thirty meters or down a hundred meters every single sample has had plastic in it from the samples we found in one thousand nine hundred nine there was a ratio of six to one plastic the plankton now in two thousand and eight we found the plastic plankton ratio of forty six to one so that's over eight times as much plastic in the environment. we protect all these things that we see come through. the shark still shocking here not. quite plastic soup but that are so regular there's the soup. scientists have shown that there is no one touchstone left on this planet every square mile of version contains tens of thousands of bits of plastic. the result of our consumption two hundred twenty pounds a year per inhabitant. we

will not change the evolution of the society we are using less and less time to prepare the food for the luncheon for the dinner and as well there we. move and we have the habits to eat outside of the house so more and more we will use products which are much more back aged and ready to be consumed for the drinks or for the food then we were used to use in the past and in the first ten years of the current century since two thousand we produced as much plastic as we produced in the entire century that preceded way using at the moment in excess of two hundred sixty million tons of plastic every year worldwide now around about a third of that is used for single use items for items of packaging that a used once and then discarded so it's a material that lasts for very long time in the marine environment and yet we use it and throw it away within

a year. of these oceans of plastic there because of our carelessness or is it because the system doesn't work properly. what happens to plastic when we throw it away. this is one of the biggest garbage tubes in the united states. what else landfill serves half a los angeles county about seventy eight cities and five point two million people twenty miles landfill takes in and is permit at about thirty thousand two hundred tons per day what that accounts for is if you take a football field from post to post fill it up with waste about ten feet higher little over three meters that's how much waste is accepted here a death. in the united states nearer the least half the plastic we threw away is simply better and. thousands of bottles and bags end up in this type of tip every year. between them the two continents buried four to five million

metric tons of plastic in two thousand and seven. in the face of this exponential consumption the infrastructures can't keep up. only five percent of the plastic used in the world is recycled and the west the main consumer does not even have the means to deal with that. this is the port of chinari in india part of our recycled waste ends up here by the container full. hidden from european eyes all rubbish is treated behind these doors which are usually kept closed. you see containers that then unloaded and then the material is in this yard in this yard as you can see that is different different quality from

different origin some material from germany some from france some from america some from the middle east it's this at some who will let us into future images number one recycler of plastic bottles. is a broker he buys that comes in several recycling bins and resells it here where it can be treated by cheaper labor. like me. so noodles line of business is doing well. and the export of used plastic has been increasing by thirty percent a year in two thousand and seven front sent seven hundred thousand metric tons of plastic and broke as you see the build up from france if you see from the label you may be able to identify the bottle that maybe you have you'll think of. these of gum here now and it will be teeth like gold and made again into valuable bottles more products which could be you of the again.

the plastic recycled my future comes from western countries quite legally the recyclers hope not showing us how we'll take our boat rubbish delinquent just european consumers to send the. message to the utopian customers utopian whole homeowners are utopian man or woman it's very straight and simple who took our polyesters is about to be associated in keeping the environment and please add wood for the human belief i have a week i liked those bottles which you throw in the dustbin that got word there into those products that you use every day maybe it is a shark it is a t. shirt audit is a pipe and shirts are it is the bottles we to use what blinky what audi drinks are

any juices. through. so we try to have zero waste if possible by trying to have no plastic come into our homes and then end up in the garbage cans so markus and amber have gone for a radical solution for us when we go to buy things at the grocery store like we buy bread. it sometimes comes the plastic bags you have to file you have to go to an actual bakery we are now making these out of old t. shirts so we've been collecting t. shirts from schools and from goes well when people are thrown away their shirts instead of using plastic bags and of course we never buy plastic water bottles

anytime we want to get water we bring our own we fill up at a tap filtered water we bring these with us everywhere so you get these habits you develop them and then you don't think about them you just remember grab my bag of the market. even organic waste doesn't go into plastic bags to get eaten it's show us the worms and you got to see underneath. it. carefully. and in the bottom look some shallots some garlic. so there's a recycling bin and we try to throw anything away if we buy something we try to make sure the packaging is recyclable the idea of waste is something completely invented by humans so there should be no waste if you're recycling if you're conscious about the things that you buy and you remember that everything you buy

has to go somewhere. new plastic in the home eat whose new plastic in the tip going abroad plus no plastic in the ocean. that's marcus and i'm is a question of the time. they're already off and another adventure peddling two thousand miles between vancouver ninety one to convince whoever they meet on the way. for them plastic is a problem full stop and it needs to be eradicated at the source. the benefits which are brought by the use of the stigma to also great for the society so great for the consumers in terms of security for food in terms of

