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Mhm.

Okay okay wow.

Yeah.

From space it's hard to see any evidence of mankind

on earth.

All the effects were having on our planet's finite resources

from up here it looks perfect.

It's only when we look more closely that we start

to see some of the results of our consumption.

Thanks particularly the one that's rarely talked about waste.

Mhm.

I've always enjoyed beachcombing and as a child I would

search for sea glass.

It's a wood.

But in the 50 years since then things have changed

The treasure I used to find in the sand has

been replaced by trash.

I want to know why No one knows exactly how

much rubbish we produce.

What we do know Is that the seven billion of

us were making more garbage now any other time in

history but does anyone know what happens to it all

How it's affecting the land the air the seas and

ultimately us historically we've always buried our track but it

seems that now we sometimes don't dig.

We just dump Since 1975 waste from the ancient Lebanese

City of Cider now a suburb of Beirut has been

brought here to an uncontrolled dump on the edge of

the city Over 80 tons of it every day.

What was a sandy beach has been replaced by a

trash mountain Well over 40 m in height as the

rubbish decomposes chemicals leach into the ground While methane.

A pernicious greenhouse gas regularly blows over the city's nearly

200,000 inhabitants and the tumbling trash and liquid runoff flows

directly into the sea affecting the local fishermen and their

livelihood this is not just a local problem because over

there is italy up there is Cyprus.

Syria's next door and north of Syria is the Turkish

coast.

And there have been complaints from all those countries about

the garbage that floats up onto their beaches much of

which comes from this garbage mountain here rubbish pickers arrived

for the day shift looking for ways to sell for

recycling and the putrid mounds.

No one was willing to talk to me about working

here except one a refugee from Palestine.

When you started here 35 years ago this rubbish mountain

didn't exist.

You've seen it grow.

He thought it could have been toxic waste.

Efforts have been made to clean up this dump Including

a $5 million prince.

I struggled to see much result but it's not just

about these extreme situations.

Waste is everywhere at ever increasing levels.

We produce too much waste.

We've become profligate by nature.

We've learned that it's ok to waste.

We don't think about the consequences when we throw stuff

away.

We're seeing an effect on pollution possibly effect on global

warming.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know

that you cannot have infinite growth against finite resources every

year we throw away 200 billion plastic bottle 58 billion

disposable cups and billions of plastic bags.

The okay this is appalling mm here in Britain where

I live we have the most landfill sites in europe

80% of the population live within two km of one

And although government policy say they should be used as

the last resort for most waste This one in Yorkshire

is expanding.

There is the Welbeck toxic tip.

If you look slightly to the right you can see

the school that's built just one field away from the

edge of the tip.

In between.

Believe it or not They are now going to place

3000 houses.

So with a school and hospital in the city center

all within that close proximity to one of England's largest

toxic tips standing at an incredible 62 m in height

it looks set to become one of the tallest piles

of trash in the world landfills in europe.

Unlike many other places in the world are controlled and

must be checked regularly to ensure they don't breach their

licenses and permits this one.

However breeches with monotonous regularity four a former miner turned

campaigner initially became concerned about this landfill in order to

stop it being built on an area of historic interest

but it was to be the first of many battles

The stench is horrendous.

You could not put a baby outside on the lawn

flies flies phenomenal.

We actually mounted a private prosecution against the firm for

the flyers because the environment agency wouldn't in our conservatory

we've had as many as 3 to 4000 flies paul

feels the british authorities and government agencies are complacent and

don't do enough to safeguard the health of the community

only once as the environment agency prosecuted.

And those site owners have never ever once taking this

company to court over the breaches of their lease documentation

paul however has been taken to court on numerous occasions

earning him two lifetime injunctions for his efforts.

The judge said to me I will take every penny

you've got I will take your house away from you

and you will go directly to jail if you show

any documentation or go on that tip again the waste

industry in this country are so rich that they can

afford to employ universities to prove that things and common

sense.

An official from the environment agency who investigated this particular

landfill wrote that monitoring left much to be desired.

His report concluded Accepting the EA's views that this is

one of the better regulated of some 2500 active landfill

sites in England and Wales.

What does that say for the rest all over the

world landfills are filling up fast in some places like

Beijing space for waste to simply run out.

Over the past decade 14 dumps around New York have

reached capacity.

Society produces lots of waste.

We're all part of the problem.

If you went back 150 years you'd find that the

waste stream consisted mainly of natural products.

So it would be paper wood products animal products wool

the fibers cotton wool were all naturally produced.

What's happened in that intervening time 150 years is that

the the waste stream has become progressively more toxic.

So we've seen increasing levels of heavy metals radioactive substances

synthetic plastics.

So 150 years ago you could have taken away stream

you could have stuck it in the hole in the

ground and it would have rotted and there would not

have really been many long term consequences.

Now if you want to go looking at a modern

waste tip you need to be very careful.

They're actually quite poisonous but even when they're closed down

they still cause problems Although most new sites have a

layer of clay spread beneath the liner which both act

as a barrier to stop chemicals leaching into the groundwater

It seems this method is flawed and that all barriers

will ultimately fail.

Making dumps a potential threat for hundreds of years.

In 2008 a major land slip unearthed an old landfill

on Dorsett's World Heritage Jurassic coastline spewing rubbish down the

cliff face and onto the beach below.

But with no definitive landfill maps no one can predict

where or how coastal erosion and rising tides will affect

old sites wherever in the world they are.

Nature functions by building up and breaking down building up

and breaking down anything that goes out into the environment

which is made by nature is built up and broken

down.

built up and broken down.

And we've had hiccups with our civilization because we keep

putting things into the environment that don't break down.

Even the best managed and closely monitored landfills still cause

problems.

This one in Gloucestershire in the heart of the Cotswnolds

is no exception.

Licensed to take 150,000 tons of hazardous waste a year

It's one of the most toxic dumps in europe.

This is the only way you can get to see

it.

It is really without trespassing yep and there we have

it in all its glory it's enormous.

This is Brandon's hazardous waste landfill and what's he going

to be filled with?

