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  • I cannot help from feeling that we are on the edge of losing all that we've become accustomed to.

  • Everything seems so fragile and yet it is constantly taken for granted

  • as we carry on with our busy lives blinded by the immediate.

  • As a child, I remember our waste management providers giving our family various buckets

  • to sort paper cardboard tin and aluminium and only the special plastics with the special numbers stamped on it.

  • Beside the sink is where our family's rubbish collected until there was no more counter space.

  • Frustrated with her four children's lack of responsibility, my mother would take it

  • to the overflowing buckets in the garage, where she would often forget it.

  • Then finally my father would get annoyed that his tools were buried and secretly,

  • or not so secretly, would bin the waste so it never actually made our suburban curb for collection.

  • This was our part.

  • As I've grown older, I've become very conscious of our fragile world.

  • But I've never thought of myself as a conservationist, a radical tree hugger,

  • and I've definitely never chased a rogue whaling ship, as I've never been to sea.

  • But somehow, after a couple drinks in San Francisco, with a very passionate friend,

  • I find myself in a humid port in Brazil, about to sail to South Africa as part of the 5 Gyres Institute's

  • expedition through the South Atlantic Gyre, documenting plastic pollution for the first time.

  • ...um, prepare supper for eighteen hundred, and then eighteen hundred to twenty-two is wash up after supper.

  • And twenty-two to zero-two you can just sit and drink tea, ok? (laughter)

  • With regard to watches, if you can be on time, be vigilant,

  • keep the log, which is the log book we have to write, and stay awake.

  • Stiv, if you want to take care and do the anchor and get a couple of people to help you.

  • With an overwhelming curiosity, I am now a part of this precarious group of inspired strangers,

  • led by scientists Dr. Marcus Eriksen and his wife, and 5 Gyres co-founder, Anna Cummins.

  • We're going to head out now, ok!? We're all ready to go.

  • Next step, Africa.

  • With fresh eyes, and different networks we are brought together with simply,

  • to help alert the world.

  • What we're doing with 5 Gyres and with Algalita is simply looking at the distribution of plastic.

  • I mean we take a manta trawl, we skim the surface of the ocean,

  • we count pieces of plastic in a lab and we share the results.

  • The goal for trawling

  • is every fifty nautical miles from now until the time we get to South Africa.

  • In between those times, we deploy the high speed trawl.

  • It's a relatively new issue, this idea of plastic marine pollution.

  • Any sailor or navy man who was sailing through the gyre would have seen this plastic

  • in the last maybe thirty, forty years.

  • But it wasn't until Captain Moore came upon this area between Hawaii and California

  • full of plastic trash in an area where sailors don't traditionally go.

  • When you first pull up some of these samples, as you'll see,

  • it may not look like a lot of plastic.

  • You might find less than a handful sometimes only a few fragments,

  • sometimes it might take taking these samples back to the lab to see if theres any plastic at all.

  • But whats really interesting to think is here we are in the middle of nowhere

  • were going to be thousands of miles from the nearest land mass

  • and still were going to find evidence of our plastic footprint.

  • And, I want to remind everyone that this is our research mission.

  • So, I invite you all to embrace what were up to wholeheartedly get involved.

  • We need your help to accomplish a mission.

  • First trawl. Forty-nine to go...

  • The philosophy that there is an away,

  • that you know we say we throw something away.

  • That you can create something to be used for a minute that lasts forever,

  • is evil in my opinion.

  • What I think needs to happen with people who... companies that produce plastic is...

  • in the whole scope of the products impact,

  • they need to calculate for its environmental impact economically.

  • Oooh! This was the manta not the high speed so this is actually a research sample.

  • It's the sea-state coming down, huh?

  • Yeah, it was about a... it was pretty calm it was about a two or a three today.

  • There's a nurdle. Yep! We have nurdle!

  • There looks like a piece of some sort of film packaging...

  • Oh yeah, totally.

  • Hard to see against the spoon.

  • Today, I was introduced to a nurdle.

  • It might as well have been a bean bag pellet only it was a tiny piece of virgin plastic

  • that was found hundreds of miles off shore.

  • Given its seemingly insignificant size,

  • how can Marcus be so dedicated?

