economy for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines. people gather at moscow's busiest airport to pay tribute to the thirty five killed in monday's suicide bombing it was russian worst terror attack since its capital's metro was bombed last march. and terrorism is expected to grab the spotlight of the dollars economic forward russian president arrived for the opening speech after being away by the blast at. star decided russia's upper house of parliament votes to ratify the new groundbreaking strategic arms reduction deal with the us reducing both the superpowers nuclear arsenals by over. up next watch a special report on the pollution of the planet's water reserves as oceans suffer from being turned into waste dumps scientists look at how to clean them up.

it was the soup of the nor the super good. there's the soup. your project all these things you know if you go through the. door so sharply you're no good but it. just is the first place to cold in the stomach of the if you translate it to human body size this would be to their fridge in the stomach.

so in the past five minutes here in the content creek i took a little walk around to see how many styrofoam cups i can pick up and five minutes what you see here is what six people would consume in one week of drinking coffee every day so many people think that their individual actions don't really have an impact but if you multiply this by the millions and millions of people that drink coffee in los angeles alone you can start to understand how we see something like this in every single river every single creek everest single stream and los angeles behind me is compton creek it's one of the many streams that drains the los angeles area now this stream will go into the los angeles river and then out to the pacific ocean the purpose of this boat is to to get attention and get politicians get other

schoolteachers get the public to look at us and listen to our story. listening to marcus and his story is like being in most of the planet seas and taking the time to look. in the mediterranean alone there are three million tons of garbage drifting around and eighty percent of it is plastic. we don't think about it but the sea bed wasn't always covered with these or from an identifiable drifting object. we're really the third generation to make massive use of plastics. all this is the result of sixty years of consumption. we've let plastic colonize the sea. on the surface. a few

meters down. and at the depths of one thousand meters. with all of this material will be down here for ages especially where it's really data there's much less oxygen and no light whatsoever i mean yours are factors which help break down the plastic so the stuff will be around for a few hundred years and have your kind of loser dreams when you go really deep for the one thousand meters for instance a mr you imagine something mysterious and completely different also when you get down there and you see piles of plastic and rubbish it's just awful that was and is just so much as a tree and i hope. the oceans are being stuffed with plastic. we're force feeding them. but there's something we haven't thought of.

the count digested. the next a fool but there's nothing miraculous about catch. this material has revolutionized own lives today but at one price. what happens to plastic once it's in the ocean is really a note as we've always been told doesn't really have no effect on animals or hughleys. michel louis is one of the thinking heads of a professional syndicate once you are in and you realize all the benefits that this best of material is bringing to the society to the quality of life you are convinced that best it is fantastic and then you want to explain that to everybody to prove that this product is not dangerous at all as it is providing quite

a lot of marvelous things if they stick would that be existing the resources for the planet the would this deal everything that planets will leave all would be totally exhausted it's thanks to the plastic which has been invented industry only speaking in the fifty's we have been able to produce so much material so much products that we use every day. i just came back from a drive out to the desert one of the aircraft boneyard picked up this cessna for a few hundred bucks now it's missing the wings is missing the engine everything else except for the fuselage this is ideal because it's lightweight it has the

doors intact the windows are intact waterproof but will make it waterproof. marcus erikson is a dedicated militant against plastic for fifty years he's been pedaling along america's rivets he's seen the pollution grow and it keeps growing. one day marcus had a dream so the whole world would care about the problem he hopes to mobilize the planet by sending the seas in an old airplane cabin sitting on fifteen thousand plastic bottles. to win the energy of someone who is determined to change the world he setting out for two thousand five hundred mile trip will be open i'm sure. so this is. over a thousand people schoolkids but across the country and chicago have given us

messages about the ocean and about plastics which we're going to take across the ocean and bring back and share with the policy makers and try and get something done about this passage issue. that's right after the bottle. this is the marine mammal sometimes one of the biggest organizations of its kind. for thirty five years one thousand volunteers have constantly surveyed the beaches and meters of the entire california coast to help undernourished all sick animals. over the years they've had to learn to deal with new kinds of moons. their death i am raising animals admitted to our facility with santa. we have. time

ad that was attached to a hook that came out of an elephant seal stomach we have a thick black bag that was wrapped around a sea lions neck we have. monofilament line that was wrapped around is the way i am back as well and inside of it now and then we have a louse trap and string that was found wrapped around a while of a first seal that actually an endangered species so it's very much of a concern. loss nets don't stop fishing. there have been cases of strangulation in the home for the species of seals and sea lions. species of whales have suffered in incidents with plastic. plastic khamenei kill. and also suffocate.