It's going to be filled with a mixture fairly innocuous

things like paints and varnishes solvents but the ones that

were ears are things that have been produced by combustion

particularly municipal waste.

What is shocking is the quantities that are coming here

And the location because 15,000 people live within three km

of that whole and the wind most commonly blows across

the site in that direction towards the village you can

see the spire in the village of Bishop's Cleeve there

and the method that is used is incredibly primitive.

The waste material is mixed with liquid in these silos

before being spread on the landfill so as to prevent

toxic dust from escaping and being blown onto nearby land

and houses mix it up with from the landfill that

is all of the liquid that drains off at the

bottom of the landfill everything rots down and lead.

It's the substance that comes down and we know That

there is chromium six.

We know that there is cadmium and a whole load

of other heavy metals in there which are really dangerous

to human health.

It's outrageous.

The local residents were so worried by the toxic dust

clouds clouds.

The operators of the site have maintained neither drifted nor

even existed that they started an investigation along with the

residents findings.

Government agencies also discovered the dust outside the landfill but

came to the conclusion it was unlikely to be associated

with a significant risk to health.

The owner of the field next to the landfill gave

me permission to take a sample of soil and tested

for toxins.

Mark spots Into a square at 10 m by 10

m right?

2 3 4 5 6.

It was important to do this in a scientific way

four samples from the century Accumulate The eight sub samples

It's the middle of that.

Where's the stick?

I've lost my stick.

See what's impossible.

I have to put the sticks up where I mean

a flag would have been more useful.

Others must be over here.

I've done that one.

We are free of as much as we can.

There's a bit of rooted in there.

But their reality that I think back to my time

at school I was hopeless except for growing mold on

old food.

I was very good at that.

The samples I took revealed elevated levels of 17 toxic

chemicals in the soil.

When the Health Protection Agency analyzed their own dust samples

they too found toxins present.

But once again concluded they were unlikely to be associated

with a significant risk to health.

Yet other independent soil analysis found levels of toxins many

1000 times higher.

Yet a major study of 21 hazardous waste landfill sites

in five countries found that living within three km of

any of them was associated with a significantly raised risk

of congenital anomalies.

birth defects to you and me.

But like almost every report on the health effects of

landfills including those that found increased cases of cancer.

This one also ends by calling for nothing but further

research no matter who you believe there's no doubt landfills

are damaging to the environment.

And although all the studies say there's not enough evidence

to prove conclusively that they damage health it's obvious to

me that the land filling of rubbish needs to be

reduced.

Significa the question is what do we do instead with

the need to reduce the amount of waste dumped in

the ground burning?

What we no longer need seems like the perfect solution

Although incineration is generally more expensive than land filling.

It's the most widely used alternative.

There are no records of the exact number of municipal

incinerators in the world.

But there are thought to be about 800.

Some reports say there could be as many as 469

in Japan alone and in the UK We do know

that there are 30 with planning applications to build over

90 more incinerators are designed to burn rubbish at very

high temperatures converting it into gas ash heat and electricity

The newer ones are being promoted as a potential green

energy solution and indeed are no longer called incinerators.

They're now known as waste to energy plants.

But as with landfill there are hazards associated with incineration

toxic chemicals escaping into the environment.

In developed countries.

They are subject to strict monitoring to ensure the design

operation and maintenance of these facilities provide maximum safety reducing

the risk to the surrounding environ.

However some scientists have been campaigning actively against incineration One

of them for over 20 years.

I first got involved when the librarian asked me to

look at the issue of incineration because they were building

or wanted to build an incinerator in our county.

And at first I thought it was a good idea

You get rid of all the terrible landfills you make

energy at the same time you get rid of.

You only got one facility to monitor.

It looked like a good idea.

She says well you better read these and it was

papers from barry commoner that talked about the dioxin issue

and it didn't take me long to realize that this

was a crazy idea.

I've come to Iceland to the remote town of capital

of the west fjords to meet residents concerned about emissions

from the incinerator used to burn their rubbish Built in

1994 at Great Expense to the local community.

This incinerator called funny meaning fire in Icelandic was recently

shut down after its chemical emissions were found to be

too high incinerators at the bottom of a fjord and

the weather here is very still so it doesn't go

anywhere the smoke goes up and it falls down.

What we know is that there are certain generic problems

with incineration.

The level of safety that is offered is totally dependent

on the engineering and totally dependent on it working perfectly

all the time.

And it's a very very challenging environment inside and incinerated

very high temperature very hot acidic gasses experience tells us

that they don't work perfectly all the time.

Tons of waste went through this every week.

The dioxin levels were found to be way too high

and nobody wants to be contaminated basically because it's it's

a it causes all sorts of diseases like cancer and

if it builds up in the body.

Although dioxins and other chemicals are already to be found

in our environment created by combustion manufacturing processes forest fires

and volcanoes which Iceland isn't short of.

It's the manmade halogen ated ones produced by burning certain

types of rubbish which caused concern.

Dioxins are compounds that are made from carbon like we

are but they've got some extra bits stuck on.

These are chlorine or bromine molecules and they do not

occur naturally in mainstream chemistry of life.

Now the problem with these compounds is that a they

tend to persist.

I we don't have life does not have the enzymes

and things to be able to break them down.

But if you set fire to them you start to

produce a set of compounds which are very toxic.

The dioxins are one example there are many many others

but the most toxic of them are the dioxins which

is why they get so much attention.

In 1997 all European incinerators were required to have strict

pollution controls.

But the sophisticated filters needed to capture the pollutants aren't

cheap.

These are the new ones added to funny in order

to make it comply.

So here we are around the side there's a chimney

obviously they bought this huge great filter which was hugely

expensive and it worked very well for about a few

months and then it stopped working and to buy new

filters enormously expensive but eventually they did and that worked

again brilliantly and then stopped working.

It's a bit like the bags costing more than the

vacuum cleaner.

And then finally four years after they originally invested in

this they stopped using it because they couldn't afford to

use it.

But regardless of how effective the filters are at capturing

these toxins.

The fact remains all incinerators produce ash which still has

to be disposed of basically there's two ashes that were

concerned about.

