i'm broadcasting live director from the heart of moscow this is r.t. . have you of the syrian government forces launched their biggest and sweep against protesters in the north and west of the country blocking their escape to turkey meanwhile russia urges the un security council to bring both sides to the negotiating table. licensed to kill israeli special forces get the green light to shoot at palestinian independence of protesters the un is expected to vote on the palestinian statehood of the later this month something that israel strongly opposes. and seeking solutions brushing russia and ukraine agreed to

talk as kiev pushes for discounted gas and supplies i'm able to cope with the current pricing levels the deal that's in place was struck in two thousand and nine and ended as a european gas crisis. and next on our team watch how global season turned into plastic soup as we follow the investigation of a team of environmentalists. in the. close to the super bowl the nor the super good there's the soup. project always

been there when you come through and. you're still shopping you're no good for it. just you it's the first place to hold them in the stomach of the if you translate it to you lean body size this will be their fruits in the stomach. so in the past five minutes here in the concentrate i took a little walk around to see how many stars on cops i can pick up and five minutes what you see here is what six people would consume in a 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 every single stream and loss angeles behind me is continent creek it's one of the many streams that drains the los angeles area and this stream will go into the los angeles river and then out to the civic 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's 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 depth of one thousand meters. is all of this material will be down here for ages especially where it's really deep 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 have because you kind of lose or dreams when you go really deep

on the one thousand meters for instance mr you imagine something mysterious and completely different and also when you get down there and you see piles of plastic and rubbish it's just awful that was that was just so much of a three and a half. the ocean's being stuffed with plastic. with force feeding them. but there's something we haven't thought of. the count digestive. the nets are full and there's nothing miraculous about catch. this material has revolutionized on lives today but at one point. what happens to plastic once it's in the ocean is really you know as we've always been told doesn't really have new effects on animals or humans.

is one of the thinking heads of a professional syndicate once you are in and you realize all the benefits that this plastic material is bringing to the society to the quality of life you are convinced that plastic is fantastic and then you want to explain that to everybody to prove that this product is not then doris at all as is providing quite a lot of marvelous things if they stick with the existing the resources for the planet you would this deal everything that planets with live on would be totally exhausted it's thanks to the plastic which has been invented and this really speaking in the fifty's we have been able to produce so much material some of the products that we use every day.

but you just came back from a drive out to the desert one of the aircraft boneyard where we picked up the 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 catalina long america's rivers he's seen the pollution growth and it keeps great. one day mark as have a dream that the whole world would care about the problem he hopes to mobilize the planet point so you can see is an old airplane cabin sitting on fifteen thousand

plastic bottles. with the energy of someone who is determined to change the world he setting out from two thousand five hundred mile trip to the open ocean. so this is. over a thousand people schoolkids across the country of chicago have given us messages about the ocean and about price ticks which really i think across the ocean and bring back and share with policymakers and try to get something done about this plastics issue. that's right after the bottle. this is the marine mammal some to one of the biggest organizations of its time. for

thirty five years two thousand volunteers have constantly surveyed the beaches and the entire california coast to help undernourished and of. over the years they've had to learn to deal with new kinds of. their death like crazy animals admitted to our facility with being told. we have. this in mind that was attached to a hook that came out of an elephant seal stomach we have a big black bear and that was wrapped around a sea lion neck we have. monofilament line that was wrapped around is the right hand back as well and inside of it now and then we have a law and string that was found wrapped around a bottle of it first actually an endangered species so it's very much of a concern. last night stem stop fishing.

there have been cases of strangulation in the home for the species of seals and sea lions. beaches species of whales have suffered incidents with plastic. plastic khamenei pill. 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 very deep their biggest problem with something like this is this animal male female she's going to grow some more and then hang on not want as after all of our occurred and that strangling her or stop her from being able to eat for all to find

plastic items found in the sea come from what we threw 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 accra i don't see bird specialist started an experiment on foreman's a common species in northern europe. he wanted to know look the h. a completely straightforward investigation. but its results were a big surprise i look at the whole us and per se more or less accidents because in the early one nine hundred eighty s. i found more blessed states and at that time stuff i didn't know it all in in the stone walls which later proved to be industrial place that's. that the first time i

realized i was placed in a bird stomach it was. amazement. john has alerted his european colleagues. is determines knew how many films are affected. it's received and emulous three thousand birds found beached along the coastline of eight countries is a piece of firm niland why it is green bit this pieces of place they still with and dirty ninety five percent of these birds flying just means there's all sorts of fragments so for broken up with that items and here this. at least seven industrial plastic granules ok what their fear is the efforts placed the content of a fall in the southern north sea so if you translate that to you with the size that

this is will be there for each in the stomach and so in that case there's no need to discuss whether it's a little better for you we had read it this is not l.c. . according to the united nations plastic is not part of the diet of half the species of sida. thanks to the use of plastics we protect the planet and the prodigal climates illusion as well and she would have to replace the plastic packaging by other material then you would have to multiply the weight of the packaging by for the price of the packaging by two and the amount of waste by one point six. fifteen plastic. marcus and his friend joe a sailing mid pacific city known for thousands of slightly leaky bottles. marcus's

