Care About the Ocean? Think Twice About Your Coffee Lid. | Short Film Showcase

Humankind is not woven the web of life; we are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together; all things connect. The diversity of life on Earth is entirely dependent on one crucial element: water. From glaciers to rivers to the oceans, over 70% of the planet is covered with water. 97% of that is saltwater. The health of our planet lies in the health of our oceans.

Our increasing population and growing dependency on disposable products is rapidly polluting the oceans. Science is revealing the devastating impacts of plastics, as there is now more plastic than plankton biomass in our oceans. In our world's oceans, we have five major gyres. These are big, large circulating bodies of water.

You're in the larger Atlantic gyre that is referred to as the Sargasso Sea. What happens with this gyre, because it's circulating, is that everything seems to coagulate in the center. Just as everybody's heard about this big plastic mat that's in the Pacific, they've actually found one that's in the Atlantic that's just as big, if not bigger. Things like plastic are particularly buoyant, so they can sit on the surface, and the winds and currents will move them around.

If we look at the bigger issues of how all this material has been accumulating in our oceans for four decades, really massive plastic gyres have been documented in every major ocean. 80% of marine debris comes from the land, by storm drains, rivers, and legal and illegal dumping. Once it enters the ocean, it is carried by currents out into the gyres, where it is held out of view.

Bermuda is unique in the fact that it's in the middle of the trash gyre, in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea is named after floating algae called Sargassum. The Sargassum collects in large mats on the surface, creating a unique and safe nursery for over 150 species, many of which are endemic to the Sargasso Sea. This community is being heavily impacted by plastic pollution.

The Sargassum community is one link in this massive chain. So if the Sargassum community is not healthy and fails, the ripples of that will actually affect seabirds, sea turtles, whales, everything we think of in the ocean. The Sargasso Sea itself is actually super important when you consider one of the big carbon sinkholes on the planet—the filter, so to speak. The reviving of the chemicals that we're burning up produces one in every fifth breath we breathe.

So, if we lose the Sargasso Sea, if it crumbles because of pollution, overfishing, or whatever, I think it'd be just absolutely tragic for the whole planet. We get a lot of ocean debris, especially during storm surges and gales, hurricanes, where it will push a lot of debris onto Bermuda's beaches. What happens to these materials is that it gets broken into smaller and smaller pieces through the action of sunlight, no degradation in the plastic.

This makes it brittle, and then you have wave and wind action, which will take this plastic and break it into pieces. Animals, such as fish, begin to chew on this plastic material, again breaking it into smaller pieces. So that sort of disappears by becoming smaller and smaller, making it less visible to us when we're actually on the ocean.

One of the most abundant types of microplastics in the ocean is nurdles. Nurdles are small pellets that are the precursors of all plastic products. Single-use and disposable plastic products make up a large portion of marine debris. One of the big issues with plastics is that it's creating a hazard for our animals, wildlife, and marine life.

We see clear evidence that birds, fish, and turtles are biting the plastic; they're eating this and mistaking it for their real food. When their stomach is full of plastic, it doesn't go through their digestive system. We've had turtles here wash up—juvenile turtles full of plastic—could have died because they've just consumed so much plastic, thinking it's jellyfish.

Plastic can break down to a certain size, and what happens is once it gets down to a smaller size, it doesn't break down any further. So all the filter feeders, all the small fish, and things like that that are filter-feeding on plankton are mistaking bits of plastic for food. Chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides run off from land and adhere to floating marine debris, increasing toxicity to marine life and ultimately to humans.

Now these particles that can be mistaken for food are not just a mechanical problem for efficacy, as they are trying to digest something they can't. But it’s also laden with some of these chemicals, and if it gets into the digestive system, the digestive juices that break down food will actually work to take some of those chemicals off those plastic particles. They'll enter the digestive system into the circulatory system of a seabird or fish.

So, it's a problem of something they can't digest and it's loaded with chemicals that are probably deleterious to it. If that animal is still alive after doing all this and something else comes along to eat that animal, now that material that's in that fish is going to move up the food chain into whatever ate that. So that's the issue of bioaccumulation.

Bioaccumulation is the process of small fish getting eaten by larger fish, resulting in toxic chemicals intensifying as they move up the food chain. The fish is then consumed by humans and poses a growing threat to our health. People often think that because something's in a plastic container or a plastic water bottle, it's actually healthier. But there’s a lot of research that says the chemicals in the plastic will actually leach into the food, will leach into the water.

If you test people's blood, you will find chemicals from plastics in their blood, and some of the chemicals are endocrine disruptors which have a significant impact on the hormone system. They can cause obesity; they can cause sex changes in fish. We don't really know how big the problem is because we're not there when that poor little turtle took its last bite of a fatal piece of plastic and died. We weren't there to see that.

So we don't really know what the magnitude of the impact is. We just know for sure that this stuff's out there and they're eating it. At this point, as humans on the planet, we're all going to take responsibility for the fact that everything we buy comes triple-wrapped, twice covered in plastic. It's going to be us that changes how these companies actually market their stuff.

If we as individuals stand up and say, "Well, I don't want to buy that because it's got two layers of plastic on it," we will set the tone. The awareness of actually reducing the waste, reducing what you use in the first place, is so important. Because it's all very well to dispose of it responsibly, but it's still a waste if it's not something that we needed.

Plastic bags, for example, are shipped in; they've already come all across the world and we use them for 10 or 15 minutes. When we talk to people, we tell them that recycling is not a solution here because everything already has a big footprint. So we focus on reducing resource use, reducing trash, reducing electricity.

The use of plastics and our dependency on plastics is probably one of the biggest injustices that we've done to ourselves and also to the planet. If you continue to do what you've always done, you always get what you've always gotten, and we're not making it any better for ourselves. So we need to make it better. We need to stop being so dependent on plastics.

The fight against single-use plastics is a global battle. Change is happening; bans against single-use plastics are occurring in major cities. Encourage your local restaurants, grocery stores, and community to use alternatives. Reusable bags, water bottles, to-go containers, silverware, and compostable packaging are simple ways to eliminate plastic from your life.

Humanity is facing an unprecedented global challenge. The removal of plastics from our oceans will be extremely difficult, and its magnitude lies hidden just below the ocean's surface. We are one human family, and the issue of pollution is affecting all of us. The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.

Every day, we have a choice. Make the choice to refuse single-use plastics.