There's the bottom ash which is the ash which falls

through the grates just like in the fireplace.

That's the ash from the furnace.

And then we have the fly ash which is essentially

the tiny particles which we capture in the air pollution

control devices very fine materials.

The bottom ash is about 90% in the fly ash

is about 10%.

The bottom ash is toxic and the fly Ash is

extremely toxic.

It has toxic metals dioxins furans and so on.

It's been estimated that between 50 and 80% of the

total dioxin contamination of the planet has been caused by

the incineration of waste B A.

Clinical waste or municipal waste.

So now they claim of course that well we've modified

these machines but they only ever talk about what goes

out to air and there's loads being produced in the

ash and that's being used to make breeze blocks for

your house and sweep it under the carpet.

Get rid of it.

But the basic problem has not gone away.

This small incinerator was emitting unacceptably high levels of dioxins

which were found to be entering the food chain if

you build an incinerator in the area then the farmers

are going to be the big recipients of the toxics

particularly dioxins a cow by eating the grass puts into

its body What it would take you 14 years To

breathe.

In other words if you stood next to the couch

and I don't advise it would be very boring 14

years of your life.

But if you did it would literally have to breathe

the air next to that cow for 14 years to

get the same amount of dioxin into your body that

that cow is getting in one day I went to

visit the farmer affected by the incinerator.

He was initially reluctant to talk to me.

His family had been farming here for over 150 years

and the stress of their problems had taken its toll

on his elderly father who just suffered a stroke.

Hello I'm jeremy and I'm very sorry to hear about

your about your situation and I was wondering if we

could maybe go and look at the cars.

He also told me a calf born recently had died

at birth of liver damage.

He felt as a direct result of the incinerator instructed

to keep his animals confined for the past two months

His only certainty was that at some point all of

them would have to be put down the unacceptably high

levels of dioxins found in this herd's milk were only

discovered after his neighbor asked the dairy distributor to test

it.

He wanted to show me where he'd been pouring the

milk away.

He said he was puzzled by a strange residue from

the rejected milk.

Just the credit his land.

Now as a farmer is worthless and the government have

offered no compensation.

Still.

She's thinking I could take you this must have affected

your family dreadful.

Uh You have it may now get them in with

his livelihood gone and no word of compensation.

The future for him and his family looked bleak.

I wanted to find someone to shed some official light

on what was happening.

You take decision last november to close it and to

recycle the carpets.

And a few weeks after we took that decision we

had these problems with the what will happen to Mr

johnson Willie a conversation for his farm.

I hope so.

I hope at least it won't be he who has

to pay for it.

And then then it's either us or the government that's

responsible in my opinion.

The last time the Icelandic Environmental Agency tested Funny was

in 2007.

And although those results showed the emissions were 21 times

above the safe limit.

The incinerator wasn't closed down until December 2009.

I wanted to know why I was hoping to meet

the Minister for the environment but she's got the flu

today.

So I'm gonna meet her second in command and see

what he's got to say our experts that we're dealing

with those those matters there.

The the environment Agency felt that there was not this

this threat of of of any danger to the to

the to the environment or to the health of the

people.

And yet you feel that we should try not to

have any dioxins in the.

Well that's that's my personal that's my personal view that

we should we should make all the efforts and we

need to have a look at the practical options practical

solutions that we do have.

Mm But at the time you didn't make any efforts

to close the incinerators.

Well I think the the the the the the signals

from the the environmental agency came to us much later

It was not until early this year.

So it was it was when you discovered the land

around it was actually polluted because the operators I think

said that that there would be no problem with pollutants

near the incinerator and yet 1500 yards away we have

this land which is apparently now unusable.

So the operators it seems of people who supply the

equipment should maybe be held to account.

But Iceland with its defective incinerators isn't alone all over

the world incinerator operators regularly violate their emission limits.

And it's not just the old ones.

The new state of the art facility which opened in

Scotland in 2009 breached its emission limits 172 times and

these things aren't cheap.

The town of Harrisburg's in the USA was forced to

file for bankruptcy due in part to a $310 million

dollar debt for their incinerator.

While Detroit taxpayers went $1.2 billion dollars into the red

building and upgrading.

There's one of the world's largest But communities could be

made to pay in more ways than one.

For over nine years residents in this idyllic town in

France have been fighting for justice with the authorities and

the owners of their local incinerator now demolished.

It had been releasing dioxins 13,000 times above permitted limits

But here once again the incinerator continued to operate.

It was only when local cancer cases increased significantly that

it was closed down The street behind the facility became

known in the news as Cancer Road.

When 24 out of the 80 residents contracted the disease

only One small incinerator wrecked 350 farms.

3000 animals were called 7000 tons of hay was destroyed

And 13,000 liters of milk were poured away.

The court case involving 165 residents was dismissed on the

basis that the cancer cluster in the area was not

statistically significant and that there was no proven link between

exposure to dioxin and cancer.

The precautionary principle says that in the absence of scientific

certainty the burden of proof should show the action isn't

harmful.

So in this case shouldn't it have been up to

the authorities to prove the incinerator was safe as opposed

to the local residents having to prove it wasn't.

We're pretty sure that with humans you can't get absolute

proof.

So that's why governments have to be prepared to act

with precaution on the balance of evidence.

I mean the manufacturers usually demand that you give them

proof beyond all reasonable doubt but they know that that's

asking for the moon.

You can't have it.

So some people when they see the stack of an

incinerator the chimney I think oh dilution dispersion and forget

that nature.

Re concentrates re concentrates in fish particularly mercury and re

concentrates with any grazing animal sheep pigs goats cows chickens

and so we get all this back to us and

and now just to finish that story the huge problem

here is that once we get dioxins into our body

we can't get rid of them.

The man can't give him a woman has a way

of getting rid of them.

It's called having a baby.

So she's getting the dioxin from her food every day

She can't get rid of it.

It accumulates in her body fat.

And when she's pregnant The dioxin that she's accumulated for

25 years or so in her body now moves to

the fotis.

