue,
40 million ringgit Malaysia,
which is equal to ten million US dollars.
The raw material processed here
is a mix of industrial-grade plastics
from things like cars or computers
and household materials,
like bottles and detergent containers.
First the material come in,
we have to sort it out.
After that, we crush it
and we blend it into formulas
and go to the extruder.
The extruder heats the plastic scraps
until they melt together.
Workers feed the hot, gooey plastic
into a machine that cools it down,
elongates it into strands like noodles,
and then chops it into tiny pellets.
The pellets are this plant's final step.
A valuable commodity used in
the production of other plastic products.
All these are
recycled content plastic pellets?
Yes, recycled content plastic.
So these are all recycled content plastic.
These two colors mix together.
These become the standard color.
Let's go to the test laboratory.
We use these for pipes
because they can withstand
extremely low and high temperatures.
Mr. Yeong's factory
is operating 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
But even with that,
it's impossible to keep up
with the enormous amount
of plastic flowing into Malaysia.
The country is inundated.
The place ahead is an industrial site.
Chiam Yan Tuan lives in Klang,
forty kilometers east
of Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur.
Klang is home to the twelfth busiest
container port in the world.
Here is fine. No one is around.
Is there...
any smoke we can see?
There is some smoke there.
And I think they burning everyday.
Recently, Chiam started noticing
that plastic waste was being dumped
in this abandoned area near the port.
This island is called Pulau Indah.
In English, means "beautiful island."
But we can see
there are rubbish everywhere.
Every morning,
we can smell in our community
some plastic smell in the air.
The stench was overpowering,
and Chiam and his neighbors worried
about toxic fumes.
When we make complaint
directly to local authority,
they challenge us, "Can you prove it?"
"Is this really pollution?"
And, "Is this really toxins?"
We cannot.
I think maybe we can stop
on the other side?
There's a big factory there.
In this area, a number
of illegal operations have sprung up,
makeshift recyclers trying to turn
the overflow plastic into profits.
This factory had been banned
one time, at least.
But later on, it's still operating.
This road is called Sungai Chandong.
I think over 20 small factories here.
I think most of them are illegal.
This half-built shopping area
is being used as a dumping ground
for discarded plastic shipped to Malaysia
from around the world.
Plastic.
Maybe from... computer.
They will process this in maybe landfill,
or just dump outside.
You cannot be recycling 100%.
Made in China.
Made in Thailand.
So terrible.
So terrible.
All across Malaysia,
citizens are fed up with the plastic waste
pouring into their country.
Residents of the small town of Jenjarom
were shocked to discover this massive pile
just one kilometer from the town center.
From Japan.
Made in the United Kingdom.
This from UK.
My country already import
about one million tons of plastic waste
this year.
This mountain of rubbish,
it's produced from the illegal factory
next to this dumping site.
The air pollution became very serious
in my village
because we've been surrounded
by more than 40 illegal factories.
The townspeople began
documenting the illegal factories
with photos and videos
they uploaded to the Internet.
The illegal factory, we found
that they burn their solid waste.
The burning caused
a lot of respiratory disease problems
to our people, especially our children.
And our elderly, who has this problem
of repeating asthma,
repeating coughing also,
our study found
maybe a four times increase
of these cancer patients.
SAY NO TO PLASTIC WASTE!
The Jenjarom residents
began a full-fledged campaign
to pressure the Malaysian government
to take action.
We knew that these were illegal factories.
How can we stay here
in this sort of condition?
The air is very terrible in this village!
When we first complained
to the local authority,
we were ignored.
When we asked them
to close down these illegal factories,
they say they have got no power
to do that.
How could they claim they don't have
the power to close the illegal factories
when they are in charge?
These foreign operators,
they don't care for our environment.
- They just care for profits only.
- Profits.
After months of agitation,
the Jenjarom townspeople
got the government to crack down.
The government aims to shut down
up to 100 illegal plastic waste recycling
factories nationwide.
We are hearing increasing number
of complaints from the community
that there are these
illegal plastics recycling factories
mushrooming in different areas
in Malaysia.
So we are closing down
as many as possible.
To some residents here,
simply regulating the industry
is not enough.
Enforcement,
monitoring is not the solution.
There's only one solution.
That is the total ban
of foreign plastic import.
But the government isn't quite ready
to take such a drastic step.
Malaysia wants to encourage industry.
We cannot say a total "no" to plastics.
But we are opening the door
only to people who are legitimate.
We are not letting
the low quality plastic scraps come in.
But the high quality ones,
we would evaluate case-by-case basis.
The government
has also adopted a road map
to eliminate all single-use plastics
by 2030.
For now,
Minister Yin and the Malaysian government
have promised to ban imports
of all non-recyclable plastics
over the next three years.
We people bear such a big burden
from the air pollution
and the water pollution
and just benefit to
a very small group of people
that our minister is saying that they
already invest big money in the factory.
But what happened to the environment risk
and also the health risk to us?
Why we bear this?
Who can answer me this question?
Why we bear this?
While Southeast Asian communities
are fighting back against plastic waste,
citizens in western countries,
including the US,
have also begun to join the struggle.
What we want is an all-out ban
to the use of plastic bags.
When one Texas town decided
to clean up its own environment,
it set itself up for an epic battle
with some powerful opponents.
Laredo is a border city in South Texas.
Ninety-five percent of the population
is Hispanic.
It is a really dynamic
and fast-growing city.
Tricia Cortez is the executive director
of an environmental group
called the Rio Grande International
Study Center, or RISC.
Our organization exists to defend this.
This is our client.
The Rio Grande supplies water
to six million people.
For many communities along the border,
it is the only source of drinking water.
It's one of the ten
most endangered rivers in the world.
The number one reason
is insufficient water supply.
And the secondary reason is pollution.
In the early 2000s,
many people in Laredo began to notice
an extraordinary amount
of plastic bags littering the city.
Plastic bags were everywhere
along the highways and all the empty lots.
In the creeks, all along the riverbanks,
in the storm drains.
Global estimates are that
up to five trillion plastic bags
get used every year.
That's 160,000 per second
with an estimated revenue of 39.2 billion
US dollars annually to plastic bag makers.
Just our town alone,
we were consuming 120 million
single-use plastic bags every year.
Hoping to cut down on litter,
some Laredo citizens had an idea.
Get the city to pass a law
banning plastic bags.
Public meetings and hearings
started to take place
about getting an ordinance
to restrict these plastic bags.
Mayor, today we are opening up
a public hearing
on the plastic bag ordinance.
We're asking for change.
Laredo was
among the first US cities to attempt it.
There was a lot of fear
and questioning and concerns.
The Texas Retailers Association is
and do oppose
any type of discriminatory ban
on plastic bags.
The downtown merchants,
a small, very vocal group,
went to many of these meetings
and hearings
and they just opposed this, period.
Walmart is part
of the Texas Retailers Association.
We do stand with the Retailers
Association's position on this issue.
Their argument was that this
was really going to do some serious damage
to the Laredo downtown retail economy.
As the debate wore on,
a new voice from outside Laredo
entered the fray.
A Washington DC-based representative
of the plastics industry.
My name is Donna Dempsey.
I'm with the Progressive Bag Affiliates
of the American Chemistry Council.
I represent plastic bag manufacturers,
resin producers, and plastic recyclers.
The American Chemistry Council
is a powerful lobbying group
that represents the oil and gas companies.
Plastic bags are an environmental choice.
It was clear
that the plastics industry
was paying close attention.
Across the country, plastic bag bans
were becoming a trend.
