SXSW: Plastic People

One never really realizes the environmental impact of everyday items we use in the 21st century from toothbrushes to carpets to hair used for faux locs, braids, wigs and weaves. There is plastic that has been ingested living within your body right now that could possible become an invisible invader to your health. Can anything be done to stop the invasion ultimately making us plastic people?

Plastic People investigates our addiction to plastic and the growing threat of microplastics on human health. Almost every bit of plastic ever made breaks down into “microplastics.” These microscopic particles drift in the air, float in all bodies of water, and mix into the soil, becoming a permanent part of the environment. Now, leading scientists are finding these particles in our bodies: organs, blood, brain tissue, and even the placentas of new mothers.

Acclaimed author and science journalist Ziya Tong takes a personal approach by visiting leading scientists around the world and undergoing experiments in her home, on her food, and her body while collaborating with award-winning director Ben Addelman in an urgent call to action for all of us to rethink our relationship with plastic.

Part of Tong’s journey was to assist in tying the human body to the global body traveling the world to expose the threat of waste colonialism hitting the front lines of the plastic pollution crisis witnessing firsthand how plastic breaks down in the natural environment, how it spreads on farm fields, enters water systems, and drifts across currents in the air, as we breathe, eat and drink it into our bodies, again and again.

Tong made me take a nice hard look around my house, to investigate how much of my house and life was engulfed in plastic. I didn’t have to look any further than my own body with plastic replacing some original body parts. Frightening doesn’t even begin to describe how the human race is allowing our planet to become a wasteland in more than one sense of the word.

Here are just a few facts regarding our use of plastic.

Over 1.5 billion plastic bottles are bought worldwide every day. Two million plastic bags are used every minute on Earth.
More than 400 million tons of plastics are created every year. Ten to twenty million metric tons of plastic leave the land and enter the ocean each year and most plastic is not recyclable. Less than 10% of plastic worldwide ever gets recycled with most of it either ending up in landfill or out in the environment.

Plastic People is a not so subtle reminder that humans are more in control of the planet an environment than we would like to think. Here’s hoping the human race gets a little more serious concerning how we inhabit our plane and environment or we may not have one to either sooner than later.