And so the effective concentration of that stuff is hugely

increased in the fotis potential to interfere with the baby's

mental development.

The baby's immune system and the babies are sexual development

It's not a wise thing to do but to really

understand the power of manmade dioxins I felt I needed

to see them at their worst.

During the Vietnam war agent orange a herbicide contaminated with

T.

C.

D.

D.

The most deadly of the dioxins was repeatedly sprayed over

the jungle to kill the foliage and cut off the

Vietcong supply lines.

However No one predicted that nearly 40 years later Children

would still be born suffering from what many scientists believe

are the effects of this dioxin contamination.

Yeah.

Dioxins interfere with hormones affect development damage the immune system

with fetuses and breastfeeding infants at particular risk.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Mhm.

We received many thousands.

The form change man abandoned.

Oh their parents want to send them here because we

can take care of them quite well.

Since about 1966 67.

I saw many cases of birth defects but I didn't

know why.

I found a book Population in 1974 by the National

Academy of Science the U.

S.

A.

About a Spraying Mission in Vietnam since 1961.

I realized that maybe the birth defects I have seen

may be caused by toxic chemicals but the U.

S.

Air force stretched during the war time.

People have done calculations to say okay if by magic

we could stop darks in appearing in our diet.

How long would it be?

How many generations would it be before the level diluted

to an extent that you couldn't detect it.

Six generations Children here at the tu du hospital were

considered to be the lucky ones receiving full time care

and attention from the hospital staff.

But many others are not so lucky.

The mother of this little two year old girl was

devastated when her daughter was born without arms or legs

Right until then she'd been unaware that dioxins sprayed during

the war could have any effect on her own family

I look back that's what you're doing your little ball

Yeah.

Mhm.

Seeing these Children here in Vietnam leaves me in no

doubt about the dangers caused by exposure to high levels

of dioxins.

But what effects do they have at low levels in

our bodies?

Everyone in the population today has these chemicals in their

bodies.

We can't find a dose below which nothing has happened

when we look at levels in our experimental animals where

we've seen effects we see by chemical effects occurring at

levels that are present in essentially most of our population

talking about a chemical that has effects at very low

concentrations in the body.

I would say there's absolutely no safe dosage.

Dioxins are the most toxic chemicals that we know of

And even at the minute amounts that we that we

exposed to.

We're still seeing toxic effects on babies on Children.

If you start to look at development as the period

on which to concentrate for toxic effects you find that

a there are many many substances that seem to have

effects and B they occur at doses 100 to 1000

times lower than you need to produce an effect in

an adult because developments are kind of one way trip

And if you're pushed off course you you don't necessarily

get back In June 2008 33,000 doctors wrote to the

European Parliament concerned by the lack of monitoring of the

ultra fine particles incinerators.

Also emit these nanoparticles are so small.

Not only are they impossible to see they're impossible to

capture and escape regulation and monitoring by any government bodies

There are two basic questions with nanoparticles is one where

do they get to in the body?

And two if they get there does it matter?

We're already quite a long way down the line looking

at the first question I mean the scientific community is

by a number of different methods.

The findings so far indicate that if they get into

your body then they travel and they get around by

the same sorts of mechanisms that viruses do.

If you inhale some particles they've been shown that they

get to the liver the spleen bone marrow the brain

you can get across the blood brain barrier.

There's another process called global distillation going on whereby these

compounds like PCBs and dioxins things are being wafted around

the planet very very low concentrations but they get to

the colder part of the planet and then they condense

right whether it be by dioxins or toxic heavy metals

The arctic which seems so clean on the surface has

become one of the most contaminated places on earth as

the climate warns toxins deposited in the arctic ice have

begun to be re released back into our environment.

If you take the inuits their natural diet has been

and they've had to change because it's it's become too

toxic.

So so what we're doing in this part of the

world is having an effect on a global basis.

We can argue about how much dioxin comes out of

modern incinerators.

We can argue about what the health effects are but

what we can't argue about in my view is we've

got too much out there already.

We have too much in the environment we have too

much in our food we have too much in our

bodies.

We have too much in our babies.

We don't need any more and we should be cutting

back on sources for which there are clear alternatives.

But what becomes of the billion tons of rubbish we

make that never actually makes it into landfills or incinerators

each year that disappear into the environment washed away through

storm drains rivers and ultimately into our oceans.

The evidence lies on beaches all over the world.

2.7 million kg of track was cleared from global shorelines

in a single day.

You see this is so nice to wrap your rubbish

and leave it on the beach in a plastic bag

I mean isn't that thoughtful?

A staggering amount was from smokers.

I'm feeling rather holier than now because at the moment

I'm not smoking I don't know how long it will

last but I do notice a lot of cigarette butts

Yes there will be a lot of cigarettes.

Now they're biodegradable are they know they're not unfortunately they're

made of cellulose acetate acetate kind of type of plastic

basically.

Obviously inside they've also got all the toxins that we're

not going down into people's lungs.

So once in the water that will leach out into

the water and that's because the cigarette butt is so

small and the water is so big does that matter

But it does actually because I have done experiments with

the little water fleas and it can actually poison them

Just one cigarette and a few liters of water.

That's why I'm not smoking it because I'm worried about

the effect it has on water.

So this will never degrade.

It will break down into smaller and smaller pieces but

essentially it just kind of hang around for several years

It's not just the water fleas who are affected in

water.

Each cigarette butt becomes a time release capsule of chemicals

which are also toxic to fish but scientists are only

just beginning to piece together the amount of rubbish in

the world's water.

There's a range of concerns there's the environmental impacts of

debris in the marine environment problem to tourism problems to

shipping but actually my biggest concern is that annually we're

using 260 million tons of plastic and we're using 8%

of world oil production in order to do that.

And yet over 30% of that material we throw away

within a year.

Most of the rubbish from the 11 million inhabitants of

Indonesia's rapidly developing.

Jakarta ends up here in the waters of the chile

wang river.

For the city's 1.4 million poor many of whom live

along its banks.

There's no organized waste collection garbage of all types even

dead animals decays in its waters leaving it so contaminated

That it will take 20 years to clean it.