  • I got interested in this topic a long time ago,

  • when I was young, just in terms of trash debris and plastic.

  • Then as I got into my undergraduate and I was living in a coastal community, I started reading about marine debris in the ocean,

  • and I stumbled across Algalita which included Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins.

  • I started reading about the issue and got super interested and applied for graduate school.

  • Specifically what I study is the chemical component or the toxicity of plastic debris to organisms

  • So, I research the chemicals in the plastic debris either through manufacturing,

  • or that, adsorb or absorb onto the debris in the ocean

  • and so how that affects the animals in terms of does it transfer to their tissue.

  • And then, if so, are there toxic affects because of that?

  • Chelsea's work is extremely important.

  • What she's shown in her lab already is that pollutants will jump from plastic to fish tissue.

  • As bigger fish eat the smaller fish... it biomagnifies up the food chain.

  • Staying under?

  • Awesome!

  • This is how you make nerds happy.

  • So the routine begins, day and night, wind and waves, trawl in trawl out.

  • Our staggered shifts never quite set,

  • three groups rotating twenty-four hours a day.

  • A dinner shift previous, means a four hour watch starts sharp at 2am in a cold night.

  • Let's see what's in the high speed.

  • Ooh!

  • This is perfect for Chelsea's toxicity analysis.

  • Can I see?

  • You get to the middle of the ocean and you find a spoon.

  • Is that what that is?

  • Whatever it is, it's been in there for a long time.

  • (Heavy Wind)

  • Woo!!

  • For me, I've grown up in the ocean. The ocean has been my second home.

  • I've been surfing for fifteen years all over the world,

  • diving, sailing on the ocean, and in way, the ocean is sick

  • because of pollution. And, we really don't know what the extent of the problem is,

  • and what kind of damage is it going to take in the long term.

  • It's been proven that these pollutants, PCBs, DDT, other hydrophobic pollutants stick to plastic.

  • It's also been shown that pollutants will desorb from the plastic into the tissues of animals.

  • They eat it, and the pollutants pass from the plastic into their organs.

  • They're attracted to fats, so there's a perfect synergy for the pollutants

  • to pass from the plastic into the organs of the animals.

  • And Chelsea's now working on the next step, which is,

  • when fish in the open ocean eat plastic, do those pollutants desorb into their tissues?

  • Beautiful. Yeah!

  • That's a big fat sushi.

  • We did a really controlled study in the lab, of dietary exposure of plastic.

  • I fed them plastic that had been in the ocean for three months, and then plastic just straight from the factory.

  • And we found that they actually did eat the plastic.

  • We looked for toxic effects, so we found some interesting stuff with them,

  • where they were losing weight, some of them looked like, appeared to be anaemic.

  • We found some single-cell necrosis in their liver and different problems with their thyroids and so,

  • still working on a lot of that data, but the persistent organic pollutants that we look for in plastics that we're talking about,

  • they definitely have, what we call, an endocrine disrupting effects, which are problems with reproduction.

  • Your endocrine system is what controls all the hormones in your body.

  • And so some of these persistent organic pollutants basically mimic our natural hormones

  • and then disrupt our normal reproductive system.

  • I maybe thought that we used too much stuff, because I was geared towards thinking about consumerism,

  • but the idea of plastic never crossed my mind. I used plastic bags at the market...

  • You know, I used disposable coffee cups, it just, it didn't cross my consciousness.

  • I started years ago as a kid, sailing dinghies and always had an interest in the sea and ships and boats.

  • And just seeing larger chunks sailing and occasionally you come across a patch of trash and...

  • shit, that's not really good. But you don't realise they are little bits and

  • they're breaking down and it's there like on the whole.

  • So I got interested in this issue because I read about Captain Charles Moore

  • and his research that he had been doing in the North Pacific garbage patch.

  • He compared his findings to zooplankton

  • and his information came back that he had six to one ratio of plastic to zooplankton.

  • Now, I don't know what the negative effects of that is, but I know that it isn't right.

  • I've been filled with a lot of uncertainty about the trip, about the issues, about everything.

  • And only a few hundred miles into the four-thousand mile trek,

  • our main sail is completely ripped along the seams.

  • Again, I'm not a sailor, as my constant battle to keep my lunch down proves.

  • But I'm sure, this cannot be good.