plan has already worked. his exploit is being followed by millions of people on the internet. we can affect some policy. some policy to help curb the exploitation of. a 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 could feel that it's going to impact the next generation my kids are going to feel it so i feel like. obligated to do something it's an obligation knowing something's wrong you can't do nothing otherwise you're on your accomplice. in the mansion twenty as an english peer at a none plan dish but particularly farsighted idea. he fitted

a number of ships which regularly followed the same northrup in shipping lanes with the strange device. it was a record of chips and been turning 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 plantain in the english channel the north atlantic. one hundred seventy thousand samples of plankton but has been trapped over five million miles a spider's web woven over almost

a hundred years. these devices have provided some unexpected and precious scientific proof. to us that one of its catching planktonic organisms maybe it's getting small pieces of plastic at the same time so we went back through historic samples we sampled from the ninety six days there and the seventy's the eighty's and ninety's and i had abundance through time and that's where we showed that it had increased significantly when you compare the one nine hundred sixty s. and ninety's. this british scientist has proof of the increasing pollution of the channel and the blanket. 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 discovery. 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 he struggled to start and get some attention. there's a steady trend of increasing plastic and it's growing exponentially to the purpose that this is the day at the world awareness both talk about solutions and 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 have determined by plastics. i was just interested there is a plastics that are forming by the breakdown of large pieces or what is the smallest piece of plastic present on the beach that was the challenger set to two of my graduate students just a little over ten years ago richard has found fragments of plastic that can be

measured in microns finer than a human. and used for huge quantities of them. of all of the pieces that we we extract that look a little bit unusual around about a third we confound the plastic. he thought that maybe his findings were the result of a freak event on a particular plymouth beach so he analyze the sound of ten other british creatures and he checked all stars the same time why. we held these materials every place we've examined and that surprised me the ubiquity the fact that these we know that large items of temporary are now covering the ocean surface they're 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 idea as we move to more remote places and perhaps

we wouldn't find any plastics at this this microscopic scale but in fact we have. people are thinking that plastics are producing and because they are totally ignoring the an enormous amount of the benefits benefits that you get from the plastic little you'll night news less consumption etc if you have the light light of the girls then automatically the consumption is very slow or one hundred kilo less for a car is zero point three liter per hundred kilometer. captain charles moore is fed up of seeing the oceans used as a dumping ground. he truces the few view 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. they come out of this. well that's right here. they come out of here as well on the ground and after many years. millions millions and millions he cooled the movie and stevens without having been used for anything these pellets are on their way to the world cousens 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 and three days of sampling these rivers coming down the rivers to the sea just in three days two hundred thirty six million pellets. charles moore is infuriated by plastic waste because you will soon as that it never disappears. the captain's life changed twelve years ago when he sailed 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 and i would lose the bet i would always see something and this gradually made me think something is wrong. when he returned he was intrigued and that there was so much

plastic floating around so far from civilization so he decided to go back and quantify 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 pull this kind of plastic debris out. hi dr mark is here from high above the pacific ocean and middle of nowhere looking for plastic and lots of it. comes in shows move created a foundation called uncle eater. because the actor has joined him alone with a considerable team they've obtained government groups just started this and since then they have kept on filtering the ocean. this place. since.

there's a. figure put out of cap. so this is seven hours of the open ocean with a troll tell us why it is no more gore that's not much area. that's like it it's not on human hair my entire football field the ocean is so vast this much plastic and very small strip that we sample is a virtual. captain ml's samples of stead of a planet wide controversy. he discovers the trash vortex i'm told will. trash from the american continent is sucked into the trash for to explain spiral currents of the pacific joining the trash coming from asia.

some of the islands and beaches of one are in the direct line of this massive plastic. don't believe it is the victim of throughways from all the countries the border the pacific. we began cleaning this just coastline here in two thousand and three and since that time we collected over ninety tons trash just this few miles of coastline. the trash drips with major ocean currents spiraling ground for at least ten years and finally ending up as a stagnant mass centrism who sometimes is still a. team

this is standard operating procedure. samples are brought back to them to be studied. expedition after expedition the extent of the problem is revealed more clearly. six hundred seventy one fish that we collected have 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 although these fish might be to some people i think they're orrible and they're also the making food source for animals such as tuna and marking off and sound people don't necessarily 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

a line. in the middle of the trash talk text as far as is possible from any inhabited land. and his team have discovered even the simplest forms of life struggling to some point in the midst of our trash. jellyfish so turned up they can no longer swim. even as though plants are the most basic element come from the training are affected these tiny living organisms swallow tiny particles of plastic which get stuck and become in bed in that bodies. microscopic life forms but life forms that are already struggling for survival as they come further and further and meshed in our rubbish.

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