Mhm.

Yet millions of people depend on the river not just

for their daily activities such as laundry and bathing but

as their major source of drinking water.

Think right.

For much of this rubbish it's just the beginning of

a long journey out into the sea.

Once there The larger items can harm at least 267

different species of sea life.

Mhm.

And although we've been dumping our waste into the world's

oceans for thousands of years it's this new litter the

trash from the last few decades which many scientists fear

poses the biggest threat yet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Yeah.

Mhm.

One of the worst cases ever recorded was this gray

whale beached in Seattle.

Yeah Scientists found 20 plastic bags small towels duct tape

surgical gloves and a golf ball.

Mhm.

No understanding the scale of the problem began in august

1997 when returning from a trans pacific voyage Charles moore

took a shortcut home through an area in the north

pacific ocean known as the Golden.

We couldn't come on deck without seeing some form of

trash after just looking for a few minutes.

So got me thinking we need to measure how much

is out here.

And I came back two years later and found there

was six times as much plastic as the zooplankton we

catch in this net by weight and that was explosive

The idea that somehow in the deep ocean we've got

more trash than life ignited the whole controversy about allowing

our throw away society to become part of the ocean

bio.

What is it?

I mean when I envision it I think of just

like a landfill floating in the ocean.

Is that what it is?

No it's it's not like it has that quantity of

trash in it but it's dispersed.

It's an enormous area and the trash is about the

same density as the water itself.

So it lazily floats just below the surface.

And you can't see it from a satellite.

More study shocked the scientific world.

He revealed there were six times as much plastic as

ocean microorganisms known as Zooplankton.

The starting point in the marine food chain.

What's recently become known as the great pacific garbage patch

is situated in an ocean gyre.

In the north pacific covering an area of 20 million

square kilometers where the rotation of currents draws in waste

material from surrounding areas which in this case includes north

America and Japan.

It takes an average of six years for a piece

of rubbish to reach the center of the giant by

which time it will have been eroded into tiny fragments

which is why it's so difficult to measure the true

extent of the problem estimates range from the size of

Quebec to twice the size of texas.

Let's talk trash.

You know we had to be taught to renounce the

powerful conservation ethic we had developed during the Great Depression

in World War two.

After the war we needed to direct our enormous production

capacity toward creation of products for peacetime throwaway.

Plastics take a lot of space and don't biodegrade only

we humans make waste.

That nature can't digest.

There are very few areas of the world ocean Which

are plastic free.

The United Nations itself estimates 46,000 pieces per km2 on

average in the world ocean.

It's rare to find a trawl that has no plastic

in it.

In fact we've never had one in all the trawling

we've done throughout the North Pacific that's been plastic free

We documented come from this river here and the river

over here the san Gabriel in Los Angeles in three

days one rainy day one light rain day and one

dry day 2.3 billion pieces of plastic weighing 30 tons

now for a major urban area that's actually trying to

catch some of that stuff that has street sweeping and

gutter baskets.

If one area like that is still putting in 2.3

billion pieces of plastic in three days weighing 30 tons

Imagine how much is coming in from China and Indonesia

Let's see what we've got here.

How many miles did we troll?

I think you could say we traveled a mile.

Got some packaging thin plastic film.

This is the most common identifiable type of plastic we

find even out in the deep ocean in the past

every material that defines the age that we live in

whether it was steel or copper decayed at some rate

by natural forces.

That rate is much slowed with plastic and that's great

if you want to have long term usage for your

products.

But if you've got a throwaway society it's a bad

thing.

But there are four other ocean gyres and two of

Moore's colleagues have traveled over 20,000 miles to see if

like the North Pacific gyre.

They too are polluted.

You hear just about one the North Pacific jar.

The Captain Moore had had studied 15 years ago But

there was no one going to the other four.

The northern hemisphere has to then there are three in

the south and no one had been in those jars

and see what was happening.

There's been this myth in the media about an island

of garbage the size of texas and then twice the

size of texas.

It isn't like that at all.

And in fact it's more like like this a thin

plastic soup and this is actually a very concentrated sample

This is right off the coast of California but you'll

see it's small broken down fragments of plastic that shares

space with zooplankton.

There's no place that we have gone but we didn't

find at least some particles of plastic small confetti in

our surface samples.

It's everywhere.

See if it were an island that might be better

in a sense you can go get it you can

go harvest this island of trash bring it back to

land and deal with it.

But what the reality is is this thin diffuse soup

that we have discovered covers the entire planet.

Other scientists were equally disturbed by the increasing amounts of

plastic they were finding in our oceans here in Plymouth

Professor Richard Thompson and his team found microplastics present all

over the world curious to see exactly how plastic degraded

in the environment.

He carried out a number of experiments which included leaving

plastic bags tied to moorings in the harbor.

A year later the bags were still strong enough to

carry shopping Here for example I've got what was heralded

as the world's first degradable plastic bag.

This one's been in this box since 2004.

You can see I mean okay it has degraded in

terms of it being a plastic bag.

It no longer is one but it's fragments of plastic

that aren't inherently anymore biodegradable.

This one's been in here since 2004.

We see the same sort of thing.

You can still see the printing on the bag.

But all that's happening is it's fragmenting into smaller and

smaller bases.

So the next pressing question was really well to what

extent does that matter?

Is this material causing any harm to the environment or

to marine life?

We looked at the log worm our Nicola marina which

lives in the marine sediments itself.

And that work showed that all of those organisms would

quite readily ingest microscopic fragments of plastic.

So we ran some longer term experiments with the common

muscle might have a schedule.

And what that showed was that after a single pulse

exposure to small fragments of plastic in the laboratory Over

48 days later having been in clean water for 47

of those days the muscles had still got small quantities

of plastic inside them that had been retained.

Yeah here off the remote isle of in Scotland dr

Phil Coe and his team suspect the shellfish they are

about to catch in the deep water found in the

Clyde estuary will have plastic in their stomachs.

So this is a deepwater trawl from about 65 m

And so we have here this is the Dublin bay

prawn or focus is its scientific name.

We would know as longest steam.

