Salon’s article on Angela Sun’s frightening documentary is worth reading in its entirety, here: “We can’t strain the entire ocean”: The horrifying truth about where our plastic ends up.
Here is a brief excerpt from the interview:
What are some of the misconceptions that you came across, perhaps about plastic in general?
First and foremost, I don’t think all plastic is evil — it’s specifically targeting single-use, disposable plastic. I don’t think that people even fathom or realize how much is produced, or how much we use, because it’s so ingrained in the fabric of our lives. Literally, we wear, touch, eat out of, come in contact with plastic every day. Until you actually try to refuse single-use plastic — for instance, we have a two-week pledge, just to monitor and see how much you actually use it in your personal life, and a lot of people are astonished and appalled at how hard it is for them to do it.
Another misconception of plastic, or just this topic in general, is that a lot of people don’t know where plastic comes from. A lot of people, they just don’t question — it’s not even a thought…I also think that the first initial reaction is, let’s just go and clean this stuff up. That was my first reaction as well. But I feel like, as humans, we don’t understand how small we are, in the scope of the world, and how vastly dependent we are on the oceans of our world. If the Earth is covered by roughly 75 percent water, that’s a lot of area that we just don’t know about. So for us to say that we’re just going to go clean that up — I don’t want to say it’s presumptuous, because it isn’t, but I just think we don’t understand that we can’t clean up a mess that’s woven and collected into our whole ecosystem now. I’m not fatalistic about it, because you have to be hopeful, but I do think that we have to be realistic. The fact that we can’t strain the entire ocean without killing the wildlife in it is just fact. You just can’t. And I think we’re just skimming the surface on a lot of clean-up efforts — literally, because you don’t know what’s down in the depths of the sea. And it’s completely littered with plastic.
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