  • The sea dragon's fuel tanks are only meant to carry us through the windless days of the gyre,

  • not an entire ocean.

  • So, what we'll to have to do, we'll just organise a sowing circle.

  • To be honest, don't worry, I mean it would have happened to me, it's an old sail, it's gone along the seam.

  • This is my second cruise, first one I went to the North Pacific,

  • and the north Pacific is famous for this garbage patch,

  • or this big island of trash floating in the middle of the ocean.

  • What I found when I came back is that people were wondering what was this island like?

  • In 2008, I had a chance with Captain Moore, and Marcus,

  • we'd been dating for about 6 months at that point,

  • so decided that a month at sea was a great way to test our relationship.

  • We crossed the North Pacific gyre from Hawaii back to Los Angeles,

  • and I still expected to see an island of garbage the size of Texas.

  • So, this was a real eye-opener for me, seeing that the issue is really difficult to see.

  • So, that inspired Marcus and I to start the 5 Gyres Institute

  • with a goal of expanding that research on plastic in the North Pacific,

  • which people are starting to know about, to all five oceans.

  • Everyone nowadays, wants everything instantly.

  • It's an instant society, gotta have it now now now now now, instant wifi, instant everything.

  • So everyone wants their instant coffees. No one really worries about their little plastic cups, "oh, it's only one cup."

  • Stuck on a boat we wait with our own set of worries.

  • Either we kill time sewing countless stitches, or we sit behind a computer just like at home.

  • With our expedition slowed with sail repairs, we distract our busy minds with familiar old habits.

  • Alright! Hauling in number ten!

  • The life cycle of a piece of plastic - it starts out with these nurdles,

  • or these virgin plastic pellets, and they mould it into say a plastic bottle,

  • then let's say the plastic bottle gets out to sea.

  • Plastics don't biodegrade, they photo-degrade,

  • which means the light breaks them down into smaller and smaller pieces,

  • so, once it gets out into the middle of the ocean and it's floating around with the sunlight,

  • the sunlight breaks it down into smaller and smaller bits.

  • Soon as it comes out of the river mouth or the sewage outfall pipe or whatever

  • and goes into the ocean, it's plastic in the ocean.

  • The gyres are simply just machines driven by weather

  • that create a circle, that collects it. Gyres are natural phenomenons.

  • And, beyond two hundred miles of most countries is international water, no man's land.

  • I'm part of a society that does not take responsibility for it's own waste.

  • Look at that! Woo!

  • Wow, that's a lot.

  • That looks like a nurdle, and that's a nurdle right there.

  • I mean, they're getting more dense.

  • Much more colourful, mostly white like we usually see, but...

  • We've got some blues, reds...

  • something about the colours of plastics, like there's a theory but I don't know if it's proven.

  • Yeah, well certain animals can be attracted to other colours.

  • When you look at the stomach contents of a Laysan Albatross you'll find overwhelmingly more white plastic,

  • and it may be because they're drawn to that colour because it's a food source, or it mimics a food source,

  • or because they're foragers, they're you know, they're looking for food from the surface,

  • and what they might spot first is white, it stands out against the colour of the ocean.

  • And anything with fish? Any correlation?

  • You know, I don't know if there's been enough research yet on ingestion.

  • You know, based on the ones that Charlie looked at in the North Pacific they were mostly white, it's like a food source.

  • And it may be more visible at night, or it may just be it looks like a fish egg or like zooplankton.

  • Alright! Process it!

  • We found a fridge in the Mississippi River, when I was filming for Nat Geo last year.

  • I hopped into it, and for like quarter of a mile, just paddled in the refrigerator, in the Mississippi.

  • We saw like seven in total in that month on the river.

  • I mean, our biggest export, I would bet is trash.

  • Just junk washing down our watersheds out to sea.

  • I went to a small town of Peru,

  • and a little small village, maybe a few hundred people,

  • but there was a road going out onto the tide pools, and the road ended

  • and there was a hole in the concrete, and that was a communal dump.

  • And you look down, and along the beach, thousands and thousands of plastic bottles.

  • Thousands of them!

  • Where was this?

  • Near Nasca in Peru, just south of Lima.

  • Plastic!! Seven O'clock.