So normally if you go to a restaurant you can

have these prawns whole well you would just end up

the tail and that's what we call scampi.

So these are big healthy specimens and we're looking at

them because they live in a muddy and sandy environments

and deeper water net rocks live in burrows typically live

in burrows in the seabed and the generalist scavenger predators

So they will pick up dead fish than anything really

And because of their burrowing habitat and the way they

eat there's a potential that they'll take in plastic through

either their prey or from the actual borrowing activities in

the mud.

We conducted a trial and we looked 100 20 prawns

and we found that 83% of those contained plastic filaments

or pieces of plastic bag.

I think what we have to do as a society

is realize that we are potentially having an ecological impact

in our environment as a whole.

That we're only just beginning to understand what those impacts

are.

That was but there's a second more troubling problem.

Scientists are currently looking at not only does plastic leach

chemicals but once in water it also attracts chemicals potentially

making plastic even more dangerous to marine life because these

chemicals are hydrophobic in nature.

What will happen is they will latch onto the surface

of solids like plastics and to give you an example

in common terms it's a little bit like if you

were washing up after a curry or a spaghetti bolognese

and you've got all those red food red and yellow

food coloring in the bowl they latch onto the side

of your washing up bowl rather than necessarily being washed

away in your face with cleaning them off.

You could get orders of magnitude so thousands tens of

1000 times greater concentration on the surface of plastic debris

that was in the surrounding seawater.

So that begs the question.

Well what what happens to those chemicals in a different

environment perhaps in the guts of a marine organisms?

Are they released?

So when a fish eats plastic what what does it

in jest?

I mean if we were to eat that fish would

it be would we just cut out the plastic from

its stomach?

Well we've all grown up with this idea since it's

part of our food delivery system that plastic is a

nerd.

We think of plastic as not transferring anything to the

food because we get our milk and plastic we get

our yogurt and plastic we get our meat in plastic

and we really wouldn't like it if we had some

concept that plastic was bio actively transferring chemicals to the

food that were a problem for our body turns out

that's actually what's occurring and in the ocean it's not

only the compounds that have been mixed into the plastic

at the time of manufacturer but it's the compounds that

have been absorbed by the plastic as they float in

the ocean.

Many of these are capable of disrupting our hormones.

There are so many chemicals that are being used that

have hormone like activities.

So it's different from toxicants that kill you.

Just out of being toxicants here they are mimicking uh

hormones that exist in our bodies in very small amounts

and that they play very important roles in the way

our organs form and function.

Many have also been shown to suppress our immune system

and even decreased reproductive rates.

There is a very interesting danish study whereby the show

that contrary to what you would think younger couples are

more seeking hill.

When this happens you have to think whether or not

it's this exposure to hormone like chemicals during development that

is causing this shift eating a lot of small fish

A large fish becomes more polluted than each one of

the small fish because each one of the small fish

transfers a persistent pollutant to the large fish which it

stores in its fatty tissue and then when we eat

that we store the accumulated pollutants in our fatty tissue

That's bio magnification.

That's why killer whales the top predators in the ocean

are the most polluted.

They're having very difficult time reproducing at the zoological Society

in London veterinary pathologist paul Jepson has been documenting strandings

of whales dolphins porpoises marine turtles and basking sharks.

He's one of only a few scientists in the world

who's been studying the effects of pollution in marine mammals

for over 20 years.

And it's not good news pollutants accumulate at every level

in the food chain.

So in every level in that change you get an

order of magnitude increase in the concentration of the pollutants

When you get up to bottom those dolphins and killer

whales then the levels are very very high and probably

unsustainably high.

And that's why these species are most affected.

And so you get this big transfer from the mother

to the firstborn particularly the first born calf.

This big offloading of pollutants.

But the worry is that the population declines could be

absolutely massive.

And actually we don't know whether these populations will actually

recover most of the marine mammals.

Paul has autopsied particularly killer whales have very high levels

of toxins.

Some of the levels we found in the animals.

When we've done a postmortem say on a killer whale

or dolphin they will be classed as toxic waste.

You know you have to dispose of them as as

hazardous waste.

And this has been found in other parts of the

world like innocent Lawrence Seaway with the belugas where they

have these very highly contaminated animals releasing bad chemicals into

the atmosphere doesn't mean they stay up in the atmosphere

They condense into the ocean creatures in the ocean and

then take them into their bodies.

That starts the bio magnification process.

This is why the whales are having difficulty reproducing.

They're the sentinel.

There are the canaries in the coal mine there the

harbingers of what's going to happen to us.

There may only be a few generations before human beings

won't be able to reproduce.

And plastic floating on the ocean is nature's way of

telling us to get after a problem.

No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is not about what might happen in some distant

future.

The ground beneath our feet is already full of rubbish

The air is tainted with manmade chemicals and our oceans

are turning into toxic soup of floating debris.

The issue of sustainability is the single biggest challenge to

our civilization.

The best place to start that change is with waste

Professional packaging.

People would have us believe that life would be impossible

without their services.

Yeah.

Mhm.

When I speak to packaging industry they say they're mainly

interested in getting goods safely to the market.

I have no objection with that except perhaps where it

comes into conflict with dealing with the waste at the

end of the lifetime.

And if this one's easy to recycle and that one

isn't then why do we need to go down this

route per millimeter of liquid getting to you?

This one is using more or less twice as much

plastic for a meal of drink that you consume as

this one.

So that's costing more to transport.

It's more petrol that's being petrochemical that's being used in

its manufacture its will waste to dispose of and it's

hard to dispose of?

So I really query what we're doing in some cases

and I think that to fully tackle this problem we

need to work with industry to move towards designing the

end of life recycling bility.

I met a woman who's already taken up the challenge

We're going and declared her own personal war on waste

feels fair.

The organic store rights.

We saw a picture of the turtle with the carrier

bag in its mouth and of an albatross who had

like pounds of plastic in its stomach and it consisted

of bottle caps cigarette lighter touch brush plastic toys stuff

that we were using on a daily basis.

And my husband saw that picture of the turtle and

he said we are never taking another carrier bag ever

again.

