00:00
[Phillippe Decelle walking into room]
[“Life In Plastic…”title and credits]
[plastic objects]
00:47
[Phillippe Decelle speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: Plastic doesn’t cost very much so to sell an almost worthless material to a customer, its innate poverty has to be combined with extraordinary creativity. This creativity was made possible by melting technology which enabled shapes to be maintained that were formally impossible.
[Decelle presenting plastic objects]
The plastic chair no longer has anything in common with a Louis XV chair. Take this small dressing table, for example. At first glance, it’s just an ordinary cylinder, but when you pull here, e presto, you’ve got an upholstered chair and here, you have a mirror.
[plastic objects]
01:49
FEMALE NARRATOR: The fascinating thing about plastic is that it can be fashioned into any shape required, but today plastic is also the backbone of our society. We hardly notice their supporting function. Plastics are simply taken for granted. They permeate every area of our everyday lives and not only in the form of the many articles in daily use like toothbrushes, microwave ovens, telephones, furniture, packaging and functional clothing. Indeed, without plastic, our entire world of information and communication as well as modern medicine would be inconceivable. Today, how could we ever do without cd’s, heart valves or chip cards?
[inside plastic bag factory]
02:57
[Klaus Fuchs speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: Plastic is crude oil. The production of petrol gives rise to a byproduct which, with the help of the help of catalytic crackers, is used to obtain polyethylene. This comes to us in the form of a granulate. We liquefy it and blow it into plastic film which undergoes further processing. The plastics sector will expand even more. With so many single households today, smaller and smaller units are required in the food sector and this multiplicity of food stuffs couldn’t be manufactured without the possibilities of the bi?-plastic packaging.
[plastic objects]
04:02
FEMALE NARRATOR: But plastic is not only practical, colorful and soft to the touch, many plastic materials give off dangerous chemicals throughout a products entire life.
[Dr. Ninja Reineke speaking]
FEMALE NARRATOR: Blood tests carried out all over Europe by the WWF have shown that all of us carry traces of additives from plastics like softeners, for instance. Plastic is basically a brittle material and softeners are used to make plastic products more flexible, then there are flame retardants which ensure plastics don’t catch fire easily, but although softeners are introduced into plastic products, they don’t form a permanent bond with them, so they’re released during use. As we all know, after a while, plastic material becomes brittle. That’s because these substances have escaped. They’re in the air around us, in house dust. They’re part of our environment and we inhale them. Since a child’s organs are still developing, these chemical substances pose a far greater threat to youngsters than to adults.
05:37
[Thilo Maak speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: Plastic toys, in particular, often contain a large volume of softeners which make a teething ring pleasant to bite on. The problem is that these softeners have been shown to have a carcinogenic effect. When a child puts a plastic ring in it’s mouth, the softeners dissolve out and are ingested. They can then result in diseases like cancer.
[child biting on plastic teething ring]
06:02
FEMALE NARRATOR: In 2007, the European Union passed a law banning the use of softeners in toys but, for the time being, only in toys. Many softeners are known to act like hormones. That’s why they’re also called hormone mimics.
06:20
[Dr. Ninja Reineke speaking]
FEMALE NARRATOR: The hormone mimic phenomenon was first discovered in marine creatures like fish and sea snails and also in amphibians and alligators. Scientists found a direct correlation between increased concentrations of hormone mimics and abnormalities in the creature’s reproductive organs. Since then, a large number of similar studies have focused on the human body. They too have revealed that disorders such as reduced fertility are on the rise especially amongst Europeans. There’s also a correlation between the incidence of these anomalies and the intake of hormone mimics.
[refuse sorting plant]
06:40
Separated plastic household waste ends up a refuse sorting plant. In Germany, this amounts to nearly 60 kilograms per head per year. The total volume in 2006 was nearly five million tons and that’s just household and packaging waste. Professor Michael Braungart is one of Europe’s most celebrated environmental chemists. He wants to revolutionize our world. In fact, if he had his way, every existing product would have to be reinvented or redesigned, as he puts it.
07:31
[Prof. Michael Braungart speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: Conventional glass is printed on with ceramic paints that contain heavy metals as well as chlorine, so when it’s recycled, there is always a dioxin problem. We print on glass in such a way that the printing material combusts quite harmlessly. In other words, there is no emission problem and no ceramic residue. These printing paints are just as important for plastic. When plastic is printed with harmful paint, the entire recycling process is useless because heavy metals, chlorine and dioxins are introduced. When destruction is reduced a little, people think the environment is being protected. Leave your car at home they say and protect the environment. That’s like claiming to protect your child by only smacking it twice instead of five times, but less destruction still doesn’t mean protection so we have to define conservation in such a way that we really do protect the environment, that we are actively useful and beneficial to other creatures.
08:32
FEMALE NARRATOR: Even at the planning stage of a product, thought must be given to how and where it’s useful life will end. This means that each constituent must initially be non-toxic and all constituents must be easily separable.