  • There you go, that's a big chunk!

  • Big chunk!

  • Let's go get it!

  • Jody do you still see it?

  • Yeah, it's there.

  • There's a plastic bottle too.

  • Before I really knew much about the 5 Gyres,

  • I knew about Marcus' junk raft.

  • It was a suicide mission to raise awareness.

  • A ride on a self-made boat of old plastic bottles from California to Hawaii.

  • It is getting away!

  • After three months, nearly sinking, running out of food and water, he crossed the Pacific.

  • While his passion is incredibly inspiring,

  • the few bits pulled in by our surface trawls every sixty nautical miles, seems hardly worth risking one's life.

  • I'm on a boat! (Laughter)

  • Looking for plastic trash!

  • Hey Dale, I'm gonna go in.

  • Marcus is going in baby!

  • Ok, need someone to go down and get the ladder.

  • Can we have one less camera and maybe a ladder?

  • (Splash)

  • Alright, this just got serious!

  • (Laughter)

  • No! I'm not laughing or joking...

  • What's the matter? How is the water!?

  • It in the forepeak.

  • We can haul him up or...

  • Yeah, swim back here Marcus!

  • You guys get ready to get him out! And get the main down.

  • Are you ok?

  • I look at Marcus' stunt work as good for the cause.

  • I like that he has the courage to train scientists to actually be an activist as well.

  • Where is he? I can't see him. Tell me where he is!

  • Dead ahead!

  • Put your cameras away, we've got a man in the water.

  • Kinda in shock, I didn't know what to think.

  • To jump out, and just save this one plastic bottle?

  • It's a team effort. It's the two of us, and I wouldn't be his partner in these projects if I didn't believe in them.

  • Careful...

  • Let's not do that again. Please!

  • Holy shit! That was cold!

  • Everyone saw the reality of being in the water and how difficult it is to get somebody up?

  • Just be really careful. If anything like that happens again...

  • everyone be quiet, one person talking, i.e., me or Clive.

  • you do what you're told, ok?

  • So, it was a good little practise.

  • When your focus becomes that, exactly,

  • just trying to educate people about this garbage that's in the middle of the ocean,

  • yeah it's just one piece, and maybe one piece doesn't make a big difference,

  • but it's just the idea of it all. To bring as much of it in as we can.

  • There's so many wars and conflicts and different perspectives of religious and political,

  • and right-to-life, right-to-choose, all these things that people have their own opinions about,

  • but water connects us all.

  • People should stop and think a little bit more about things,

  • and not be so hypocritical, cause I've been talking to people who are at Starbucks, talking about plastic trash,

  • and I can just almost imagine them, with their one use spoon, plastic spoon,

  • their plastic cup in their hand as they are talking to me about this problem.

  • So, I think there's a lot of speculation and a lot of people jumping on the band-wagon,

  • follow things, don't just talk about it.

  • Ok... push again guys!

  • Ok, let's leave there, that's great.

  • We successfully got the main back on!

  • To windward and beyond!

  • (Laughter)

  • It's just amusing.

  • Wait a minute!

  • Can we get Chelsea and you to do this in unison?

  • (Laughter)

  • It's just amusing.

  • I really wanna see you guys work together on a little show.

  • To the amazing one handclap lady,

  • Wow, yum!

  • Chocolate coconut.

  • Cheers!! Cheers!! Cheers! Cheers!

  • To week one! Success!

  • Three to go!

  • (Heavy wind and rain.)

  • So we just threw the small suitcase trawl in for seven minutes,

  • we had to retrieve it because it was going upside down,

  • and also in seven minutes, we already caught a lot of debris in this one,

  • so it must be getting closer to the accumulation zone.

  • Only a group of nerds like us would get so excited over this. Oh trash!

  • While there's also this mixture of like, you don't want it to be there,

  • but you're also really excited when you find it there, cause that's what we're doing here.

  • Right. Yeah, I know.

  • People are almost like happy when we find a big trawl of it, then you're like, no that's not right.

  • Yeah, like I had said to Charlie once,

  • "Wow, that was a good one!" He goes, "A good one?"

  • I'm not sure if I'm numb from the nausea

  • or crazed by the dehydration that comes from throwing up day after day,

  • but I find the storm's power mesmerising.

