all right the first three days first. the british columbia coast is made up of deep inlets and rugged island shorelines so helicopter travel isn't just a joyride it's essential. today we're headed to the clyde quite sound and one of the forty thousand islands that dot the coastline here. these trains are a bit tricky. it's really hard to tell just how much debris is actually here because of the logs and rocks we could spend years cleaning this island alone it being estimated that there's about five point two five trillion piece of property in the ocean right now and a lot of those pieces that are free to move wherever they want to on the planet aside from you know the unsightly mess of pollution on these. problems. possibly cause when. it turns out there's little sponges

so any chemicals that are in the water will begin to absorb these chemicals in the plants she said and this is very toxic and very dangerous. every day we're finding new animal or whale that's been washed ashore with some exposed atsic. given the amount of plastic here i'm not surprised wildlife is suffering pull it. out for us oh wow it's a yeah you can tell this is an old refrigerator there's no way we could make a dent cleaning the speech by ourselves fortunately reinforcements are on the way so i gave it our bring the warrant for volunteers to this remote area and it got to be every two dozen volunteers that. many here come from different local environmental groups overall there are five thousand volunteers to call upon across the region. but with so much coastline to monitor close. he and her team

rely on tip offs posted on the ocean legacy website to prioritize the most crucial locations. i found the forty foot. idea here fair yeah these are bare. here and foam as it. fishing so when it washes up on shore. is searching for food and mistakes the sarah from from being a few. ones collected the plastic is ready for transport back to the mainland i am going to learn how to use delaying our attach one of these super pacs. i hope at the base of the helicopter so i can lift it out of here when you drop the box around the walk and run it over to you guys i want to get out. since ocean legacy started the team of collected over five tons of plastic off islands like this and they're keeping most of it out of landfills too. but what happens to the plastic

they collect chloe's invited me back to the recycling center in vancouver to find out. what's the next step in the process we take all of these are random hard plastic items and we're going to shred them up. the fragments will then be sold on to companies who will breathe new life into the. styrofoam will become picture frames and picnic benches while bits of old tires will hit the road again as new tires. ocean legacy is even starting to engage high street companies such as lush cosmetics who are using recycled plastic for their signature packaging so in order to make the black pots we've needed to turn this material basically into something that looks like this. so it's still a very small project but we're looking now in our own eyes nation to grow this much larger to engage more industry and more cleanup groups so that we can help create an economic value for these materials they're organized as

a nonprofit foundation which means that all their profits get funneled into research education and more clean up nothing goes to waste here. so what are we turning this into the next that make us. what that's. how are you turning this into fuel. it's a clever solution plastic is made from fossil fuels after all. to learn more chloe is taking me to the boat where they have a prototype of the machine they're developing on a larger scale. we've set our parameters and the machine is essentially heating up and will start to vaporize the plastic. the plastic is converted into fuel through a process of thermal decomposition called pyrolysis the machine is air tight and oxygen free so that the plastic doesn't burn as the temperature heats up to four hundred ten degrees celsius it melts to become a liquid and then a gas. this passes through a tube into

a container filled with cool water where it condenses and forms oil so who could obtain a machine like us the larger scale technology that we're looking to develop would be ideal for remote coastal or even island communities that don't have readily accessible fuel sources that are and are also inundated with classic pollution everywhere it makes sense that these remote communities can use that plastic as a resource to write something that will benefit the community. the machine will take three hours to turn the plastic into fuel in the meantime i'm off to check out another project less focus on recycling and more on changing mindsets it's an artist and author douglas copeland studio on the other side of town. what are you looking at here the same dolls these are just big global head dogs there's a twentieth century twentieth century way of looking at plastic or something shiny and copying great then there's

a reality in the world where you know in our adjusting to that and so these guys here plastic boy plastic girl they will be representing the future these figures are part of douglas's installation at the vancouver aquarium and i'm getting them ready for their debut. to like you know who he says. look at it that. douglas is using eleven tons of ocean plastic in his show. what inspired jared to create this installation piece i go north this place called queen charlotte islands about four years ago i was up there and plastic bottles were suddenly washing up on my sacred beach and really it was like you know vandalizing moment for me so i thought well let's make an image of the trash one which has been his route motional untangled to it i guess copeland isn't pretending to offer solutions but he is hoping to engage audiences who ordinarily wouldn't stop to

think about the problem and ultimately he's hopeful we can turn things around before it's too late. i'm heartened by the energy british columbia is putting into tackling the problem of plastic pollution before i leave i want to return to the ocean legacy boat to see how much fuel the machine has produced. something different colors as it's been mixed are separating into different. so what's in it coming out of this machine is a mixed oil and in that oil we can separate into cursing oil diesel fuel and petroleum products so you can make your tricity from it power your lawn mower heat your home how are you using this you currently we're not making enough of the fuel to use it in a practical application so this is just our small pilot we've really got the world's interest rate you know in launching these units worldwide. the fuel will emit greenhouse gases and other pollutants but at least it takes plastic out of

circulation and reduces the need for fossil fuel extraction. so can we use it in the ship yeah let's do it ok. and the whole she goes. very. good. running. now. ocean legacy are planning to roll out these machines starting in british columbia in one year's time they aren't the first organization to try to turn plastic into fuel or to recycle it. but what impresses me about chloe and her team is the determination which drives them to take a multi-pronged approach to tackling plastic pollution is a problem that won't go away if we continue to use and discard such huge amounts of plastic. but what i've seen here gives me hope that if other groups around the

