Plastic Planet Uncovers the Truth about Plastics

“The response has been unbe­liev­able,” Boote told Organic Connections. “One week after the film was released in Austria, a fam­ily called me and said that they wanted to per­form their own exper­i­ment and see if they could live with­out plas­tics. That was a year ago. Just five min­utes ago they were on Austrian TV again—mother, father and three kids—and they’ve been liv­ing plas­tic free now for one year. They’ve started a move­ment; many more have since joined them, and there are other fam­i­lies in Germany, Italy and France doing the same thing.

“For the film, we tested baby bot­tles for the chem­i­cal bisphe­nol A (BPA). We also ended up test­ing baby paci­fiers and found out that the paci­fiers we bought in var­i­ous shops in Europe were highly con­t­a­m­i­nated with BPA. In the end, they were taken off the whole European mar­ket. Then an Austrian fed­eral min­is­ter banned BPA, and I started to work on a new law with the German Federal Environment Agency. On 26 November the European Commission decided to ban BPA altogether.”

(Bisphenol A, also known as BPA, is an organic com­pound used in many plas­tics. It has been proven to be linked with can­cer and neu­ro­log­i­cal issues, and has now been banned in sev­eral countries.)

“When I pre­sented the film in Abu Dhabi, the Minister of Environment and Health came. After the film, he asked me, ‘So how should we start?’ I didn’t know how to answer him, because I’m a film­maker, not a polit­i­cal advi­sor. But I had met a pro­fes­sor from Dubai when I was in the region, who had told me that one of three camel species was dying because of plas­tic bags in the desert. And so I said to the min­is­ter, ‘Why don’t you ban plas­tic bags?’ He replied, ‘OK, I will.’

“There are now many stud­ies being done on plas­tics, and the funny thing is that some say that because of the film Plastic Planet it’s now eas­ier to get financ­ing for a sci­en­tific study about plastics.”

There was also quite a neg­a­tive reac­tion from the plas­tics indus­try, an indi­ca­tion of how the doc­u­men­tary assaulted the sta­tus quo.

“When the plas­tics indus­try real­ized that the movie was going to open in the­aters, they put together a 14-page media kit,” Boote recounted. “They sent it to all the plas­tic man­u­fac­tur­ers in Europe. Among other things, it directed them to not answer any ques­tions con­cern­ing plas­tics. If peo­ple had spe­cific queries about, say, the `plas­tic soup’ in the Pacific, then they should call this per­son. If some­one wanted to know more about the dan­ger­ous chem­i­cal bisphe­nol A, they should call that person.”

(“Plastic soup” refers to a vast area of the Pacific Ocean con­tain­ing a high con­cen­tra­tion of plas­tic trash, which, depend­ing on how it is mea­sured, may be broader than the con­ti­nen­tal United States.)

“After the film was released in Austria, the plas­tics indus­try had a ‘cri­sis meet­ing,’” Boote con­tin­ued. “I was not invited, but I’m quite well con­nected right now, so I knew what they were doing. The meet­ing addressed the ques­tion of, should they pub­licly stand up against Plastic Planet or not? Of the 138 CEOs, only 4 said that they should go against the film; the rest said no. They were basi­cally putting their heads in the sand and wait­ing until the storm passed.”

The plas­tics indus­try also pur­chased the Plastic Planet domain name before Boote could, and they put their own mes­sages on the web­site con­trast­ing with those of the movie.

Revealing the Issues

There is no doubt about it: plas­tic, with its end­less vari­eties of pos­si­bil­i­ties in shape, color and con­sis­tency, rev­o­lu­tion­ized man­u­fac­tur­ing. It is highly unlikely that tech­nol­ogy would be where it is today with­out plastic.

At the same time, it has taken a heavy toll. Plastic Planet pries the lid off this enor­mous issue and shows it to us graph­i­cally, much as Food, Inc. did with indus­trial farming.