08:46
Male Narrator: Traditionally, people think in a linear way. In a cradle to grave approach, they use materials and then take them to a dump. Because the waste has been disposed of, they think that they’re protecting the environment. Ours is a cradle to cradle approach. Our materials are returned to the various cycles. No other creature on earth creates waste. Only man. So we reinvent things so that they’re useful either biologically or technologically. Everything that wears out is designed so that it can be returned to biological cycles. Everything that breaks down that changes biologically, like foodstuffs and detergents, is redesigned to be biologically useful. Everything that is merely used is returned to technical cycles, that’s why we say cradle to cradle and not cradle to grave.
09:42
[bottled water]
FEMALE NARRATOR: Plastic waste, especially bottles, is collected separately in special systems and sorted. Some of it is turned into low quality plastic which is used to make garden furniture or street posts. PET beverage bottles are partly used to produce new bottles.
[bottle recycling]
Most of the waste, however, is compacted into large bales and shipped abroad, in particular, to China. There, the bottles are shredded, cleaned, melted down and re-exported worldwide in the form of fleece pullovers.
[landfill]
11:04
[plastic in body of water]
What used to be the impressive feature of plastic, the fact that it is not only practical, but also virtually imperishable, has suddenly become a curse. This plastic waste was washed up on the coast of San Francisco after a nighttime storm.
[plastic under water/fish swimming in that water]
11:40
[Thilo Maak speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: The weather situation in the North Pacific is such that basically there’s always an air eddy circling over the water masses and the current in the ocean is influenced by the air masses above it. This phenomenon in the North Pacific means that we have a maelstrom, which in a clockwise direction, attracts everything coming from the coast of North America and Asia. It has been discovered that plastic products coming from these two coasts spend up to 16 years in this maelstrom, then they are spat out, so to speak, and end up on the beaches of Hawaii, for example. We believe that in the summer months, this maelstrom attains an area the size of Central Europe.
[bird in body of water eating something]
[jellyfish in body of water]
12:30
We shouldn’t imagine this plastic carpet to be like a refuse dump on land with gulls circling overhead and rats scurrying around on it It’s a carpet of waste which, in part, drifts a few meters below the surface. We dived in this area and it was unbelievable. Land is hundreds of nautical miles away, yet you still see these yellow, red, blue and green splashes of color, tiny bits of plastic. We’ve taken samples with nets and compared the volume of plastic we found with the quantity of animal plankton, the microorganisms that live in the sea. We found that the water column in open water hundreds of nautical miles from the coast contain six times more plastic than animal life.
[sea life in body of water]
[dead sea life on beach]
[dead birds caught in plastic]
[boat on sea]
[bird nest? made of plastic]
14:04
One major problem is that chemicals like DDT or PCB become deposited on these plastic particles. Once they’re ingested by microorganisms, they’re in the food chain because the microorganism are devoured by the creatures that feed on them. These, in turn, fall prey to their natural foes and so on. So basically these chemicals become more and more concentrated as they pass along the food chain. The creatures at the end of it get the entire load and among them, is man himself.
14:35
[flowers in plastic]
FEMALE NARRATOR: As a rule, the raw material used to make plastic is crude oil, but with oil reserves limited, over the last few years, bioplastics, as they are known, have been produced from maize starch. These comparable products are decomposable and do not require the addition of dangerous softeners.
15:00
[Dr. Harald Kab speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: A highly interesting development is taking place in the plastic sector where scientists have also begun developing materials which are no longer manufactured in the customary way from crude oil, but from renewable primary products. These bioplastics are often biodegradable and can already be found on the market in diverse forms… [Kab picks up vegetables in bioplastic packaging] like packaging for fruits and vegetables, for example. These particular tomatoes were grown ecologically. The film looks exactly like ordinary packaging, however it is made from renewable raw materials. In this case, maize.
15:46
FEMALE NARRATOR: The advantage of biodegradable bags like this is that, unlike conventional plastic bags, they can be disposed of at home in a bio-waste bin.
16:00
[Dr. Harald Kab speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: Bioplastics function just like normal plastics and look exactly the same. This symbol, however, indicates that the product is completely biodegradable and compostable. As a rule, such products are made from renewable raw materials.
[people at bioplastics convention]
The trend is to move away from crude oil. Indeed, in the future, we will simply have to become less dependent on fossil resources and instead use renewable resources like agricultural materials. What is particularly exciting about products made from such materials, is that they have special properties which differ somewhat from those of the conventional plastics in use today. Here, for instance, we have breathable film which ensures that perishable products, like fruit and vegetables, stay fresh longer. So, even if they weren’t biodegradable, or ecologically acceptable, there would still be many reasons for using these new plastics.
[snow falling/trees covered in plastic]
17:30
FEMALE NARRATOR: Many plastic products that are part of our everyday lives are virtually imperishable and, in time, release many of their often hormonally active additives into the environment. Spread by wind and rain or illegal refuse disposal in the sea, today they can be found all over our planet, even in marine regions far from civilization.