San Francisco enacted
the nation's first in 2007,
followed by other places,
including Seattle.
The last thing the plastics industry
wanted
was a city in their home state of Texas
banning one
of their most profitable products.
And even before Laredo could vote,
other Texas towns joined in.
Under the ban, the use
of plastic bags
is outlawed in most stores in Brownsville.
That means shoppers must provide
their own bags and many of them do.
Now Austin's mayor says
Austin should do the responsible thing
and ban plastic bags.
All right.
Motion to adopt the final readings.
By the time
the plastic bag ordinance
came to a vote in Laredo in 2014,
most people in the city supported it.
District five.
Vote yes.
District six.
Absent.
In June 2014, by a six to one vote,
the Laredo City Council
passed the ordinance.
Measure passes.
That year, we started to see
very visible changes.
The bag ban really cleaned up this place.
You didn't see
plastic bags just lining, you know,
every single spot on our side
or their side.
Retailers and shops didn't
go out of business because this happened.
People survived without their plastic bags
and they did okay.
But the bag ban's opponents
weren't going down without a fight.
Mr. Mayor,
members of the council, and staff,
once again we hear that this
is a downtown issue, but it's not.
I was first approached by Les Norton,
who is a friend and a business leader
here in town,
approximately two weeks
before the ordinance went into effect.
Plastic bags are reusable by the consumer.
If you eliminate them,
people are going to have to buy them.
It only took me about 15 minutes
to find a state law
that preempted the city from doing this.
It was clear on its face.
And I called Les and said,
"This is an illegal act.
We can strike this down with ease."
The Laredo merchants sued the city...
alleging that the bag ban violated
state waste disposal laws
that prohibited cities
from regulating containers.
They were arguing
that plastic bags are containers.
These were laws from the '80s, early '90s,
that the bottle industry
had successfully passed
through the Texas legislature.
So they piggybacked onto those laws
to say,
Um, "You're regulating containers,
and you're in violation of state law."
The case ended up
at the Texas State Supreme Court
in Austin.
And by this time, the merchants had
once again enlisted some powerful allies.
The Retail Merchants Association
of the State of Texas,
they filed briefs.
Different retail groups filed briefs.
The plastic bag industry groups,
they filed briefs
in support of our position.
The Texas Attorney General
also joined the effort
to strike down the bag ban.
This is the new measure
of these municipalities.
They wake up one day and they decide
that if they don't like the law
and because of their political preference
or personal conviction,
they can just go around the law.
Many supporters of the ban felt
that the merchants' lawsuit
was actually being bankrolled
by the petrochemical industry.
They got serious funding for this.
They had a really large legal entourage
with attorneys from all over.
So I can only imagine the kind of
industry money that went into their fight.
However,
the Merchants Association's lawyer
denies this.
I was paid by my clients.
My ethics in this case was solely
with the merchants.
I have not worked for the plastic bag
industry. They were not my clients.
That was not my ethical obligation
in this case.
The odds were stacked
against the city from the get-go.
The city still said,
"We think we have a chance."
The question presented in this appeal
is whether the Laredo
single-use check-out bag ordinance
is valid, and not prohibited.
Not only would this affect
the city of Laredo now,
this would have a statewide effect
on whether or not these bans
are legal in any city or county
across the State of Texas.
For the petrochemical industry,
there was a lot more at stake
than just plastic bags.
If the court ruled that cities
like Laredo could choose to ban bags,
there was nothing stopping them
from banning other things
they didn't want in their towns,
like oil drilling or fracking.
In June 2018,
all eyes were on the Supreme Court
as the decision came down.
The Texas Supreme Court today ruled
that a Laredo ban on plastic bags
violates state law.
Texas Supreme Court overturned
Laredo's ban
on disposable plastic bags.
It was so devastating.
It was a terrible day.
Brownsville's plastic bag ban
is now under review.
This ruling leaves
Austin's plastic bag ban
in the crosshairs,
as well as ordinances in Dallas,
Port Aransas, and South Padre Island.
The fight ended up with the bag ban being
struck all across the State of Texas.
You start to think about,
"Well, why is that happening?
What is moving them to do that?"
It's industry. It's big money.
You have these legislators
who don't want Washington DC
to come in and tell Texas what to do
with health care or these certain laws
and... or the EPA.
And yet they did the same thing with us.
Six months after
the Supreme Court decision,
the main stakeholders
who worked to pass the bag ban
met to discuss their next steps.
The city voted to do something
and to protect the interest
of a certain industry,
all that was wrecked, you know.
And it's just very unsettling
that the State of Texas
can go in and overturn something
that the citizens of one community
decided to democratically embark on.
The Texas Supreme Court,
given its very conservative make-up,
were really just pushing hard
so that the plastics industry
didn't take a hit.
It's time to go up to Austin and...
and have our voices be heard one more time
through the legislative process.
For now,
these bag ban proponents
will focus on passing new laws
at the state level.
You know, I've lived in Laredo
for 36 years,
and I think that was probably one
of the most positive things I've ever seen
happen in this city.
And it didn't take that long for people
to look around and see.
"Hey! This is a different place
than it was six months ago."
Just a few hours northeast of Laredo
is the epicenter
of the plastics manufacturing industry.
Houston, Texas.
A visit here is a crash course
on the direct impacts
of plastic on our health.
Houston is home to the largest
petrochemical complex
in the entire nation.
Second largest in the world.
Second only to Saudi Arabia.
This is an oil and gas Mecca.
Yvette Arellano
leads a bus excursion around Houston
called "The Toxic Tour."
The tour is designed to show
the effects of the oil and gas industry
on local communities.
The smell that you're smelling
is the smell of plastics production.
A typical tour makes stops
at various neighborhoods, refineries,
and plastic production facilities
along the Houston Ship Channel,
a 50-mile waterway dominated
by oil and gas complexes.
The first community
that we're visiting is Manchester.
Hartman Park is the heart
of the entire community.
Manchester is home
to nearly 5,000 residents.
The majority are Hispanic, and a third
of the population live in poverty.
So, welcome to Hartman Park.
You look all around us,
you'll be completely surrounded
by oil and gas infrastructure.
Ninety percent
of the town's population
lives within one mile of facilities
that process or store toxic chemicals.
The daily exposures here
are seven highly toxic chemicals,
from acute exposure to chronic exposure.
There are serious health risks
that arise from living
near petrochemical plants.
Multiple cancers have been identified
in people livingdownwind of those places.
The levels of ADHD in communities downwind
can be elevated.
We're right next to a playground
and right in front of a tennis court,
right behind a baseball field.
Wheneverchildren come into these
public spaces, as they're playing around,
they're also having snacks,
they`re drinking water,
and all of those heavy metals are slowly
accumulating inside of their body.
All of these exposures can lead
to fatigue, headaches, nausea, vomiting,
asthma.
Plastic production facilities
certainly pollute and poison the people
who live around them, who are often
some of the poorest and most vulnerable
communities in our country.
Petrochemical companies produce
an estimated ten tons of plastic
every second.
A lot of it right here, on Tidal Road.
Every day, the refineries here emit
powerful fumes into the atmosphere.
A number of us are just... We're feeling
a tightness in the throat right here,
like a squeezing on both sides.
I was used to it growing up,
but this is our backyard and,
like, no one ever told us growing up
what we were being exposed to.
Many of the health risks
associated with plastic production and use
arise from endocrine disrupting chemicals,
commonly referred to as EDCs.
Many of the chemicals known to be
endocrine disrupting compounds
are plastic or are added to plastic.