How much waste do you generate a year?

Have you ever worked it out last year?

We created a carrier bag of waste carrier bag.

I mean this yes.

Waste of landfill waste in a year.

How many are you And a rabbit?

three of you had a rabbit and the rabbit I

suppose.

But anyway that's extraordinary.

What about your newspapers?

They get recycled?

True waste that cannot be recycled for a whole year

That's absolutely amazing.

I would love to by purely by how you choose

to shop or are there other ways it starts before

you get to the checkout You have to make a

conscious decision before you hit the checkout.

So basically you pick something that looks nice you have

to ask yourself what am I going to do with

either this product or this packaging when I have finished

using it.

And so whereas most people perhaps turn it over to

look at the price we turn it over to look

at the recycling information.

This is something that lots of parents buy for their

kids that comes in this laminated pouch with a plastic

juice.

It's orange juice.

So instead of buying it in a carton that can

be recycled or a glass bottle.

This the green dots symbol.

You're familiar with that?

No I'm not.

I get confused in all these symbols.

Right Well this symbol here lots of people think that's

a recycling symbol but it's not a recycling symbol.

It means that this company has paid a certain amount

to to have their products recycled but the consumer cannot

do anything with that.

It's not hard to learn on a packet of cigarettes

that they kill you.

It's very clearly why isn't it clearly written on these

Is it just me or do other people struggle to

understand what they all really mean?

What does that mean?

Recycle?

It means that it can be recycled.

You think you all do a bit of shopping don't

you?

Right.

So I want to know what that is.

Do you know recyclable.

Don't know recyclable retractable.

You're all wrong but I've often wondered if it were

possible to do without packaging altogether.

Our aim is to help customers refill their own containers

instead of creating more packaging waste.

So I bring my containers here for for everything.

You bring your container.

If it's dry goods that you want you can either

bring a bag or if you bring a tupperware we

just wear it first then you just fill it up

It means you can buy exactly the amount you want

as well which means you don't waste any food.

If I'm a bloke and I'm sort of just didn't

plan to do some shopping then I would have one

of these would I?

Exactly.

That's exactly what I would have a little bag in

my pocket or in my I do actually carry a

bag normally and this this is just the next step

on.

Lots of people are used to going to the supermarket

and carrying a reusable bag to put things in.

So this is just the replacing the packaging to go

in your reusable bag is amazing.

When we first started we started on a market stall

we were given a small grant to test the idea

out to see if anybody was really into the refilling

idea.

And what we found.

And it's still true today is it takes people two

or three goes to remember to bring their own packaging

First time they forget second time they forget third time

they remember one thing after that it just becomes a

new habit.

Ultimately it's a good business model.

It's cheaper for the supplier to put something in one

bulk container than put it in lots of different bits

of packaging.

It's cheaper for me.

I should get a good margin on it and we

should be able to pass it on at an affordable

price to our customers.

So everybody wins and there's no environmental impact in my

lifetime.

We've become accustomed to throwing away products even food While

people starve and farmers are told to grow GM crops

to increase food production.

In the UK alone we throw away over £11 billion

pounds worth of food every year.

The global waste of your food is around about 1.3

billion tons a year.

Food is energy.

But instead of all this wasted food going into landfill

Couldn't we be making better use of it?

We built to digest in a prison in the UK

Guys Marsh prison.

And it was designed to treat the food waste that

was produced within the prison itself from the kitchens.

And it's an absolutely first rate example of a small

scale digester.

I don't understand the difference between anaerobic digestion and composting

So I've come to see it in action.

Hello.

So good afternoon.

I'm just going to give you a pat down search

Do you have any objections to a female doing that

to you?

It will be a pleasure.

My name is Lynn.

Thank you.

Just hold your hands up like that.

Thank you very much.

Mhm.

This digester the first to be installed in a british

prison is a prototype.

Record the weights of what we're recycling all the food

gets processed through the process of there.

So it breaks down a little bit quicker.

You're recreating what occurs naturally in us human beings and

animals who use bacteria in their guts and their stomachs

to digest food and turn it into energy.

And anaerobic digestion commercially is exactly the same.

Only the anaerobic digester is not flesh and bones.

It is concrete tanks and metal tanks and it is

a pump system.

What comes out is exactly the same.

Its energy its energy in the form of a methane

rich biogas and it is a solid and a liquid

fertilizer which can be used on the land to replace

Inorganic fertilizers.

What does this save you a year to save.

And just for the food waste it's about £18,000 a

year.

And the cost of running this is fairly minimal.

It's minimal.

Yeah.

Once you've set it up there's no charge at all

really.

So that's saving the taxpayer.

Mhm.

Because backwards we'll let you go first jeremy in another

case Jeremy nice to meet you.

Thanks very much.

So this is the compost.

How long has this been here?

This compost has been here about 10 days.

Maturing days and it's covered in.

Look at the flies and how much longer will it

stay here.

This will stay here about another 20 days and being

constantly turned so that the heat is generated stream coming

up and feel the heat to make sure everything is

working fantastic stuff and it's beginning to smell good.

Yes it smells better than that smelled in those tanks

Do the prisoners work on this?

Yes the prisoners work within the area and they work

within the tunnels.

Obviously some of them have never done this before.

We try to teach them you know where their food

is coming from.

I've never understood why we don't do this in this

country why we import stuff why we don't grow under

in these tunnels all the year round.

We could grow up so much more.

Yes we could perhaps times will change and we will

thank you very much.

It's been a great pleasure.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if this could be put into

practice on a large scale?

I'm told that managing resources more efficiently could save the

UK economy £6..

pounds every year.

If we put our minds to it 17 million tons

of waste could be diverted from landfills and incinerators potentially

saving us millions more in raw materials.

Imagine if that happened on a global scale.

The city of SAN Francisco has been leading the way

in recycling for years 75% of its homes and businesses

participating in the city's zero waste initiative San Francisco established

a zero waste goal back in 2002 because land filling

waste is a total waste of resources and we really

kind of piggybacked on an emerging international movement for Zero

Waste we can't just keep extracting resources from the earth

We have to utilize the limited resources that we have

we have a three stream collection system that we have

provided to all residents whether they're in single family or

an apartment buildings all types of businesses not just restaurants

but high rise office buildings retail.