lightness for transport etc that would be stupid just to cancel those. strong benefits in order to just. correct something which is just at the end of the life of the product and be goes that is a wrong be a view of the people and of the society we hear that same line from the weapons manufacturers guns don't kill people keep people kill people we hear the same line from the plastics industry that plastics aren't the problem it's people that are the problem it's people littering but there's no way to educate every single person on the planet to add dispose of their plastics properly so the industry and the manufacturers have a responsibility to design a product that if people littering if a plastic bag blows out of a garbage truck it won't have the sort of impact that we're saying. can we do without plastic. the moment. but in europe

a few minutes about it is a try at least in part. because two ton of law found it so faced with the problem of plastic pollution. pollution of its beaches and the sea so ten years ago it made some changes. with well there's bread there's vegetables a bit of everything. and in the summer months there's a lot of stuff from their gardens and things like flowers grass from their lawns that sort of thing i'm keeping whatever people happen to have a tome that's biodegradable or. for the moment these banks are one of the few alternatives to plastic. organic waste is collected every week in banks made of stopped. they don't have to be salted the banks break down not tree along with the food waste. said getting on that void to become

biodegradable bags are mixed with the organic waste so they break down completely within three or four weeks with us and perhaps all the potato and corn starch that they're made of it reacts like any other organic matter it plays on and it just like potato peelings for example that it has. the resulting compost is used by the region's fungus so two million organic banks go back to the earth each year. and a bit more plastic has not ended up strewn around or in the sea. i doubt it because we successfully sell to hawaii to get attention to the issue of plastic marine debris which was hundreds of school and college students attend marcus and his lectures all along that trip from canada to mexico. now you might think ok this animal it eats plastic it goes in the mouth of the red and that's it

no big deal the problem is other end is small so this past is past a particle was actually stayed in our stomach for a long time the plastic is plastic particles they're not benign they don't just sit there and do nothing bile and marcus raises another question the industry adds millions of tons of chemicals to plastics what kind of effects do they have. these freshwater snails are sensitive to the slightest variations in their environment they serve a sentinel's one day the federal agency for the environment asked your goldman to study the effects on this gastropod of a chemical substance whose effects are still unknown this pheno. he was surprised

but when to having. it was a complete new phenomenon for us we had and lost thousands of these new people and never find something comparable before and so we repeated the experiment once twice and even a third time you'll discover that ten percent of the females presented significant sexual differ missions and that their egg production was four times normal. this uterus with the two glands is considerably larger in superfine compared with the norm athena and this specific specimen. in addition exhibits this great rupture of the overbuilt you can imagine the power of the masses which have caused this rupture it's really like. an eruption of a volcano on. your ground where is the

a found. the answer is in our plastics this antioxidant is added to baby's bottom bottles and packaging but it also risky. i was really shocked because you have to imagine the test concentrations which can be found in every surface water and it is hard to believe i confess that at these very low environmentally relevant concentrations such harmful effects like the killing of the kenyans is induced. the scientists are really beginning to discover that the plastics in the oceans release chemical substances into the environment which have effects that are still and know. how much escapes once the products are in the water. how do these pollutants accumulate in the food chain. our marine animals affect it. and

to what extent. it. was a. that's what the crew of the world one left phone and i mean trying to find out by studying the mediterranean fin way the world's second largest whale. yellow dots are there so we get closer to the film. to know these animals are contaminated the scientists needed to study fact samples. for. your situation. the results of the

biopsies are clear just like parliament as an atlantic whale until the fin whales that contains foreign toxins which are additives to plastic. yes. put. no one yet knows what effect these products have on the species. and they call them. here we are in the middle of nowhere miles from any continent and we find substances and pollutants that have no business being here. q it if they were purchased hundreds of miles away and are being carried by the current market dog bothers me most is that we are contaminating the whole planet from the clothing the remotest and wildest place that's. shocked by his own discovery you wondered if the food wrapped in plastic that we

eat every day were contaminated by certain substances. he put some more snails in bottles of water for forty eight weeks. those near us which were kept in t. but us produced much more embryos compared to those neo's in the glass bottles there are compounds in the plastic material in these p. t. bottles that leach into a culture medium or the snails we do not know which compounds we haven't identified yet but they are clearly estrogenic. would only must realize when we want to put a material or substance on the market it undergoes laboratory testing which enables us to show that it is harmless is not getting the results are passed on to