Endocrine disrupting chemicals
are chemicals that behave like hormones.
Hormones turn genes on and off.
They make your brain develop properly.
They give you five fingers.
They determine what sex you are.
One of the most commonly known
endocrine disrupting chemicals
found in plastics
is bisphenol A, better known as BPA.
BPA is tied to a whole series
of human health problems,
including infertility,
changes in the way the brain is wired
if exposure takes place in the womb,
breast cancer, prostate cancer.
When you begin to look
at the range of human health effects
which have been linked to BPA,
it's jaw-dropping.
The next stop on the Toxic Tour
is El Jardin Beach,
close to where the Houston Ship Channel
flows out into the Gulf of Mexico.
As plastic production along the channel
has increased,
people along the coast have found
plastic residue washing ashore.
We came down here to look
for these little plastic pellets.
And I have found them every single time
that I've come down here.
These are known as the feed stocks
for plastics.
So this is what you use
to make all of your plastic items.
And, you know, some are clear,
some are whitish, some are, like, older.
They look just like food for animals,
or they look like seeds,
or they look like fish eggs. So...
fish eat these, turtles eat these.
By now, the issue of plastics
polluting our oceans is well-known.
Images of its impact have gone viral.
Experts believe around
eight million metric tons of plastic
end up in the ocean every year.
It's starting to have an impact
in terms of the marine environment.
Not just in terms of what the beaches
look like,
but in terms of the health
of the marine biota and,
since we eat it, human health.
But what is less known is the impact
of what are called microplastics,
tiny particles that are now being found
everywhere on Earth,
from our air, to our water systems,
to the depths of the ocean.
When you have a big piece
of plastic and it's in the environment
for a long time,
It gets broken down
to smaller and smaller pieces.
Those ultimately
will become little microplastics.
Microplastics can pick up contaminants.
Those contaminants can be highly toxic.
Things like dioxins, E. coli,
or even the bacteria that causes cholera.
Microplastics smell like food
to small fish.
Small fish are usually eaten by big fish,
and bigger fish are then eaten
by even bigger fish,
and then we eat them.
I read somewhere
that every time you eat mussels,
you eat something like 60 or 70
potential microplastic particles.
And although the research
into microplastics
in our food supply is in early stages,
there's a growing body of evidence
that the impacts are significant.
There's been a lot of serious
scientific study of the health effects.
Type two diabetes, infertility.
A five-decade-long decline
in human sperm count.
We should be taking public steps
to reduce exposures.
And that's gonna require changing what
we're making in the chemical industry.
If you look right beyond
the bridge as we cross,
to the furthest left,
you will see Exxon Mobil,
the second largest refinery
in the entire nation.
The Exxon Mobil complex
in Baytown, Texas,
covers more than five square miles
of refining, processing, and production.
This here.
The Big Boss.
You know,
when we talk about plastics pollution,
you think of plastics pollution
in the ocean,
and really where the plastics pollution
starts is right here.
- Hi, how are you doing?
- Hi.
I'm working security here.
Any time anybody is filming
or photographing the plant
or anything like that,
Exxon just likes to know what's going on.
So I gather you're maybe protesting,
or you're trying to relay your concerns
to the community
- about Exxon.
- Right.
So, also Exxon also has
public information for people.
If you don't have
that contact information,
I can get that for you.
Do we have
a public information person contact?
Five-nine, you can go ahead
and have them contact
three, two, niner, three.
Thank you so much.
- All right, take care.
- All right.
Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical,
and the American Chemistry Council
all declined to participate in this film.
Over the next ten years,
plastic production
is expected to skyrocket.
The petrochemical industry
have, on the books,
expansion of their plastics industry
of 150 billion dollars in the US alone
for the next decade.
They're projecting a three-fold increase
by the year 2050.
The problems created by plastic
are only going to get worse.
So, what's being done?
In January 2019, a new initiative called
"The Alliance To End Plastic Waste"
was announced with this promotional video.
Managing plastic waste
is one of the most critical issues
of our time.
One only has to watch the news to realize
that the issue around plastic waste
is a worldwide issue.
We've got to solve this problem.
It's time for us as an industry
to step up, make a difference,
and make the world a better place.
Comprised of nearly 30
of the world's largest petrochemical
and consumer goods corporations,
the Alliance was created
in order to, quote,
"advance solutions to eliminate
plastic waste in the environment."
The companies collectively committed
one billion US dollars to fund the effort,
which so far seems mainly focused
on better garbage collection,
recycling, and clean-up.
But critics say the Alliance won't tackle
the plastic problem at its source.
A billion dollars. When they're spending
hundreds of billions of dollars
to produce plastic waste?
These are global companies
with hundreds of billions of dollars
in their portfolios.
I mean, if you think about
Procter & Gamble being
sixty-seven billion dollar a year
in revenue,
that's a drop in the bucket.
It's really absurd.
So the question becomes
what can we do
about the problem of plastics?
There is no one answer to what do we do
faced with this problem.
We can't recycle our way
out of plastic pollution.
Recycling can be part of the solution.
But we have to start
with reducing overall.
A growing movement of people
is trying
to quit using plastic altogether.
It's called Zero Waste.
Zero Waste, for a household,
aims at eliminating as much trash
from your house as possible.
So when we go to the grocery store,
we simply bring a kit of reusables.
So we bring some cloth bags
to buy anything dry,
like flour, salt, sugar,
cereal, tea, coffee.
I also bring mesh bags for produce.
When I come with my totes,
I'm not gonna need a plastic bag.
Every time you buy something
that is made out of plastic,
more plastic will be created
because it simply creates
a demand for more plastic.
So, when you get away from all that,
then you're investing in a more
sustainable world for our children.
Easy things that people can do,
I mean, learn to say no.
Take a moment and ask yourself,
"Do I really need that?
What is the impact of that?"
So, in the past,
underneath that sink was filled
with cleaning products.
But all we need is Castile soap
and white vinegar.
We don't have to worry about
recycling those containers,
or what the impact of those plastics
would have on the environment.
We simply have eliminated them
with those simple solutions.
Not everyone is going to be able
to completely eliminate
plastic from their lives.
But changing behavior
is definitely a good start.
Consumers have more power
than they realize.
Start with a reusable cup.
Start with a reusable bag.
Maybe choosing your products
based on something that you know
can be reused,
versus something that you know
will be immediately put into the landfill
or the recycling bin when it's empty.
Individual behavior is really important.
What you and I do every day
through our small actions,
they do add up.
And they do make a big impact.
But you and I...
cannot do it by ourselves.
We need regulation to protect us.
I'm pleased to announce that today,
the government is phasing out
single-use plastic shopping bags
over the next year.
Governments around the world
are starting to recognize
what they can do.
The authorities here
have banned plastic bags.
The capital is all set
to impose a complete ban
on the manufacture, use,
and sale of plastic carry bags.
The European Parliament has voted
for a complete ban
on a range of single-use plastics.
The government is trying to
ban materials
that are relatively easy to ban.
Consumers are looking to use less plastic
than they've used before.
But neither of those things by themselves
is going to be sufficient.
Science and the marketplace
also have a critical role to play.
We need to be designing plastics
that are inherently safer,
to create new chemicals that would not be
endocrine disrupting chemicals.
I love it when I walk into a CVS and I see
BPA-free bottles being advertised.
Environmentally conscious companies
are trying to find innovative ways
to reuse plastic
or invest in bioplastics.
Wheat stalks are just
as effective as plastic straws
and completely biodegradable.
This carrier bag
was not made with plastic,
but with cassava, a tropical root
found abundantly in Indonesia.