world were to work in similar ways it could be possible to make a real difference. around the world more than forty countries have imposed laws to cut down on plastics. in two thousand and two bangladesh was the first to prohibit ten plastic bags after they clog storm drains during devastating floods. and in malaysia's federal territories a recent ban has been imposed on plastic bags in favor of biodegradable income possible bags and food containers. while in kenya it's become illegal to produce sell and use plastic bags with a penalty of up to four years in jail or a forty thousand dollars fine. but is it too little too late plastics may be being banned on land but they've already made their way into the sea. floating between california and hawaii is a massive comfort trash known as the great pacific garbage patch it's the size of

texas and still growing. in the deep sea one of the most inhospitable places on earth scientists have found plastic items almost completely intact but even more troubling is what happens when plastic does degrade mike plastics are fibers we need granules of plastic which are defined by being less than five millimeters and they start off of as large pieces of plastic and then due to littering runoff pool waste management and up in the marine environment and when they're exposed to sunlight the sunlight makes them vestal and the action is the wind in the ways just breaks them down and they become smaller and smaller they don't biodegrade or ever really go away and because they're very small and they can be readily ingested by number of different mean and they can reduce the and mind. they consume and in thailand that hands

a knock on effect on groups and reproducibility we're fine michael path takes everywhere we feel that we found on the surface of the ocean with and see the wood . cullen we found them in animals like crabs and ones that live the boss and the bad. plastic we're getting if we were. twenty five million tonnes of plastic waste is produced by your ph here in france alone five million plastic cups a frying away anyway. like many other countries across the world france faces a monumental plastic waste problem and this is driving a growing number of campaigners and entrepreneurs to challenge the way the plastic is used and made. will they be able to end the country's dependence on this basic material. twenty five percent of all plastic is recycled in

france with the rest any up in landfills or worse illegally dumped i'm meeting councilor and environmental campaigner irish baron bosh at one of the many tips surrounding paris glasgow where you by going to see to it left the. sample an example i'm going to limit that it limit the matter you open it once it. see a field ya traduced sawmill yard so media use that plastic. you off also now twice like you media said an arm with some of it with a new all false underneath john's security in a perfectly vulnerable. this search. engines that and the most knowledge of them although it's not. as good or not is the don't draw she said it could reach.

france's two thousand and fifteen ban is a good start to encourage people to reduce their reliance on plastic but the next target is twenty twenty when the country will be the first to ban single use items like plastic cups plates and cutlery so i'm embarking on a road trip around france to find out how ready industry and people are for the changes ahead. first stop some roadside services. so i just stopped to get some water and a coffee it's plastic everywhere and. one thing is clear it's going to take serious innovation to wean us off plastics but on the beach in san manner there's a possible solution. daveed coty manages our go back a start up creating plastic from seaweed. so why is so we need good as a plastics alternative to great advantage of seaweed is renewable and it's

unlimited that we don't need to our best seaweed on the field and fully biodegradable and go back to see what is there a balance the we need scientifically the make up what is it that makes it really what is good in seaweed is a forty minute chain. which is very similar to the poly machin you can find in the oily bays the plastics petroleum based polymers are long chains of carbon atoms bonded together these are produce emphatically to form conventional plastic but they can also be made from a wide range of buy materials like vegetable oil or like seaweed. daveed has asked me to help them to collect the brown variety which also happens to be a non-native. she's a real lady that we have is too thick to see one of. which is basically she's a pollution in fact and which is the date of today burnt so this can be

a plastic. they're going to be a plastic it's going to be but you're you'll have be obeyed that quickly be your base but you know your which will have certain characteristics similar to plastics . gopac started in two thousand and ten and each year they sell forty tons of one hundred percent bio plastic made from hundreds of tons of seaweed. there it is our treasure. is in charge of production at the plant what are the other ingredients that are in this matter so but to be. fair. salvia is playing this one close to his chest it is commercially sensitive after all and from where i stand the process looks involved. fyrst the seaweed is turned into something that looks like play dough before it's tried in an oven for

fifteen hours. after that it's pulverized. this batch here is destined to become flower pots. what exactly does this machine do. intend. to question. here from the new york. dam if it. has almost all but there you thoroughly. there you go straight through the gardens and we have sixteen small flower pots how long does something like this take to decompose takes. up to four months twelve months depending as well on the coaching that we can provide if this was a plastic pipe how long would that take to decompose five hundred years between five hundred years in the nature so you're looking at five hundred years against

four months do you see a gap in the market for your products. we give a room in the market but this room should be at the same price ninety eight percent of the people are ready to go for something which is greener which is better for the environment but at the same price. right now our go pack is the more expensive option for consumers but davey's hopeful that in twelve to eighteen months they can step up production to offer products that are only fifteen percent more expensive than conventional plastics the seaweed alternative to. really impressive but there are limitations. but these can be overcome. with the band looming stance observer and friends are experimenting with plastic alternatives for materials like milk and corn starch i'm off to see another venture

in scent. is an engineer who recently has developed what he calls if we can boss whom from an ingredient found in most of our cupboards in his refined form what is this product that you want to show us it's really ok ok yes how do you turn this into this. how is your fellow from your new leg. was going to crest each nest and you. may. simply fall one cuban pair met the family do. an exam and do. yoga and i can as you can. confirm it is not reason. where does the sugar cane come from and the indonesian way and who does the transformation from the sugar cane to these pellets here. tap safely under lizzie.

those are new who know and who got really poor fell just. a. as the other plants nikolai's guarding his formula closely i can see why the results look good it's actually a food product yes so if i finish my juice in this possible way and i want to dispose of it i don't necessarily need to put it in the plastics waste put it in the food waste.