although the volunteers of the marine mammal center managed to save dozens of animals every year the vast majority are inaccessible. but we can see that it's fairly deep the biggest problem with something like this is this animal are male female she's going to grow some more and that entanglement won't as after a while it could end up strangling her or stop her from being able to eat for all to find plastic only times found in the sea come from what we throw away on land here is some of the first collateral victims three hundred marine species of victims of plastic. twenty years ago young i'm from adult seabird specialist started an experiment on

full moons a common species in northern europe. he wanted to know what they ate. a completely straightforward investigation. but its results were a big surprise i looked at home a simplistic more or less by accident because in the early one nine hundred eighty s. i found more blessed states and at that time staff i didn't know it all in the stomachs which later proved to be industrial plastics. the first time i realised plastic in a bird. amazement. young has alerted his european context. his determined to how many full moons are affected. is received and analysed three thousand birds found beached along the coastline of eight countries. so firm niland why it is green bit this pieces of

plastic they're still with and dirty ninety five percent of these birds flying dust bins there's all sorts of fragments of broken plastic items and here this. at least seven industrial plastic granules ok what i fear is the efforts placed the contents of a full moon in the southern north sea so if you translate it to you with the size that this is will be efforts in the stomach and so in that case there's no need to discus with this little bit for you we had agreed that this is not elsie. according to the united nations plastic is now part of the diet of half the species of cib it's. thanks to the use of pesticides we protect the planet and we protect the climate

evolution as well if you would have to replace the basic by getting back all the material then you would have to multiply the the weight of the begetting by for the price of the packaging by two and the amount of waste by one point six. drifting plastic. marcus and his friend joe assailing the mid pacific sitting on thousands of slightly leaky bottles. marcus's plan has already worked his exploit is being followed by millions of people on the internet. it can affect some policy. some policy to help curb the exploitation of. these synthetic chemicals that we had to use to our advantage short term advantage but now we're finding out just polluting our world and really i can feel that it's going to impact the next generation my kids and it feel it so i feel like.

obligated to do something it's an obligation knowing something is wrong can't do nothing otherwise interrupt your accomplice. in the mansion twenty as an english peer at an outlandish but particularly far sighted idea. and you fitted a number of ships which regularly followed the same north european shipping lanes with a strange device. it was a record of ships and been towing them every month ever since. these

are time machines to be kept as treasures. the recorders contain cassettes with which you can trace the evolution of plankton in the english channel the north atlantic. one hundred seventy thousand samples of plankton that has been trapped over five million miles a spider's web woven over almost one hundred years. these devices have provided some unexpected and precious scientific proof. to us that one of its catching planktonic organisms maybe is catching small pieces of plastic at the same time so we went back through historic samples we sampled from the nine hundred sixty s. the one hundred seventy s. the eighty's and ninety's and then compared abundance through time and that's where

we we showed that adding three significantly when you compare the one thousand nine hundred sixty nine. this british scientist has proof of the increasing pollution of the channel and they planted. in fact plastic never decomposes into the environment it just breaks down into small bits over time so even if we stopped producing plastics tomorrow which is not something that i would advocate because i actually think plastics can bring many benefits to society that even if we did the legacy of the plastics that we produced there fragmentation would continue for many decades and centuries to come. marcus wants to share the scientific discoveries. all the plastic which has ended up in the sea is still there. three months and several storms later he finally reaches hawaii on his plastic bottle raft it was enough to make him a hero of modern times has struggled to start and get some attention.

there's a steady trend of increasing plastic and it's growing exponentially sort of purpose that this is to get the world awareness don't talk about solutions what do we do about this issue. while marcus is busy consciousness raising on the other side of the planet richard thompson is busy collecting scientific evidence of the contamination of the marine had to turn to find plastics.