His team has developed a clear film
made from crab shells and trees.
They believe it could be a biodegradable
alternative to plastic packaging.
But in the end,
unless the petrochemical companies
take more drastic actions
to either reduce the amount of plastic
they produce
or to invest far more on clean-up,
the crisis isn't going away anytime soon.
They have more money than government has.
We're going to have to figure out a way
to extract money from them
to solve this problem.
Many governments around the world,
they're saying, "Hey,
you produced the package. You will
have to collect it and manage it."
That's only going to happen
if consumers themselves demand it.
It means putting pressure
on our federal government
to create a real regulatory environment
in which business can thrive,
but not trash the planet at the same time.
We've made changes before.
It's not impossible,
even when the odds are stacked against us.
We need our leaders at every level
to fight this tidal wave of plastic.
We need them to be educated
and connect the dots
and see that this is a global crisis.
It's filthy rubbish.
Imported rubbish.
Polluting our land, our water,
and our air.
We don't want this in our country.
We have enough of our own.
The world is drowning in plastic.
Plastic is in the streets.
It's in the water. It's everywhere.
It's a huge global crisis.
By 2050, there's going to be more
microplastics than fish in the oceans.
The threat
is actually getting worse every year.
There is some smoke there.
Every morning, we can smell
some plastic smell in the air.
And the solution
we've always been taught will fix it
is actually a false promise.
We can't recycle our way
out of plastic pollution.
The plastics industry
has really sold us a bill of goods.
The petrochemical industries,
this is big money for them.
Right beyond the bridge,
you'll see Exxon Mobil.
Anytime anybody's filming
or photographing the plant
or anything like that,
Exxon just likes to know
what's going on, so...
We're up against some
of the most well-funded, ruthless,
cut-throat Industries on the planet.
And they are actively trashing the planet.
Plastics are essential
to the modern world.
We eat and drink from them.
We wear them, shop with them,
and our life-saving medical devices
are made from them.
They are a marvel of modern life
and convenience:
strong, flexible, and cheap.
As you can produce it
relatively cheaply,
you can mold it
into thousands of different things.
Plastic packaging has huge benefits
in terms of
protection of food, cosmetics.
And so the technologies
for producing plastic packaging
have pretty much spread around the world.
But the problem with plastics
is that they never really go away.
Plastic is durable. But it's also terrible
because it takes, really, a couple
of hundred years to biodegrade it.
There are also serious concerns
about plastic's impact on our health,
from the way it's made
to how we use and dispose of it.
The materials that are in plastic
often are toxic.
It's tied to a whole series
of human health problems.
And every single year,
more and more plastic is being produced.
Plastic production around the world
has exploded
over the last several decades.
We are seeing a doubling
of plastic manufacturing every decade.
Today we have 380 million tons
of plastic produced every year.
If it goes on like this,
the whole world will be full of plastic.
Why and how has something
so embedded in our daily lives
become such a huge problem for the world?
To answer that question,
we need to look deep into the roots
of our relationship to plastic itself.
How we created and molded it,
but, even more,
how it has come to mold us.
For years,
we've been told that the solution
to disposing of all this plastic waste
was simple.
Just recycle.
So every week, we have
three collection vehicles that show up
at every residential household.
One picks up the garbage,
which goes to a landfill,
one picks up the recyclables
in a split cart,
and that we process, and the other
is for compostable materials.
I'm Kimberly Scheibly. I'm the Director
of Compliance and Customer Relations
at Marin Sanitary Service.
Marin Sanitary
is a waste management company
hired by this California county
to collect and sort recyclables,
including plastics.
This is all the containers,
the plastic bottles,
the plastic jugs, the glass,
the aluminum cans,
steel cans, bimetal cans, tin foil.
Uh... Things like that should be here,
not things like film wrap, cling wrap.
We do not recycle plastic bags.
Plastic bags are actually
the bane of a recycler's existence
because they clog the machinery.
Places like this are called
materials recovery facilities, or MRFs.
MRFs collect and sort plastic waste
into bales,
which can then be sold
to recyclers around the world,
who melt it down and turn it
into something they can sell for a profit.
These bales here will go to market
and will be made into other products.
Recycling plastic
is a big global business,
valued in 2018
at around 37.6 billion US dollars.
After we find somebody to buy it,
it'll go to the Port of Oakland
where it goes to whoever is buying it.
But recycling plastic
is a lot harder than we might think.
For one thing, a lot of the stuff
people throw in the bin is not recyclable.
My name's Martin Bourque.
I'm the Executive Director
of the Ecology Center.
We're here at the recycling yard
in Berkeley, California.
Here's a highly recyclable
plastic container.
This would get made into plastic lumber
or bender board,
maybe tubing.
But a lot of things
really aren't recyclable,
no matter how much we want them to be.
People just want to throw, you know,
everything in, and, you know,
they wish it was recycling.
So we call it "wish-cycling."
Here's some "wish-cycling" for you.
Here's an umbrella.
I wish it was recyclable.
It's not.
There are actually thousands
of different kinds of plastic,
which makes recycling it
extremely complicated.
Each type
has a different chemical make-up,
and can only be recycled
if it's not mixed up with other kinds.
The difference between
this piece of plastic
and this piece of plastic
is actually quite significant.
You can see this one squeezes and flexes
a lot easier than this one.
This has completely different properties
and additives in it than this one.
So when these come together
at a manufacturing facility,
it makes it nearly impossible for them
to make anything out of it.
These should go straight
into the landfill bin,
straight into the garbage bin,
and not in the recycling bin,
until we have a better solution.
In fact, most plastic
isn't getting recycled at all.
The calculations are today
that 9% of all the plastic
ever manufactured has been recycled.
The rest of it has been buried,
burned, dumped in the environment,
or is sittingin a landfill
if it's contained.
In many other countries that don't have
an adequate collection system,
a lot of dumps are on the edge
of wetlands or streams.
They flood, that then flows
into the rivers and the ocean.
It's like one garbage truck of plastic
just being dumped into the oceans
every minute.
Every minute of every day of every year.
How much of that can we really sustain?
Most people don't realize
that plastic is made from fossil fuels,
like crude oil or natural gas.
The vast majority of it comes
from petroleum products,
especially through fracking these days
and natural gas,
which is the basic fundamental
building block for most of the plastic.
Companies like Dow Chemical,
Chevron, and Exxon Mobil,
known collectively
as the petrochemical industry,
take these basic ingredients,
combine them with other chemicals,
and turn them into a kind
of raw plastic known as resin.
We're talking about Dow, Dupont, 3M.
These are the companies
that take those resins
and turn them into usable plastic pellets,
or flakes, or precursors
for bottles and cans,
or maybe they actually manufacture
different kinds of packaging.
Although plastic has been around
since the beginning of the 20th century,
the petrochemical industry
really took off after World War II.
Consumers were ready to spend,
and, thanks to plastic,
had a never-ending array
of affordable goods to choose from.
The shoe industry for ladies' high heels.
The toy industry, sporting goods.
As plastic became cheaper
and cheaper, it became really commonplace.
Housewares, the electrical industry.
The biggest shift was when
the major beverage companies
consolidated
their manufacturing processes.
They were really looking to scale up
and have sort of these mega-centers
where they could mass-produce
and mass-bottle beverages
that they could then ship regionally,
nationally, even internationally.
This was the birth
of what we now call
"single-use plastic."
Single-use plastic is your plastic bag,
your clamshells, your coffee cups.
You go into a restaurant
and you get a single-use plastic straw.