  • Whatever my expectations were, following Marcus around day and night in this rain,

  • has proven to be exhausting.

  • We could pull the main up...

  • If you can let the main sheet right out?

  • You can pull it up and we'll just tack... and then we're off.

  • Start letting it out?

  • Yes, please.

  • Right now we've got thirty knot winds and six to eight foot seas.

  • So, while we're sampling the sea surface these kinds of swells

  • it can cause the trawl to jump and dive,

  • and you don't want that. You don't want to catch air in your sample as we're cruising along.

  • Becomes kind of invalid. But if you're going really slow, like we're going now,

  • we're only going like one and a half knots.

  • If you go slow enough, you can get a decent sample. But also...

  • this kind of sea state, causes the plastic debris to churn, and it goes down,

  • goes downward, so, your trawl will look like there's less debris on the surface,

  • that's not because there's less debris here. The rough seas are pushing it down.

  • (Heavy wind and rain.)

  • Just like other gyres, there is a west and east...

  • ...areas of concentration.

  • All these dots here, that's where we've been so far...

  • ...we are going to end up hitting all these...

  • Thirty-one years ago, off the coast of Cape Town,

  • they did nine trawls, and went out about a thousand miles and came back.

  • We can replicate probably half of these.

  • Pretty cool.

  • Do you want me to take it or you got it?

  • I got it.

  • Is trawl number fifteen?

  • I think it's number sixteen actually.

  • Wind speed?

  • Shitty.

  • This is nuts!

  • Did you say this is nuts?

  • This is nuts!

  • I know, I'm surprised Dale is letting you do this.

  • This is nuts how we're trawling in this. This is like trawling in a hurricane!

  • I don't want to lose a...

  • What?

  • I just don't want to lose a data point.

  • I mean, we had a six hundred mile gap in the North Atlantic.

  • That's cause we went through a hurricane!

  • Yeah... we should have kept trawling.

  • I really have to do that study and normalise for sea state.

  • That would be really cool.

  • This will be so skewed.

  • Little dangerous too.

  • Well, it ain't the girl scouts.

  • James fell in! I mean... James...

  • What about girl scouts? (Laughs)

  • He didn't fall in!

  • James fell overboard and was caught by his harness last night.

  • Dale said it was pretty hairy.

  • Yeah, I believe him...

  • Let me go back there and...

  • doing three knots?

  • It's still a little fast.

  • Three... it's between three and four.

  • Don't worry, when he's a dad he won't do this anymore. (Laughs)

  • I hope not. (Laughs)

  • With waves crashing and the storm pounding us relentlessly,

  • Marcus' persistence to get back on schedule,

  • despite the risk of having to scrap a regular data back at the lab...

  • is admirable.

  • But his determination is insane.

  • I got it!

  • Letting it in! Ready?

  • I wonder what it would be like if it were still out there.

  • One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight...

  • at least eight visible pieces.

  • Nine.

  • What's interesting is... Is that a nurdle?

  • I don't know. Might be. Yeah.

  • With this sea state, when we're not getting the small stuff,

  • the big fragments are showing up. Yeah.

  • Like they're... they're super buoyant.

  • So, even though we've got like forty knot winds,

  • these are staying on the surface, but then again all the small stuff is...

  • probably churning down deep.

  • It's really easy when the weather is like this to forget why we're here.

  • So even though it seems slightly insane that Marcus wants to continue sampling even in these conditions,

  • every single trawl has had plastic, we're going to have a nice even transect,

  • and he's already...

  • HEY!! HEY!! AHHH!

  • Woah!!! Heads up! Computers away!

  • Make it stop raining! (Laughter)

  • Like the one place you could hang out.

  • This should not happen. But there's no way to fix this at sea,

  • I mean, Dale said to fix this, he's going to have to literally take the whole section apart.

  • This should not happen. No.

  • Finally, after a week of gale-force winds and rain,

  • we woke this morning to inviting waters.

  • When the expedition began, this is what I dreamed about.

  • A break from the endless flow of emails, ubiquitous advertising and nine to five survival.

  • But just as a cliché goes, I guess perspective is gained from contrast.

  • The storm's violence has left a long stream of repair tape on a crucial rigging line,

  • putting our re-stitch main sail and Jody in peril.