scientific and public organizations we will decide whether or not we're allowed to commercialize it to produce these are constantly checking all of the products that we sell to the people. this man who are affected by these chemical products. and over a couple who use plastic like everyone else have agreed to have blood tests. showed us one is an epidemiologist for years she has been carrying out test some fatality in two thousand and five she started studying the effects of fire it's

another chemical additive for plastics she selected women with a high level of finance in the urine instead of the effect on their infant male children. no one had done this before. these ballots particularly the ones of most concern are called anti and versions they lower testosterone they do it actually to adults as well and but it's more important when it happens in the womb because the changes that occur in the lower than permanent for life and so because it's anti and or janick lower testosterone at the critical time will alter the path of development of the male genitalia so normally it starts in a feminine default if you will and then becomes masculinized under the influence of testosterone and that process is interfered with by certain sally it's when they

get to a certain level. fairly it's a used in food packaging and toys for example to soften the plastic. but in rodents to feminize the species. the testicles disappear in the penis becomes shorter. the distance between the testicles and the anus which is normally double in males shrinks and becomes more like that of females. to have the idea and the courage to try taking the same missions with human babies and got the same results. when levels of d h p the most consider the most toxic vallet were higher in the mother's year and then the boys were more likely to have testicles that were not completely descended into the spro and tended to have a significantly smaller pierce. so i wouldn't even as an eco

toxicologist and not a specialist for human toxicology i wouldn't expect negative impacts on does so it does i mean you're a waterfall completely bogus that's absolutely no danger but i'm not so convinced when we're talking about pregnant women very young children. because in these very sensitive phases of life cycle care should be taken to avoid any estrogen it can cause. plastic. plastics contain substances that can eventually migrate to only an infinitesimal quantities which are well below the norms. certain scientists use operating procedures that are unjustified uki the post in these arose emotions which are then regrettably picked up by the media and creates an unfounded scare among the public at large the

key for when but after all this is a democracy so everyone has the right to express themselves it. isn't a case of scaremongering scientists all of this simply asking you questions. over here the results of the test for. the chemical component of plastic by and large those two people are just like you or me it's like background noise but that background noise however means that we all have they spend all day in our bodies now as you know this is a product that didn't exist before our grandparents didn't have any chemical products created by industry and now we're all impregnated with it now we have to study of this time has been carried out in front of everyone tested in the united states had not only be early but also found in their bones.

in spite of the usual pollution. and the effect on animals in spite of the contamination of. man has not yet decided to do without plastic on the contrary production has been increasing by ten percent a year. in india plastics use is twenty times less than in europe and the united states but with a billion inhabitants it will soon be one of the planet's three biggest consumers. how can this country stop polluting its rivers and coasts with its plastics how can it go on absorbing all waste plastic indispensable ally of off everyday life. we thought it was an it substance over a century we have poured at least a hundred million tonnes of it into the oceans but now a boomerang effect is taking place.

the situation is hopeless. it is getting worse at a near exponential rate and shows no sign of decreasing no one seems to be able to envision a future without plastic and no one seems to be willing to admit that change needed to get rid of the plastic pollution problem is drastic. incremental change small changes will not make a difference. marcus and i refuse to give up so you are coming here today to bring awareness to the stock of the go the keep up the struggle to change those in mentalities and finally put an end to the plastic age.

change people's attitude. maybe we should scare them this way something says their . physical. event log. her.

culture is the same spirit i mean when i see them in real. time to write you make sure for the euro as the single currency reels from one crisis to the next europe's politicians appear to be powerless in the face of a. news

today violence is once again flared up. these are the images. from the streets of canada. this is our top stories banking on sanctions. on syria. because

energy firms are cashing in on pumping for another two months fueling the. condemned. also hundreds of thousands marched across italy and spain in protest of painful measures intended to pool some of your of out of its economic spiral. on the manhunt in libya kicks into high gear with the triumphant rebels now being accused of being too keen to target in the gadhafi loyalists and rounding up innocent foreigners in the process. coming to live from moscow this is r.t. it's one am here now with me. top story the syrian regime's accused of having more blood on its hands with government troops allegedly firing at demonstrators in the besieged city of homs that's ahead of the arab league chief's visit to.