You order takeout food,
and it comes in a single-use
expanded polystyrene container.
You know, five minutes after
a consumer's done with it,
now it's "trash".
With the enormous amount
of single-use plastic being produced
and consumed,
it did not take long for all those
bottles, packaging, and shopping bags
to start littering our roadways,
choking our rivers,
and washing up on our beaches.
In 1971,
this commercial, sponsored by a group
called Keep America Beautiful,
appeared on TV.
Some people have a deep, abiding respect
for the natural beauty
that was once this country.
And some people don't.
People start pollution.
People can stop it.
The ad was considered a crucial moment
in the burgeoning environmental movement.
But what people did not realize was
who was actually behind the campaign.
Keep America Beautiful was funded
by the beverage industry.
They were able to change the message
and the mindset.
It was you, the consumer, have
the responsibility to solve this problem.
Not we, the industry who produce
the package has the responsibility.
The messaging worked.
And people began paying more attention
to issues like litter and recycling.
Recycling was really
one of the major first things
of the new environmental movement
in the 1970s.
Nonprofits and community members
and environmentalists started recycling
in earnest.
The plastics industry
was right there with us
and paying very close attention.
Plastic manufacturers realize that
if they could convince everyone
to recycle plastic bottles and packaging,
they could keep selling
more and more of it.
And so the American Plastics Council
created the chasing arrows.
You know, this triangle
to indicate recyclability.
This was their voluntary effort
to allow people to sort plastics
into different categories,
one or two of which
were actually recyclable.
Only numbers one and two plastics
had buyers who were willing
to recycle them.
But the threes, fours, fives,
sixes, and sevens
had no market whatsoever.
So, you know, they were taking what was
sort of true for number ones
and number two and saying,
"It's true for all of it."
And then they went around, city by city,
and really did this major campaign
where they got recycling programs
across the country to add
all plastics to their programs.
What that told the average consumer
was it's all being recycled.
In fact, even today,
it's only the ones, twos, and fives
that get widely recycled,
and there's barely a market
for the others.
So that was a realgreen washing move
on their part.
By 1990,
over 10,000 communities in the US alone
had established collection programs.
A full-blown recycling infrastructure
was taking shape.
The US plastics industry is investing
more than 1.2 billion dollars
in plastics recycling.
It also began to catch on
in other countries around the world
where collection and recycling of plastics
became the norm.
But soon it actually became
easier and cheaper
for the developed world to sell
that plastic to one country.
China.
China has been the biggest place
for recycling of scrap plastics.
China had everything
the plastics recycling industry needed:
a huge industrial infrastructure,
a massive low-wage workforce,
and a robust shipping industry that could
cheaply import containers of plastic scrap
from all over the globe.
Also, recycled plastic
was cheaper than buying new.
If one-use scrap plastic,
recycle material,
they can save a lot of money.
The rest of the world was thrilled
to get rid of their plastic garbage.
And make a little money doing it.
China said,
"We will take
all of these low-grade materials from you
so you don't have to handle them anymore.
And we'll pay you
a pretty good price for them."
Thousands of recycling plants
sprung up across China,
processing millions of tons of plastic
every year.
They were running around the globe,
buying up every single scrap of plastic
that they could get their hands on.
So for 20 years,
they expanded their infrastructure
and all of our industrial nations'
internal infrastructure for recycling
was undermined as a result.
By 2017, China was buying
nearly three-quarters
of the world's plastic scrap.
My name is Yao Hai.
I have worked in the plastic industry
for 20 years.
Here I own a plastic warehouse
and the Tai-Ming Factory.
In this sorting workshop,
the staff clearly sorts out
the mixed materials
into different grades and reusable types.
Here they are packing
the sorted materials.
For lots of recyclers,
the main objective is to find
the most efficient way to recycle.
But this most efficient way doesn't mean
this is the most environmental way.
Many Chinese recyclers
were disposing of their excess waste
by burning it,
which was causing massive air pollution.
With the start
of the Summer Olympics in Beijing
less than three weeks away,
Chinese officials began an aggressive
new effort to reduce pollution.
The Olympics in China really drove home
the environmental issues associated
with industrial growth in China.
It wasn't just, you know,
the world seeing it, but it was
their own citizens seeing
just how bad air pollution had become.
All that rubbish: China bans the import of waste.
China launched
an aggressive anti-pollution push,
cracking down on what it calls
"foreign garbage."
China has introduced a ban
on recycling many types of plastic waste
from abroad to try to reduce pollution.
On July 18th, 2017, China announced
that they were going to effectively ban
imports of plastic scrap
and severely limit most other recyclables.
They were finished serving
as the recycling bin to the world.
At first, I didn't accept the plastic ban.
Now, we see the blue sky and white clouds.
We gradually realized and accepted
what the government did.
When China actually started
enforcing policies
and said "no" to a bunch of materials,
mainly mixed materials,
that sent the world into a tailspin.
America is suddenly facing
a recycling crisis.
We're seeing recyclers across California
struggling to find a place
to put their recycled materials.
Already huge bundles
of recycling turned down by China
are piling up in Hong Kong.
The impact of China's ban
was felt almost immediately
in cities and towns all over the US,
Europe, and around the globe.
There's now a rush
to try to sell the stuff to India
and other countries.
Plastic waste began piling up.
There are piles and piles of recycling,
taller than anyone you've ever met,
and as long as a football field.
What was the world going to do
with all of this plastic?
The waste has to go somewhere.
Waste from the developed countries,
US, Europe, Japan.
It won't be going
to another developed country,
it will be going to developing countries.
And we thought
that Southeast Asia would be
the next dumping ground.
No place has been more impacted
by the China ban than Southeast Asia.
Steve Wong is one of the most successful
plastic recyclers in the world.
For this material, I don't know whether...
Before the ban,
Steve owned dozens of plastic
recycling factories all over China
and had an estimated net worth
of more than 900 million US dollars.
My quantity imported into China
account for
seven percent of the total import
of scrap plastic imported in China.
That was a really lucrative business.
But now that China shut the door,
everything is different.
The total import of plastic scraps
dropped almost 99%.
So we have to sell our property,
to sell our asset, to sell factories.
But I believe in recycling.
The opportunity is still there.
Steve and his colleague, Tony Wong,
have traveled to Malaysia to explore
new business opportunities.
Looks like business is good.
Yeah, Mr. Yeong's business is quite big.
He has clients from mainland China
and many other places.
Today, Steve and Tony are visiting
one of Steve's new business partnerships,
a plastics recycling plant
in the central Malaysian city of Ipoh.
- Hello!
- Hello!
Long time no see.
This plant is owned by SK Yeong,
a Malaysian recycler of Chinese descent.
My factory's total area is four acres.
The total revenue,
40 million ringgit Malaysia,
which is equal to ten million US dollars.
The raw material processed here
is a mix of industrial-grade plastics
from things like cars or computers
and household materials,
like bottles and detergent containers.
First the material come in,
we have to sort it out.
After that, we crush it
and we blend it into formulas
and go to the extruder.
The extruder heats the plastic scraps
until they melt together.
Workers feed the hot, gooey plastic
into a machine that cools it down,
elongates it into strands like noodles,
and then chops it into tiny pellets.
The pellets are this plant's final step.
A valuable commodity used in
the production of other plastic products.
All these are
recycled content plastic pellets?
Yes, recycled content plastic.
So these are all recycled content plastic.
These two colors mix together.
These become the standard color.
Let's go to the test laboratory.
We use these for pipes
because they can withstand
extremely low and high temperatures.