  • Whoa! ...the red one!

  • The future can be very scary but I like to look at it,

  • not in those terms, because,

  • if I can change one person's mind, to not throw their trash onto the streets,

  • which you see all the time, and it just comes from ignorance, they don't know any better,

  • then there's hope.

  • Now there are third world countries that have no idea that this plastic doesn't absorb into the ground.

  • Everything that they've ever used, like banana leaves were used for packaging to wrap things up,

  • and of course if they threw it on the ground it would just go back into the earth.

  • They don't have a clue that this stuff is going to be around for four hundred to a thousand years.

  • All of the bio-plastic, PLA, polylactic acid stuff that's in the marketplace right now,

  • only biodegrades under the right conditions in landfills,

  • it does not biodegrade in the ocean.

  • We need a new chemical formula to make truly biodegradable products.

  • I wasn't even at the top.

  • Whether it was purely a co-incidence, or justly celebrating good weather,

  • the calm water made Thanksgiving feel like a picnic at sea.

  • Three weeks into the voyage, I imagined plain pastas and rice,

  • but Dale's stocked rations and Stiv's elaborate meals so far along in the expedition

  • has proven thoroughly impressive.

  • It does look suspiciously like there's a finger poke right here.

  • I don't know.

  • With my stomach graciously back at ease,

  • miles away from extravagant turkey-day parades,

  • there's been only one thing on my mind.

  • And it's definitely not re-run holiday programming or a football game.

  • Since the very beginning of the expedition

  • I've had this endless anticipation to see a plastic island.

  • To swim in chunks of polyethylene, PVC and nylon rubbish,

  • clouding the sea, capturing the shots to shock the world.

  • As a filmmaker, this asinine desire still exists,

  • as tomorrow we near the reality of the gyre.

  • Plastic!! Seven o'clock!

  • A hundred yards out.

  • I'm going go to the bow and just see what...

  • Yup! Here it is, here it is!

  • Just off the spinnaker pole about twenty feet.

  • Yep, right here! It's right under the spinnaker boom...

  • ...it's about five metres.

  • Can we just drop the stay-sail, it'll make it a lot easier to manoeuvre.

  • Alright... it's a really quick job.

  • Get the halyard on the winch. Two pieces and a line right here.

  • Straight out. Can you see it Mary?

  • Yeah, it's coming right in. Where do you see it Stiv? Ok, oh perfect.

  • It's about, I'd say, fifteen metres off this starboard bow.

  • Reach in! Got to reach! Reach! Reach! Dive James!

  • Arhhh!

  • And it's all you Anna! Oh, no, no!

  • It's too deep! It's too deep.

  • Two hundred yards!

  • Alright, stay! Stay! Dead centre.

  • Arhhh!

  • Oh shit! Look look look!

  • Do I still get 10 points?

  • Yey Chelsea!

  • I don't think the best use of our time is to come out into the middle of an oceanic gyre and clean it up.

  • I think the best use of our time is to stop letting it out into the ocean.

  • See anything else you guys? Yeah, I see something big out there!

  • After world war two, when we started making all of these single use plastics,

  • nobody was thinking about the environmental nightmare that might come out of it.

  • They were thinking more about the convenience and sanitation and health,

  • think about all the medical equipment that is made out of plastic.

  • So, I think now, we need to take a step back.

  • Next! Next!

  • Alright! Well done!

  • This is crazy man! Yeah!

  • I got a little fish! I got a little fish!!! A little fish guy! (Laughter)

  • Ten feet! Wow! We're in the big stuff now...

  • Coming down, on the left! Pink!

  • Owww!

  • Yeah!!! 20 Points! Yay!

  • While we make light of these old decaying chunks,

  • in actuality, I think we all find it startling that in every single trawl

  • for the last two thousand miles has contained bits of plastic confetti.

  • Born from these chunks.

  • So why did you install the satellite phone inside the locker under the sink?

  • Well, a lot of people talk shit round here so felt it would be appropriate.

  • (Laughter)

  • That was a good answer.

  • The offending part...

  • which as we can see, has split the whisker.

  • Nudge.

  • I find it really rewarding to eat cereal while Dale works.

