Documentary Review: A Plastic Ocean (Extra Credit)

Welcome to another week! This week I watched a documentary called A Plastic Ocean directed by Craig Leeson on Netflix. Today I'll relay some thoughts I had about the film.

My eyes were yet again opened to the dangers of plastic on the environment. The most shocking images were always the animals who were entangled in plastic or were bleeding and dying due to the plastic around their necks, mouths, or even inside their bodies. What I thought was a very clever part of the film was how every now and then they would transition from one scene to the other by including facts of what was happening in real time. For instance, around the beginning of the movie, there is a cutaway screen that has one single sentence, but it is a very powerful statistic.

I was already an advocate for recycling and trying to use less plastic, but I didn't realize just how bad it was until they showed all the scenes of landfills and areas where people lived with piles of plastic surrounding them. It was also alarming when they were cutting open the stomachs of the birds and finding just how full of plastic pieces they were. I was on the verge of tears from how much pain they must've been in when they died, not to mention all the countless other animals who must've suffered and died where scientists didn't find their bodies.

Over the quarter, I have learned so much more about animals through documentaries, reading articles, and tweets from my fellow classmates. I have seen many tactics on how to grab and hold an audience's attention, and this film does a great job of this as well. They jump from topic to topic and show personal stories as well as the effects plastic has on individuals and animals. I really love that they don't censor anything since this kind of topic needs to be as open as possible. I couldn't stomach some parts very well, but it just goes to show that this is a very big concern that we have to take care of sooner rather than later.

I think one of the biggest things I learned in the documentary is something called "social plastic". This was started by the Plastic Bank which is an organization founded to help encourage recycling all over the world. Through social plastic they are able to give people money to buy food, water, and whatever else they need, or they will provide other eco-friendly items such as a sustainable oven or a solar-powered outlet for charging electronics. This helps not only the environment get cleaned and taken care of, but the people living there have a job, or a way to generate income and improve their way of living. This is global as well, and as one of the founders, Shaun Frankson, puts it, "[i]t's like a fair-trade plastic where it's ethically sourced and its above-market rate income that they earn. The people in need can go and collect the plastic and create a microeconomy around recycling. This is something we can scale anywhere in the world."

A possible solution that I think would help a lot is getting awareness for this issue that will affect everyone regardless of race, sex, age, or location. In the United States, at least, should try and follow the example set by Germany and hold the companies responsible for recycling their products. I had never known they had a machine that you can turn a bottle into for money, and I really loved it and hope we can have something similar in the US. It's time to stand up and do everything in our power to protect the little earth and animals we have left.

I have some more names to add to my list of researchers which is good, and I may lean toward a different take on my topic since I think it would fit much better. Overall, I really enjoyed this film, and I hope to educate and help more people learn about the dangers of plastic and how their actions do truly mean something in the grand scheme of things.

Until the next movie!

Signing off for now...

Emi out :D