As cov­ered in Plastic Planet, the amount of plas­tic pro­duced since its inven­tion would be enough to cover the entire globe six times over. That would be fine if it would biodegrade—but therein lies the stark real­ity: plas­tic stays in the ground and water sys­tem for up to 500 years. It is found on every beach in the world. Numerous stud­ies have dis­cov­ered that chem­i­cals it releases (such as BPA) migrate into the human body and may con­tribute to or even cause grave health prob­lems, from aller­gies to obe­sity to infer­til­ity, can­cer and heart disease.

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

Boote him­self had sev­eral fam­ily mem­bers, includ­ing his grand­fa­ther, who worked in the plas­tics indus­try, yet he was not aware of these issues until he ran across a tiny news item. “In 1999 I read a small arti­cle in the news­pa­per say­ing that fish were dying out in an English river because of a sub­stance that leaches out of plas­tics,” Boote said. “I was stunned that it was such a small arti­cle. I had never heard of this prob­lem before. I wanted to know more about it, so I started to do some research.”

Not long after­ward, there was a small report in another paper that dis­closed heavy loads of syn­thet­ics in the Pacific. A few days later, the same paper printed an eight-page report on the same topic, financed by the plas­tics indus­try but designed to appear as part of the paper itself. The report asserted how inno­v­a­tive, how envi­ron­men­tally friendly and how splen­did plas­tics were. “That first lit­tle report one would quickly skim over, but eight pages really stuck with the reader,” Boote said. “That’s when I thought, ‘I’ll make a film on this.’”

Making that doc­u­men­tary was no mean feat. “We did a lot of research,” Boote recalled. “In the end we had 42 peo­ple work­ing on the research—scientists and jour­nal­ists together. We became con­nected to all kinds of uni­ver­si­ties and orga­ni­za­tions. I trav­eled to 25 coun­tries for the film, talk­ing to peo­ple from the indus­try as well as sci­en­tists and politi­cians. Ten years later, we were done.”

Probably the most strik­ing ele­ment of the movie—aside from the stag­ger­ing sta­tis­tics on plastics—is the reac­tion of indus­try exec­u­tives and staff when pre­sented with those same sta­tis­tics. Time after time, Boote was met with antag­o­nism, legal threats and abject silence.

It wasn’t that heads weren’t turned though. In at least one case, Boote’s mes­sage got home—though for sev­eral rea­sons this occur­rence didn’t make the final cut. “I had an inter­view with a guy from Switzerland who was actu­ally dis­trib­ut­ing BPA,” Boote related. “I went to him like I had done with sev­eral oth­ers: This is the sit­u­a­tion, so what are we going to do? He said, ‘Well, if it’s really like this, I will stop sell­ing bisphe­nol A immediately.’”

Solutions

If we are to save our planet from this envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, oth­ers in the plas­tics indus­try will have to develop the same sort of con­science. Fortunately the film details a pos­i­tive devel­op­ment: safe plas­tic is begin­ning to be made from purely nat­ural sources, which doesn’t affect humans or the envi­ron­ment at all, yet still ful­fills plastic’s vital role in manufacturing.

Boote con­cluded with a mes­sage for consumers.

“People can start to make changes with what I call the four ‘Rs’: Refuse the plas­tic, which is, in my opin­ion, the best. Then there is Reduce, which is of course another spec­tac­u­lar word; if you’re reduc­ing your garbage at home, you don’t need to carry so much stuff out. Then there’s Reuse, the third R. It is not the good R in terms of refill­ing a plas­tic bottle—that’s what I always did until I read the first stud­ies about plas­tic bot­tles; the more you refill plas­tic bot­tles, the big­ger the chance harm­ful sub­stances can leach out. Reusing is a good thing when you have a plas­tic bag and can reuse it. On the other hand, it’s much cooler if you go to the super­mar­ket and take out your own bag. And the fourth is Recycle; once the plas­tic is already there, you can recy­cle it, which is bet­ter than throw­ing it away.”

Plastic Planet will be released on DVD on Earth Day 2011 and will be avail­able from the Organic Connections web­site. You can view a trailer for the movie here: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/plasticplanet/.