  • A bit disgusting, but you got to do what you got to do,

  • at the end of the day. This design is stupid.

  • Whale! Woo!

  • Whale!

  • Wow, you can see the darkness right there.

  • As we leave the gyre, the sea has begun to change.

  • The colour of the water less brilliant blue, more silver grey

  • as the clouds cross the sun and the wave's crest increasingly rise.

  • Today a different kind of trawl skim the surface with us.

  • Unlike Marcus' metallic hydrofoil with a dragon tail of micro-mesh,

  • this massive sieve breathes air, and watches us with a deeply curious eye.

  • It's meal, same as our sample, day after day.

  • Do I look at you or the camera? Uh, me.

  • Alright.

  • So you may see when we drag our trawls across the ocean's surface we come up with maybe

  • one teaspoon of plastic for a trawl that's going two miles, by that much distance.

  • It might not seem like much, but this ocean is vast, our planet is two-thirds ocean.

  • So that thin strip that we're sieving, that one table spoon,

  • it's less than an edge of a razor blade on a football field.

  • This ocean is vast. If you were to add up all those tablespoons of debris,

  • those little transects that we trawl, it would add up to tens of thousands of tonnes of trash,

  • plastic pollution floating, and this is one gyre alone, and there are four more in the world.

  • It's not just this one little island of trash, this mythical island of trash up the coast of California.

  • There are many marine organisms that...

  • from the smallest fish, the smallest jellyfish, the filter-feeding organisms, the zooplankton,

  • are eating these small particles. There's a chemical burden on those small particles of plastic.

  • And those chemicals biomagnify up the food chain,

  • into the fish that we harvest to feed the world.

  • We're going quite fast. We're going in the right direction, doing about eight knots.

  • We've done the last of Marcus' trawls and now it's like the repetition of trawls from 1980, yeah?

  • So, we're going to the points of the chart, guided before,

  • which pretty much takes us from here straight on in.

  • Obviously, like I said before, we're not there until we're there, and we just need

  • to keep our thing together, and keep focused and keep safe, cause it's getting a bit more bouncy...

  • Just bear in mind as well that with cookies and nice bread that comes out of the oven,

  • that there are thirteen people on board.

  • So, some people commented that they went to bed smelling lovely cookies,

  • looking forward to them, but woke up and there were none left.

  • It is a team and you know... Sorry. (Laughter)

  • Maybe we just lock Marcus in the forepeak. (Laughter)

  • There's one thing that I'd really like to point out.

  • That the dangerous part of the voyage is that, leaving and arriving.

  • When we were leaving we had fish boat we almost hit,

  • and there's lots of ships and stuff. Now it is the backwards way.

  • There's going to be ships coming out, they'll be a lot more traffic around the Cape.

  • There might be fishing boats and we're going to be tired, and wanting to get in,

  • but it's the most dangerous part of the voyage. If you're on watch, you're on watch,

  • looking at stuff, especially now. We had a ship that's close to us, just now.

  • So you've really got to be on watch everybody.

  • Yeah, they won't all pop up on here. They'll be local fishing boats and stuff that won't pop up. So...

  • The closer we get, the more dangerous it's going to get.

  • Keep awake and aware.

  • I'm reading the book Adrift,

  • and in it he describes the life of a sailor,

  • where when you're out at sea, you can't wait to get to port,

  • and when you get to port you can't wait to get back out to sea.

  • And, I think it's the same for me.

  • What I like most about it is...

  • the camaraderie and the community, that you form at sea.

  • I'm sort of convinced that somewhere contained in that sort of community

  • is the solution to problems like global garbage in an ocean.

  • With this bizarre taste of sea life nearly over,

  • I think of our great plastic hunt in the gyre.

  • As frivolous as the hunt may have seemed,

  • I cannot help but think of the responsibility we all share.

  • ...three, go!

  • Whether a wealthy executive, or struggling farmer,

  • our goals become aligned when we have children.

  • Will the research from our last trawl,

  • be enough to tell a story that changes their future?

  • Where I live we clean the beach all the time.

  • Week later, back again.

  • And what are you going to do? Just keep cleaning it.

  • You can't clean up the ocean.

  • For me it's all about thinking of ourselves as caretakers of the environment

  • rather than destroying it, and it's shocking to me how few people actually think of it that way.

