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You can take my planet, but you won’t get my sperm!

Published 02nd October 2009 - 9 comments - 1544 views -

Did you know that drinking from plastic bottles may decrease your fertility because it could contain estrogen-alike substances (Bisphenol A)?

Did you know that there is a huge soup of plastic garbage swimming between Japan and Hawaii?

Did you know that every human today has potentially dangerous plastics in his blood?

To be honest. I didn't.

Until I saw "Plastic Planet". It's the newest example of a young but proud tradition of great Austrian documentary movies (e.g. google for "Darwins Nightmare", "Our Daily Bread", "Workingman's Death", "We Feed The World", "Let's Make Money") and it covers our Plastic Age and it's implications for our planet – and the humans living on it.

Sitting in the cinema and „enjoying“ this quite well made movie, a few questions and ideas came into my mind.

First of all, I had a weird idea about getting all this plastic out of the Pacific Ocean. There is a huge fleet of unused ships waiting just outside of Singapore because of the current economic crisis. It may sound stupid, but sometimes such ideas do work: Why can't we use this fleet to gather at least some of this garbage?

Second. Have there been any studies which examined a possible connection between this soup and what we know as the phenomenom called „overfishing“? 10 percent of our plasitc production (which is steadily growing and at the moment around 250 million tons per year) sooner or later end up swimming in our seas and oceans. Animals die from it.

Third. When I flounced on my seat listening to the effects of plastic to the human body, I was immediately very relieved to have bought a drink in a glas bottle before the show. That reminded me that most humans would most likely not act against a problem for idealistic, abstract or sane reasons.

But they act, if you make clear the consequences to their very own life. Few people would stop buying plastic bottles because they are bad for our environment and cause a lot of climate changing-emissions. We know that for a long time – sadly almost nobody cares. But many more people would stop, if they fear a loss of their fertility.

For the topic of climate change this means we have to make clear what the effects for every single person would be, if we do not act sufficiently. Not by falling into hysteria and spreading fear, but by providing relevant and sound information. Don't talk about the polar bears (too much).

That also means to show the advantages (or that there are only few disadvantages) of green technology for every single one of us. There a lot of positive things to say about those topics but I very often get the impression that we too much talk about sacrificing something, not keeping the proportionality.

It lies in the concept of "change" that things get different. But as the human history shows: Most often they get better. Maybe climate change will require many things to be different.

But is drinking from glas bottles really that much of a sacrifice compared to losing the ability of reproduction? wink

Cross-posted on my blog: ZurPolitik.com

Category: Health Effects, | Tags: oceans, fertility, plastic, movie,



Comments

Waldo Vanderhaeghen on 03rd October 2009:

cool post man! I agree that plastic is a real big problem. Any news already on possible climate (and sperm) friendly alternatives? How far does technology stand to replace the plastic around my vegetables, cheese, juice,...?

Hemant Anant Jain on 03rd October 2009:

Hello Tom,
Great post. I was in touch with Werner Boote, who directed Plastic Planet, through twitter. The amount of effort he has spent on raising awareness about plastic is commendable. And its such an important documentary film.
The trouble with plastic is, it’s an industry propagated myth that there are no alternatives. In most cases there are.
@waldo vegetables, cheese etc can easily be packed by using traditional packing materials, which have now been systematically ignored over years.
In my post about greenwashing, I have a section dealing with plastic. I wrote an open letter to the environment minister of India, who does not want to ban plastic bags. You will find some shocking information there. For example - NURDLES…
Do you know that plastic ultimately breaks down into nurdles…
but more about that here in the my post:
http://climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu/think2/post/anyone_for_a_revolution

have you heard of the latest expedition to the Pacific Garbage patch? Where they have taken a ship there and trying to analyse the fish etc for the damage the plastic may have caused them.

Tom Schaffer on 03rd October 2009:

Thanks for the praise!

@Waldo
I think a lot of plastic could be avoided by using traditional materials - as Hemant already said. I am very often furious on how wastefully and unnecessaryly plastic is used (e.g. instead of paper or carton). It is a shame that it is almost impossible to buy most of the daily goods (food, drinks) without plastic packages. Once again markets fail to provide an important choice.

Actually the point where I was a bit disappointed by the movie was that he didn’t show too many alternatives. Except one: There is also plastic that is made of starch (“bioplastic”). Its’ stake of world plastic production is still very small and it has the same ethic problem as biofuels (food (sugar, potatoes, corn,...) is used to make it), but it has the advantage that it moulders much faster as currently used plastic.

My girlfriend told me that there is also an alternative made out of gras, which is vastly available on our planet. Maybe someone who is technically more versed than me could tell us more about it?

I think it would be easily possible to dramatically reduce the amount of plastic we use, but to completely get rid of it, we would of course need a lot of further research.

Pezi K. on 04th October 2009:

great headline ^^

the alternative is made out of grass juice - they’ve discussed it for years in austria as this article confirms (it’s from 2002, there is a picture for people who don’t speak german wink ):

http://www.google.at/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=5&url=http://www.laendlicher-raum.at/filemanager/download/33541/&ei=OV3ISo6VONig_ga3meX0BA&usg=AFQjCNEmTbi-G9aa2YxQn6YCYn3PG8B07g

Tom Schaffer on 04th October 2009:

thanks for the link pezi. To make a fast conclusion for the non-german-speakers: The text states that we could use grass in different ways, that there is more than enough of it around, and that it also grows rapidly.

Pavel on 04th October 2009:

Scary, hah! Good job of the film makers, finding the shortcut to - at least every man’s - attention smile And good job, Tom, for sharing it, and commenting it in a smart and witty way. Glass bottles are not even an option in many places, east of Austria - this is because plastic is so much cheaper for Coca Cola and the likes. But where regulations are strong, they are made to comply.

Tom Schaffer on 05th October 2009:

It’s not only concerning men. There were experimates with female snails exposed to a lot of plastic. Those snails grew a penis.

Now that I mentioned that, I really should have used that too wink

Paul Montariol on 08th November 2009:

It is always difficult to fight against a complicated problem.

Ewans on 18th March 2010:

This is just another reason why I like your website. I like your style of writing you tell your stories without out sending us to 5 other sites to complete the story.
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