i was just interested well this is a plastics that are forming by the breakdown of large bases or what is the smallest piece of plastic present on the base that was the challenge i set to two of my graduate students just at the over ten years ago. richard has found fragments of plastic that can be measured in microns finer than a human. and his found huge quantities of them. all of the places that we we extract that look a little bit unusual around about a third we can found to be plastic. he thought that maybe his findings were the result of a freak event on a particular plymouth beach so he analyzed the sound of ten other british beaches

then he checked all stars the same time worldwide. we found these materials every place we've examined and that surprised me the ubiquity the fact that these we know that large items of debris are now covering the ocean's surface down in the deep sea bad but the fact that they chose worldwide and now contaminated with small fragments of plastic was actually quite surprising to me i expected that maybe as we move to more remote places than past we wouldn't find any plastics at this this microscopic scale but in fact we have. people off thinking that plastics are polluting and because they are totally ignoring the an enormous amount of benefits benefits that you get from the pacific material likeness less consumption etc if you have a lot of light of the girls then automatically the consumption is very slow or

one hundred kilo less for a car is zero point three liter hundred kilometers. captain charles moore is fed up of seeing the oceans used as a dumping ground. he truces the fury of plastic back to the origin. of birds before becoming a bottle of blister pack plastic comes from petrol then it is delivered to manufacturers in the form of little pellets. this is all plastic oh. they come out of this. wells right here. they come out of here they spill on the ground and after many years. millions and millions and millions they cooled to move to use without having been used these pellets are on

their way to the water cooler says this facility is still releasing millions every time it rains so this is an illegal dump of pellets preproduction plastic pellets this is a bag factory these are polyethylene pellets they float in fresh water these are the pellets from the rail cars that have been washed and blown down to the drain this is the drain that leads to the river these millions of pellets are entering the ocean through those little holes right there you can see pellets on every side of the drain we found two hundred thirty six million of them in three days of sampling these rivers coming down the rivers to the sea just in three days two hundred thirty six million pellets. chose more reason furia to buy plastic waste because you also knows that it never

disappears. the comptons life changed twelve years ago when he settled a little used route across the pacific. every time i took the time to survey the ocean i was able to see something in it i even would make a bet with myself i will come out now i will survey the ocean and see nothing but i would lose the bet i would always see something and this gradually made me think something's wrong. when he returned he was intrigued that there was so much plastic floating around so far from civilization. so he decided to go back and quantifying the problem. this was the big shock and this was a very very big surprise we were shocked when we pulled up the net for the first time i mean that was an aha moment my goodness what have we done that we can just throw a net anywhere in the ocean and hold this kind of plastic debris out. i dr

mark is here from high above the pacific ocean in the middle of nowhere looking for plastic and lots of it. captain jones move created a foundation called. marcus the activists joined him alone with a construe team they've obtained government grants to study this and since then they have kept on filtering the ocean. race. saying. that it's a couple. of days there's only. put up a little bottle cap. so this is seven hours in the open ocean with a troll but as wide as a lawnmower that's not much area. that's like it's not a human hair our entire football field the ocean is so vast that this much plastic

and very small strip only sample is a virtual. captain moves samples of stead up a planet wide controversy. he discovered to trash thought into. trash from the american continent is sucked into the trash for to explain spider i mean kind of the specific joining the trench coming from asia. some of the islands and beaches of one are in the direct line of this massive plastic. don't compel a girl is the victim of throughways from all the countries the boat of the pacific .

we began cleaning this this coastline here. in two thousand and three and since that time we've collected over ninety tons of trash just off this few miles of coastline. the trash drifts with major ocean currents spiralling round for at least ten years and finally ending up as a stagnant mass in a central whose sons is still unknown. charles mauls team has established an operating procedure. samples are brought back to land to be studied. expedition after expedition the extent of the problem is revealed more clearly. six hundred seventy one fish that we collected of six different species over thirty

five percent of them had at least one piece of plastic in their stomach and the reason we want to care about this although these fish might be ugly to some people i think they're adorable and they're also the missing food source for animals such as tuna and mahi mahi and soundman people don't necessarily see these fish people eat the fish that feed on these fish so it brought about a whole bunch of more questions and how densely is this going to affect humans down the line. in the middle of the trash talk tax as far as is possible from any inhabited land charles moore and his team have discovered even the simplest forms of life struggling to survive in the midst of our trash. jellyfish so turned out they can no longer swim.

even a zero plant the most basic element the ocean food chain are affected these tiny living organisms swallow tiny particles of plastic which get stuck becoming bedded in the bodies. microscopic life forms but life forms that are already struggling for survival to become further and further in meshed you know rubbish.

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