And that's the foundation of our program.

We have now made it mandatory in SAN Francisco for

everyone to participate in the program from single family residence

to apartment dwellers to all types of businesses and even

visitors.

So technically as a visitor SAN Francisco you are legally

obligated to participate in our source separation as part of

its radical approach the city believes in working closely with

its businesses This is recycled central and it's a 200,000

square foot building where all of the recyclables from San

Francisco come to get sorted.

The bulldozers put it up on those conveyors conveyors go

up 30 ft onto the conveyor belt where our ecologies

employees are there to either hand sort it or there's

machines like there's a magnet that pulls out the metal

and then our employees also hand sort the glass we

only hire folks from the local communities all of our

employees that work here are union employees and they're paid

very well and we have full benefits full benefits and

a pension.

That's fantastic.

So you've got people queuing up to work here actually

we do and we had our last open call for

jobs alignment around the block.

People get bored with working here they work here for

a long time.

People work here for a long time.

I've been here for 11 years and I'm still considered

a new timer.

We have we have guys that have worked here for

30 years 2030 years.

It's a really good job.

Tell me about about what are you doing here?

What's this stuff?

Bridget and what happened voters the bill into bells and

then we ship it over.

Where is this perspective?

This will probably go to china and they'll make it

into new products that we in turn buy back Right

So a lot of the materials that come from china

in the shipping containers come over here those containers we're

going back empty now they're going back with material as

well as using anaerobic digestion here in san Francisco.

They make compost on a truly industrial scale.

Farmers are sharp when they look and see that the

crops look better where we've used compost.

Then they start to use compost it's quite affordable and

it gives them back a higher quality of produce and

better yields and less soil erosion all adding up to

a return to the farm in stopping the waste of

organic matter.

We stopped that organic matter from going into the dumps

and by doing this we stop the production of methane

out of the dump.

We also stop the filling up of the of the

landfill by materials that are valuable for us on the

farm.

So there's a dual benefit.

There are hundreds of businesses and farms using san Francisco's

compost.

I just happened to have chosen to visit a vineyard

in the napa valley.

You know we're adding what we think is the right

amount maintain the integrity of the soils soils are like

a bang and your crop is like taking when you

take your crop off.

It's like taking withdrawal from a bank where you have

to make deposits.

And so the compost for us is a deposit.

We're replenishing what we're taking out of the soil.

You know everything we do is geared towards maintaining the

health of our soils.

That's the most important thing.

It might cost a little bit more but it's so

worth it in the long run.

You know the last thing I want is chateau Montelena

wines to change for the worst.

Under my watch that wouldn't be good.

I think we've got to taste something.

I think we should Ananda lee town is part of

a global movement of hundreds of grassroots organizations all advocating

the benefits of Zero waste.

The story that we try to tell is that it's

really grassroots communities that have been winning this battle have

been protecting the planet for future generations and often with

very few resources.

The importance of getting broader public support is is not

only about shutting these toxic facilities but really about creating

more democratic governance over industry.

That's really out to destroy both public health and the

planet.

And and how can we help facilitate that so that

communities can also empower themselves to organize and force their

local governments to change.

It's wrong to both bury and burn waste when we

can recycle over 90% of the waste that is generated

in this country recycling conserves 3 to 5 times the

amount of energy that incineration projects or even latin for

gas to energy projects generates.

What's more important perhaps is the amount of climate pollution

associated with that energy that we reduce.

If we recycled everything that is currently being buried or

burned in the US it would be like taking half

the cars of US roads that's the amount of climate

pollution we would reduce.

If we actually reach those very achievable targets jobs are

obviously created by incinerators.

How do the amount of jobs compare with those in

recycling?

So here in the US studies have shown that 10

times the number of jobs can be created by recycling

and composting the same amount of waste or tonnage of

waste that is buried or burnt in incinerators and landfills

for example here in the US there are currently about

800,000 jobs within the recycling industry.

However in the US we only recycle 33% of our

waste even if we were to achieve 75% and get

to where San Francisco has gotten across this country we

would be creating 1.5 million new jobs in recycling.

Einstein once said a clever man solves a problem A

wise man avoids it.

The engineer is trying to address a problem given the

amount of waste what we have to do is to

stop making that amount of waste.

We have to find other ways.

Well we continue to attack the problem by just saying

okay we've got a solution here.

It is we burn everything we're not going to make

progress.

We did it with smoking a smoking ban and there

were the naysayers you know it'll never work it'll be

a real problem but it was clearly understood what the

goals were.

The timetable was set there was a methodology to get

through that process and then the date came and off

we went and we had to stop we did it

with seat belts and wearing seatbelts.

We did it with drink driving actually when that became

unacceptable because the consequences were made plane we need to

do this with waste.

I'm not saying that zero waste is easy but the

problems that you have to overcome with land filling and

the problems that you overcome with incineration when you've overcome

them you've still gone in the wrong direction 25 years

from now you will need no closer to sustainability.

Whereas all the problems that we have to overcome with

zero waste it's worth doing because we know we're going

in the right direction we're saving resources for our Children

and we're reducing the contamination and we're moving towards sustainable

When I get the feeling we're at a tipping point

all over the world I've met small pockets of people

who have already changed but now it's up to all

of us.

Look at that how can you shut down the work

that not just you and me with our plastic bags

and I'll throw away cups lighters pen lids and our

take away toys not just the corporation shipping food back

and forth across the planet piling it high covering it

in plastic and throwing it away at the end of

and not just the packaging people and the pr promoters

telling everyone including themselves that if it looks good it

must be good.

And not just the politicians with their lack of political

courage their inability to stand up and say this surely

must end But all of Mhm.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No because we are trashing our planet and it's time

to stop.

Yeah.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Okay.

Yeah.

Mhm.

Okay.

Yeah.

Mhm.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Right.

Uh No.

Yeah.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Yeah