  • There's many environmental issues right now that are hurting our marine life, and hurting our ecosystems,

  • and we can't even point at one environmental issue and say it's the worst,

  • but I think we can try and ameliorate some or all of them to a certain extent.

  • If there really were an island we could conceivably go and get it.

  • But having seen what I've seen in four oceans, I really don't think clean-up is an option.

  • I think the best we can do is damage control and preventing it from getting worse.

  • Once you get your liquid beverage... (chatter)

  • I was invited on the Sea Dragon to help spread the word with my plastic wrapped camera

  • to a plasticized world.

  • But what do I say?

  • We saw no immediate consequence, we saw bits.

  • Lots and lots of bits.

  • How does one fathom the significance?

  • Wahoo! Wow!

  • That was slightly dangerous.

  • Does it take one species after another to fall like dominos to incite change?

  • Happy birthday Mary!

  • And here's to getting to Cape Town safely and soundly very shortly.

  • Hopefully before it's not Mary's birthday.

  • For my own part, now that the voyage is finished

  • I know I will still enjoy take-away coffees, straws with milkshakes,

  • with my only choice plastic, I certainly will continue to brush my teeth every day.

  • But after thirty-one days at sea, consumed by plastic pollution,

  • I do wonder if I'll become that eccentric guy at a cafe,

  • flipping out over a plastic lid.

  • I guess that's we'll find out when reality hits.

  • (Radio Chatter) Alright Guys, who's on your watch?

  • Welcome everybody, welcome to the Two Oceans Aquarium.

  • And a very, very warm and South African Capetonian welcome to the Five Gyres crew

  • who arrived here in the very small hours of Thursday morning to very thick fog

  • after quite an arduous trip from what I can gather.

  • So this journey that we just completed four thousand miles plus,

  • was the first of its kind studying plastic pollution in this area.

  • It's only been fairly recently that people have known about this issue,

  • but we're now finding that plastic pollution can be found in virtually every ocean

  • in every coastline in the world.

  • We drop this trawl in the water, skim the ocean's surface for one mile,

  • then another sixty miles, then trawl again.

  • Every single one was full of this plastic confetti.

  • This is the remains of a Laysan Albatross,

  • these birds feed their young by regurgitating what they've collected around the world.

  • Plastic bottles, bottle caps, lighters...

  • This is a common snapping turtle, that became entrapped in a small plastic ring when she was a baby.

  • These are preproduction plastic pellets.

  • Over time they're absorbing all these other chemicals that are washing down our watersheds,

  • things like oil drops from cars, pesticides, PCBs,

  • wash into the sea and they stick to plastic particles like a sponge.

  • If we know that fish are ingesting plastics

  • and other marine life are ingesting plastics, as has been recorded in the scientific literature,

  • how does it affect them, right? How does it affect their reproduction?

  • Does it cause death? Do they just pass it out without any chemicals?

  • And what we're seeing is that these chemicals do transfer,

  • so how is this effecting their life?

  • What we're trying to show the world is that this is a global problem.

  • Plastic is washing into our seas from every continent in the world,

  • and it will take international co-operation

  • implemented at a local level to solve this issue.

  • You have that personal question you have to ask yourself. Cause now you can't claim ignorance.

  • Do you do something about it? Or, do you walk away?

  • The material is tortured into existence in a laboratory using a gas called petroleum as it's source.

  • The polymers are strung together through a catalysing process.

  • Additives are thrown in to tweak the material to it's optimum purpose.

  • Finally, we have a material that is strong, durable, flexible, light-weight

  • and can be shaped to every desire.

  • Colours and varieties mix together, swept along by the tides of life,

  • it is both good and bad, evil and pure.

  • We project our ignorance and indifference onto the broken and banished goods,

  • putting them out of sight, into the highway, out of the light.

  • We return to our trodden lives of nine to five survival,

  • with nothing more than a handful of plastic bits,

  • conscious of the bleakness, the skepticism,

  • an impossible task of changing our habits,

  • we will only relent to ourselves.

I cannot help from feeling that we are on the edge of losing all that we've become accustomed to.

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塑化~長篇紀實電影。 (PLASTICIZED ~ Feature Documentary Film)

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    VoiceTube 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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