Mr. Yeong's factory
is operating 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
But even with that,
it's impossible to keep up
with the enormous amount
of plastic flowing into Malaysia.
The country is inundated.
The place ahead is an industrial site.
Chiam Yan Tuan lives in Klang,
forty kilometers east
of Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur.
Klang is home to the twelfth busiest
container port in the world.
Here is fine. No one is around.
Is there...
any smoke we can see?
There is some smoke there.
And I think they burning everyday.
Recently, Chiam started noticing
that plastic waste was being dumped
in this abandoned area near the port.
This island is called Pulau Indah.
In English, means "beautiful island."
But we can see
there are rubbish everywhere.
Every morning,
we can smell in our community
some plastic smell in the air.
The stench was overpowering,
and Chiam and his neighbors worried
about toxic fumes.
When we make complaint
directly to local authority,
they challenge us, "Can you prove it?"
"Is this really pollution?"
And, "Is this really toxins?"
We cannot.
I think maybe we can stop
on the other side?
There's a big factory there.
In this area, a number
of illegal operations have sprung up,
makeshift recyclers trying to turn
the overflow plastic into profits.
This factory had been banned
one time, at least.
But later on, it's still operating.
This road is called Sungai Chandong.
I think over 20 small factories here.
I think most of them are illegal.
This half-built shopping area
is being used as a dumping ground
for discarded plastic shipped to Malaysia
from around the world.
Plastic.
Maybe from... computer.
They will process this in maybe landfill,
or just dump outside.
You cannot be recycling 100%.
Made in China.
Made in Thailand.
So terrible.
So terrible.
All across Malaysia,
citizens are fed up with the plastic waste
pouring into their country.
Residents of the small town of Jenjarom
were shocked to discover this massive pile
just one kilometer from the town center.
From Japan.
Made in the United Kingdom.
This from UK.
My country already import
about one million tons of plastic waste
this year.
This mountain of rubbish,
it's produced from the illegal factory
next to this dumping site.
The air pollution became very serious
in my village
because we've been surrounded
by more than 40 illegal factories.
The townspeople began
documenting the illegal factories
with photos and videos
they uploaded to the Internet.
The illegal factory, we found
that they burn their solid waste.
The burning caused
a lot of respiratory disease problems
to our people, especially our children.
And our elderly, who has this problem
of repeating asthma,
repeating coughing also,
our study found
maybe a four times increase
of these cancer patients.
SAY NO TO PLASTIC WASTE!
The Jenjarom residents
began a full-fledged campaign
to pressure the Malaysian government
to take action.
We knew that these were illegal factories.
How can we stay here
in this sort of condition?
The air is very terrible in this village!
When we first complained
to the local authority,
we were ignored.
When we asked them
to close down these illegal factories,
they say they have got no power
to do that.
How could they claim they don't have
the power to close the illegal factories
when they are in charge?
These foreign operators,
they don't care for our environment.
- They just care for profits only.
- Profits.
After months of agitation,
the Jenjarom townspeople
got the government to crack down.
The government aims to shut down
up to 100 illegal plastic waste recycling
factories nationwide.
We are hearing increasing number
of complaints from the community
that there are these
illegal plastics recycling factories
mushrooming in different areas
in Malaysia.
So we are closing down
as many as possible.
To some residents here,
simply regulating the industry
is not enough.
Enforcement,
monitoring is not the solution.
There's only one solution.
That is the total ban
of foreign plastic import.
But the government isn't quite ready
to take such a drastic step.
Malaysia wants to encourage industry.
We cannot say a total "no" to plastics.
But we are opening the door
only to people who are legitimate.
We are not letting
the low quality plastic scraps come in.
But the high quality ones,
we would evaluate case-by-case basis.
The government
has also adopted a road map
to eliminate all single-use plastics
by 2030.
For now,
Minister Yin and the Malaysian government
have promised to ban imports
of all non-recyclable plastics
over the next three years.
We people bear such a big burden
from the air pollution
and the water pollution
and just benefit to
a very small group of people
that our minister is saying that they
already invest big money in the factory.
But what happened to the environment risk
and also the health risk to us?
Why we bear this?
Who can answer me this question?
Why we bear this?
While Southeast Asian communities
are fighting back against plastic waste,
citizens in western countries,
including the US,
have also begun to join the struggle.
What we want is an all-out ban
to the use of plastic bags.
When one Texas town decided
to clean up its own environment,
it set itself up for an epic battle
with some powerful opponents.
Laredo is a border city in South Texas.
Ninety-five percent of the population
is Hispanic.
It is a really dynamic
and fast-growing city.
Tricia Cortez is the executive director
of an environmental group
called the Rio Grande International
Study Center, or RISC.
Our organization exists to defend this.
This is our client.
The Rio Grande supplies water
to six million people.
For many communities along the border,
it is the only source of drinking water.
It's one of the ten
most endangered rivers in the world.
The number one reason
is insufficient water supply.
And the secondary reason is pollution.
In the early 2000s,
many people in Laredo began to notice
an extraordinary amount
of plastic bags littering the city.
Plastic bags were everywhere
along the highways and all the empty lots.
In the creeks, all along the riverbanks,
in the storm drains.
Global estimates are that
up to five trillion plastic bags
get used every year.
That's 160,000 per second
with an estimated revenue of 39.2 billion
US dollars annually to plastic bag makers.
Just our town alone,
we were consuming 120 million
single-use plastic bags every year.
Hoping to cut down on litter,
some Laredo citizens had an idea.
Get the city to pass a law
banning plastic bags.
Public meetings and hearings
started to take place
about getting an ordinance
to restrict these plastic bags.
Mayor, today we are opening up
a public hearing
on the plastic bag ordinance.
We're asking for change.
Laredo was
among the first US cities to attempt it.
There was a lot of fear
and questioning and concerns.
The Texas Retailers Association is
and do oppose
any type of discriminatory ban
on plastic bags.
The downtown merchants,
a small, very vocal group,
went to many of these meetings
and hearings
and they just opposed this, period.
Walmart is part
of the Texas Retailers Association.
We do stand with the Retailers
Association's position on this issue.
Their argument was that this
was really going to do some serious damage
to the Laredo downtown retail economy.
As the debate wore on,
a new voice from outside Laredo
entered the fray.
A Washington DC-based representative
of the plastics industry.
My name is Donna Dempsey.
I'm with the Progressive Bag Affiliates
of the American Chemistry Council.
I represent plastic bag manufacturers,
resin producers, and plastic recyclers.
The American Chemistry Council
is a powerful lobbying group
that represents the oil and gas companies.
Plastic bags are an environmental choice.
It was clear
that the plastics industry
was paying close attention.
Across the country, plastic bag bans
were becoming a trend.
San Francisco enacted
the nation's first in 2007,
followed by other places,
including Seattle.
The last thing the plastics industry
wanted
was a city in their home state of Texas
banning one
of their most profitable products.
And even before Laredo could vote,
other Texas towns joined in.
Under the ban, the use
of plastic bags
is outlawed in most stores in Brownsville.
That means shoppers must provide
their own bags and many of them do.
Now Austin's mayor says
Austin should do the responsible thing
and ban plastic bags.
All right.
Motion to adopt the final readings.
By the time
the plastic bag ordinance
came to a vote in Laredo in 2014,
most people in the city supported it.
District five.
Vote yes.
District six.
Absent.
In June 2014, by a six to one vote,
the Laredo City Council
passed the ordinance.
Measure passes.
That year, we started to see
very visible changes.
The bag ban really cleaned up this place.
You didn't see
plastic bags just lining, you know,
every single spot on our side
or their side.