[Dr. Ninja Reineke speaking]
FEMALE NARRATOR: The softeners contained in plastic products evaporate. Since they don’t form a firm bond with the plastic matrix, they can escape basically every time a PVC floor is washed, then the dirty water enters the sewage system. Often it contains many substances that do not break down in waste water treatment plants. They’re then transported further. To some extent, they accumulate in fish or else they’re carried by wind and rain as far as the Arctic.
[shots of the Arctic]
The WWF has worked with scientists who have studied polar bears. There’s clear evidence that animals living in the wild in the Arctic are already affected. Concentrations of environmental toxins that have already been banned and also of industrial chemicals like DDT and PCB are already present in the Arctic and they act like hormone mimics. They influence the immune system and also the reproductive organs of marine creatures right through to polar bears.
19:02
Random tests carried out among polar bears produced alarming results. Above all, the hormonally similar affect of softeners, pesticide residues and flame retardants that have accumulated in the Arctic over decades have a massive affect on the hormone balance of polar bears, especially their metabolism, immune system, growth, fertility and sexual development.
[researchers collecting data from polar bear]
19:39
[Thilo Maak speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: When hormonally potent substances in plastic are released, they can have a wide range of affects. Evidence has been found in various species of infertility and masculinization. In fact, of everything that can happen to organisms under the influence of hormones, scientists have even found male polar bears with two penises and females that are infertile. This is a huge problem that must be tackled. From a preventive point of view, the use of such hormonally potent substances should be banned.
[helicopter in Arctic]
20:16
FEMALE NARRATOR: In a complex interaction process, hormones control not only the development and function of the reproductive organs, but also of the brain and the immune system. As substances alien to the body, chemicals produced artificially by man, can effect the functioning of the body by intensifying, reducing or even totally suspending the effect of hormones.
20:45
[Prof. Michael Braungart speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: The combined weights of the ants on our planet, for example, is around four times greater than that of it’s human population, but ants are not an environmental problem because they always return their materials to various cycles. Man is the only creature that generates waste, yet we should follow three principles. One, ensure that all waste is nutrition, material that returned entirely into the nutrient cycle. Two, use only renewable energy and three, make sure that we support all other creatures, not that we ourselves are less harmful, but that we do at least sustain biodiversity. This doesn’t mean saving, doing without or avoiding. It means wasting intelligently so that other creatures also benefit. This approach can be reflected, for instance, in an office chair like this. We have chosen every constituent in such a way that it is a technical nutrient. This chair doesn’t break, nor does it wear out. It’s just used. In other words, this plastic is designed in such a way that it can be melted down again. It no longer has a long life, but a defined utility period so I know when I will get it back. Take this arm, it’s the way people want it. We have no wish to reeducate them and say they have to do without something. We have simply replaced light PVC with the plastic that can be returned to cycles indefinitely so we no longer use softeners which can destroy fertility as in the case of PVC. We define every constituent right at the outset and that enables us to achieve genuine recycling.
[design of chair displayed on computer screen]
22:26
FEMALE NARRATOR: For most designers, form and appeal take priority. The components of the materials used are rarely analyzed. Designers at Studio 7.5 in Berlin, however, have shown great commitment in creating the first fully recyclable chair for America’s second biggest manufacturer of office furniture.
[Studio 7.5 designers working on chairs]
[Claudia Plikat speaking]
The graphite colored parts are made of nylon, partly reinforce with fiber glass. This light green element is polypropalene. The two represent different chemical groups within the large plastics sector. Naturally, for recycling purposes, they must be easily separable in order to be returned to different cycles.
23:15
[Roland Zwick speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: The back can be used up to 80 times for the same purpose. That’s because we know exactly what’s in it and how the material will perform.
[Burkhard Schmitz speaking]
We achieve the technical features of this back, the need for it to be flexible in some areas and more rigid in others through this pattern of holes. It’s enabled us to resort to a much simpler type of material. So the intelligent step here lies not in the material used, but in the material not used. It lies in the geometry.
[Claudia Plikat speaking]
FEMALE NARRATOR: We can all remember the time when people got so tired of hearing about the whole ecology issue. The frequent response to the need to behave ecologically was a policy of avoidance, so to speak. If I don’t do anything, then I can’t do anything wrong. Naturally, for us, the cradle to cradle approach of Michael Braungart was a very positive approach for designers because Braungart, of course, would say, no, don’t avoid making something new. Each generation should have the chance to make its own statement. This just has to be done correctly and cleverly.
24:27
[Burkhard Schmitz speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: It’s just like every tree sheds its leaves in autumn, they fall to the ground as material and reappear in spring in the form of new leaves.
[leaves on trees/trees]
24:55
[Prof. Michael Braungart speaking]
MALE NARRATOR: Traditionally, industry tries to think as efficiently as possible. It has a product and tries to cause the least amount of damage while maximizing its profits by selling as much as possible. We try, first of all, to see where the material will end up, what will happen to it, how it could be reworked. In principle, we’re like the emperors of ancient Rome who were told to think of the end because, whenever you think of the end, something different always occurs to you with regard to the beginning and by this I mean that all things can be reinvented.
[plastic recycling plant]
[credits]