Retailers and shops didn't
go out of business because this happened.
People survived without their plastic bags
and they did okay.
But the bag ban's opponents
weren't going down without a fight.
Mr. Mayor,
members of the council, and staff,
once again we hear that this
is a downtown issue, but it's not.
I was first approached by Les Norton,
who is a friend and a business leader
here in town,
approximately two weeks
before the ordinance went into effect.
Plastic bags are reusable by the consumer.
If you eliminate them,
people are going to have to buy them.
It only took me about 15 minutes
to find a state law
that preempted the city from doing this.
It was clear on its face.
And I called Les and said,
"This is an illegal act.
We can strike this down with ease."
The Laredo merchants sued the city...
alleging that the bag ban violated
state waste disposal laws
that prohibited cities
from regulating containers.
They were arguing
that plastic bags are containers.
These were laws from the '80s, early '90s,
that the bottle industry
had successfully passed
through the Texas legislature.
So they piggybacked onto those laws
to say,
Um, "You're regulating containers,
and you're in violation of state law."
The case ended up
at the Texas State Supreme Court
in Austin.
And by this time, the merchants had
once again enlisted some powerful allies.
The Retail Merchants Association
of the State of Texas,
they filed briefs.
Different retail groups filed briefs.
The plastic bag industry groups,
they filed briefs
in support of our position.
The Texas Attorney General
also joined the effort
to strike down the bag ban.
This is the new measure
of these municipalities.
They wake up one day and they decide
that if they don't like the law
and because of their political preference
or personal conviction,
they can just go around the law.
Many supporters of the ban felt
that the merchants' lawsuit
was actually being bankrolled
by the petrochemical industry.
They got serious funding for this.
They had a really large legal entourage
with attorneys from all over.
So I can only imagine the kind of
industry money that went into their fight.
However,
the Merchants Association's lawyer
denies this.
I was paid by my clients.
My ethics in this case was solely
with the merchants.
I have not worked for the plastic bag
industry. They were not my clients.
That was not my ethical obligation
in this case.
The odds were stacked
against the city from the get-go.
The city still said,
"We think we have a chance."
The question presented in this appeal
is whether the Laredo
single-use check-out bag ordinance
is valid, and not prohibited.
Not only would this affect
the city of Laredo now,
this would have a statewide effect
on whether or not these bans
are legal in any city or county
across the State of Texas.
For the petrochemical industry,
there was a lot more at stake
than just plastic bags.
If the court ruled that cities
like Laredo could choose to ban bags,
there was nothing stopping them
from banning other things
they didn't want in their towns,
like oil drilling or fracking.
In June 2018,
all eyes were on the Supreme Court
as the decision came down.
The Texas Supreme Court today ruled
that a Laredo ban on plastic bags
violates state law.
Texas Supreme Court overturned
Laredo's ban
on disposable plastic bags.
It was so devastating.
It was a terrible day.
Brownsville's plastic bag ban
is now under review.
This ruling leaves
Austin's plastic bag ban
in the crosshairs,
as well as ordinances in Dallas,
Port Aransas, and South Padre Island.
The fight ended up with the bag ban being
struck all across the State of Texas.
You start to think about,
"Well, why is that happening?
What is moving them to do that?"
It's industry. It's big money.
You have these legislators
who don't want Washington DC
to come in and tell Texas what to do
with health care or these certain laws
and... or the EPA.
And yet they did the same thing with us.
Six months after
the Supreme Court decision,
the main stakeholders
who worked to pass the bag ban
met to discuss their next steps.
The city voted to do something
and to protect the interest
of a certain industry,
all that was wrecked, you know.
And it's just very unsettling
that the State of Texas
can go in and overturn something
that the citizens of one community
decided to democratically embark on.
The Texas Supreme Court,
given its very conservative make-up,
were really just pushing hard
so that the plastics industry
didn't take a hit.
It's time to go up to Austin and...
and have our voices be heard one more time
through the legislative process.
For now,
these bag ban proponents
will focus on passing new laws
at the state level.
You know, I've lived in Laredo
for 36 years,
and I think that was probably one
of the most positive things I've ever seen
happen in this city.
And it didn't take that long for people
to look around and see.
"Hey! This is a different place
than it was six months ago."
Just a few hours northeast of Laredo
is the epicenter
of the plastics manufacturing industry.
Houston, Texas.
A visit here is a crash course
on the direct impacts
of plastic on our health.
Houston is home to the largest
petrochemical complex
in the entire nation.
Second largest in the world.
Second only to Saudi Arabia.
This is an oil and gas Mecca.
Yvette Arellano
leads a bus excursion around Houston
called "The Toxic Tour."
The tour is designed to show
the effects of the oil and gas industry
on local communities.
The smell that you're smelling
is the smell of plastics production.
A typical tour makes stops
at various neighborhoods, refineries,
and plastic production facilities
along the Houston Ship Channel,
a 50-mile waterway dominated
by oil and gas complexes.
The first community
that we're visiting is Manchester.
Hartman Park is the heart
of the entire community.
Manchester is home
to nearly 5,000 residents.
The majority are Hispanic, and a third
of the population live in poverty.
So, welcome to Hartman Park.
You look all around us,
you'll be completely surrounded
by oil and gas infrastructure.
Ninety percent
of the town's population
lives within one mile of facilities
that process or store toxic chemicals.
The daily exposures here
are seven highly toxic chemicals,
from acute exposure to chronic exposure.
There are serious health risks
that arise from living
near petrochemical plants.
Multiple cancers have been identified
in people livingdownwind of those places.
The levels of ADHD in communities downwind
can be elevated.
We're right next to a playground
and right in front of a tennis court,
right behind a baseball field.
Wheneverchildren come into these
public spaces, as they're playing around,
they're also having snacks,
they`re drinking water,
and all of those heavy metals are slowly
accumulating inside of their body.
All of these exposures can lead
to fatigue, headaches, nausea, vomiting,
asthma.
Plastic production facilities
certainly pollute and poison the people
who live around them, who are often
some of the poorest and most vulnerable
communities in our country.
Petrochemical companies produce
an estimated ten tons of plastic
every second.
A lot of it right here, on Tidal Road.
Every day, the refineries here emit
powerful fumes into the atmosphere.
A number of us are just... We're feeling
a tightness in the throat right here,
like a squeezing on both sides.
I was used to it growing up,
but this is our backyard and,
like, no one ever told us growing up
what we were being exposed to.
Many of the health risks
associated with plastic production and use
arise from endocrine disrupting chemicals,
commonly referred to as EDCs.
Many of the chemicals known to be
endocrine disrupting compounds
are plastic or are added to plastic.
Endocrine disrupting chemicals
are chemicals that behave like hormones.
Hormones turn genes on and off.
They make your brain develop properly.
They give you five fingers.
They determine what sex you are.
One of the most commonly known
endocrine disrupting chemicals
found in plastics
is bisphenol A, better known as BPA.
BPA is tied to a whole series
of human health problems,
including infertility,
changes in the way the brain is wired
if exposure takes place in the womb,
breast cancer, prostate cancer.
When you begin to look
at the range of human health effects
which have been linked to BPA,
it's jaw-dropping.
The next stop on the Toxic Tour
is El Jardin Beach,
close to where the Houston Ship Channel
flows out into the Gulf of Mexico.
As plastic production along the channel
has increased,
people along the coast have found
plastic residue washing ashore.
We came down here to look
for these little plastic pellets.
And I have found them every single time
that I've come down here.
These are known as the feed stocks
for plastics.
So this is what you use
to make all of your plastic items.
And, you know, some are clear,
some are whitish, some are, like, older.
They look just like food for animals,
or they look like seeds,
or they look like fish eggs. So...
fish eat these, turtles eat these.
By now, the issue of plastics
polluting our oceans is well-known.
Images of its impact have gone viral.
Experts believe around
eight million metric tons of plastic
end up in the ocean every year.
It's starting to have an impact
in terms of the marine environment.
Not just in terms of what the beaches
look like,
but in terms of the health
of the marine biota and,
since we eat it, human health.
But what is less known is the impact
of what are called microplastics,
tiny particles that are now being found
everywhere on Earth,
from our air, to our water systems,
to the depths of the ocean.
When you have a big piece
of plastic and it's in the environment
for a long time,
It gets broken down
to smaller and smaller pieces.
Those ultimately
will become little microplastics.
Microplastics can pick up contaminants.
Those contaminants can be highly toxic.
Things like dioxins, E. coli,
or even the bacteria that causes cholera.
Microplastics smell like food
to small fish.
Small fish are usually eaten by big fish,
and bigger fish are then eaten
by even bigger fish,
and then we eat them.
I read somewhere
that every time you eat mussels,
you eat something like 60 or 70
potential microplastic particles.
And although the research
into microplastics
in our food supply is in early stages,
there's a growing body of evidence
that the impacts are significant.
There's been a lot of serious
scientific study of the health effects.
Type two diabetes, infertility.
A five-decade-long decline
in human sperm count.
We should be taking public steps
to reduce exposures.
And that's gonna require changing what
we're making in the chemical industry.
If you look right beyond
the bridge as we cross,
to the furthest left,
you will see Exxon Mobil,
the second largest refinery
in the entire nation.
The Exxon Mobil complex
in Baytown, Texas,
covers more than five square miles
of refining, processing, and production.
This here.
The Big Boss.
You know,
when we talk about plastics pollution,
you think of plastics pollution
in the ocean,
and really where the plastics pollution
starts is right here.
- Hi, how are you doing?
- Hi.
I'm working security here.
Any time anybody is filming
or photographing the plant
or anything like that,
Exxon just likes to know what's going on.
So I gather you're maybe protesting,
or you're trying to relay your concerns
to the community
- about Exxon.
- Right.
So, also Exxon also has
public information for people.
If you don't have
that contact information,
I can get that for you.
Do we have
a public information person contact?
Five-nine, you can go ahead
and have them contact
three, two, niner, three.
Thank you so much.
- All right, take care.
- All right.
Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical,
and the American Chemistry Council
all declined to participate in this film.
Over the next ten years,
plastic production
is expected to skyrocket.
The petrochemical industry
have, on the books,
expansion of their plastics industry
of 150 billion dollars in the US alone
for the next decade.
They're projecting a three-fold increase
by the year 2050.
The problems created by plastic
are only going to get worse.
So, what's being done?
In January 2019, a new initiative called
"The Alliance To End Plastic Waste"
was announced with this promotional video.
Managing plastic waste
is one of the most critical issues
of our time.
One only has to watch the news to realize
that the issue around plastic waste
is a worldwide issue.
We've got to solve this problem.
It's time for us as an industry
to step up, make a difference,
and make the world a better place.
Comprised of nearly 30
of the world's largest petrochemical
and consumer goods corporations,
the Alliance was created
in order to, quote,
"advance solutions to eliminate
plastic waste in the environment."
The companies collectively committed
one billion US dollars to fund the effort,
which so far seems mainly focused
on better garbage collection,
recycling, and clean-up.
But critics say the Alliance won't tackle
the plastic problem at its source.
A billion dollars. When they're spending
hundreds of billions of dollars
to produce plastic waste?
These are global companies
with hundreds of billions of dollars
in their portfolios.
I mean, if you think about
Procter & Gamble being
sixty-seven billion dollar a year
in revenue,
that's a drop in the bucket.
It's really absurd.
So the question becomes
what can we do
about the problem of plastics?
There is no one answer to what do we do
faced with this problem.
We can't recycle our way
out of plastic pollution.
Recycling can be part of the solution.
But we have to start
with reducing overall.
A growing movement of people
is trying
to quit using plastic altogether.
It's called Zero Waste.
Zero Waste, for a household,
aims at eliminating as much trash
from your house as possible.
So when we go to the grocery store,
we simply bring a kit of reusables.
So we bring some cloth bags
to buy anything dry,
like flour, salt, sugar,
cereal, tea, coffee.
I also bring mesh bags for produce.
When I come with my totes,
I'm not gonna need a plastic bag.
Every time you buy something
that is made out of plastic,
more plastic will be created
because it simply creates
a demand for more plastic.
So, when you get away from all that,
then you're investing in a more
sustainable world for our children.
Easy things that people can do,
I mean, learn to say no.
Take a moment and ask yourself,
"Do I really need that?
What is the impact of that?"
So, in the past,
underneath that sink was filled
with cleaning products.
But all we need is Castile soap
and white vinegar.
We don't have to worry about
recycling those containers,
or what the impact of those plastics
would have on the environment.
We simply have eliminated them
with those simple solutions.
Not everyone is going to be able
to completely eliminate
plastic from their lives.
But changing behavior
is definitely a good start.
Consumers have more power
than they realize.
Start with a reusable cup.
Start with a reusable bag.
Maybe choosing your products
based on something that you know
can be reused,
versus something that you know
will be immediately put into the landfill
or the recycling bin when it's empty.
Individual behavior is really important.
What you and I do every day
through our small actions,
they do add up.
And they do make a big impact.
But you and I...
cannot do it by ourselves.
We need regulation to protect us.
I'm pleased to announce that today,
the government is phasing out
single-use plastic shopping bags
over the next year.
Governments around the world
are starting to recognize
what they can do.
The authorities here
have banned plastic bags.
The capital is all set
to impose a complete ban
on the manufacture, use,
and sale of plastic carry bags.
The European Parliament has voted
for a complete ban
on a range of single-use plastics.
The government is trying to
ban materials
that are relatively easy to ban.
Consumers are looking to use less plastic
than they've used before.
But neither of those things by themselves
is going to be sufficient.
Science and the marketplace
also have a critical role to play.
We need to be designing plastics
that are inherently safer,
to create new chemicals that would not be
endocrine disrupting chemicals.
I love it when I walk into a CVS and I see
BPA-free bottles being advertised.
Environmentally conscious companies
are trying to find innovative ways
to reuse plastic
or invest in bioplastics.
Wheat stalks are just
as effective as plastic straws
and completely biodegradable.
This carrier bag
was not made with plastic,
but with cassava, a tropical root
found abundantly in Indonesia.
His team has developed a clear film
made from crab shells and trees.
They believe it could be a biodegradable
alternative to plastic packaging.
But in the end,
unless the petrochemical companies
take more drastic actions
to either reduce the amount of plastic
they produce
or to invest far more on clean-up,
the crisis isn't going away anytime soon.
They have more money than government has.
We're going to have to figure out a way
to extract money from them
to solve this problem.
Many governments around the world,
they're saying, "Hey,
you produced the package. You will
have to collect it and manage it."
That's only going to happen
if consumers themselves demand it.
It means putting pressure
on our federal government
to create a real regulatory environment
in which business can thrive,
but not trash the planet at the same time.
We've made changes before.
It's not impossible,
even when the odds are stacked against us.
We need our leaders at every level
to fight this tidal wave of plastic.
We need them to be educated
and connect the dots
and see that this is a global crisis.