SullivanPatrick13


 * Sullivan Patrick Portfolio**

Addicted to Plastic, Ian Connacher, 2008
 * 1. Title, director and release year?**

Our society loves using disposable plastic products, which pollute our environment and get into our food sources. Plastics do not decompose so all the products we have produced and thrown away are still around.
 * 2. What is the central argument or narrative of the film?**

Advertising telling consumers to buy products that are harmful to the environment, and are meant to be thrown away after single or little use. Recycling is not efficient due to the way products are produced. Difficulty in proving links between pollution and health problems.
 * 3. What sustainability problems does the film draw out?**

I found it very convincing when they got a sample of ocean water and found 10 times more plastic then plankton. This helped their argument that fish eat these plastics in the ocean which end up getting eaten by us. This example helped show exactly how plastics are harming humans through bioaccumulation. The scenes showing the history of plastic were also good in showing all the factors that caused plastics to be used so much today. The examples throughout the movie of people recycling plastic in efficient ways and finding alternatives to plastics made the movie much easier to listen to the problems we are facing by knowing that there are possible solutions already. One of these was the railroad ties where the best source of raw materials for their product was recycled plastic. The statement that all railroad ties in the world are the same size also showed how by having simply made products, they can be produced in large quantities more efficiently. I also liked the statement that downcycling does not prevent new products from being produced. The examples of how much other countries recycle compared to the United States shows us that it is possible to recycle more than we do now. I also found it very interesting about how poor people waste much less than wealthy people do because our society is based so much or money.
 * 4. What parts of the film did you find most persuasive and compelling? Why?**

I was confused by the scenes of greenpeace cleaning up the plastic in the ocean. I was not sure whether they were doing this to clean up the ocean, or to get samples of ocean water, or just for the filming of this movie. I would think and have heard from other sources that the oil burned by boats used to clean up the oceans would be doing more harm than cleaning up the ocean is helping. The scene from lego land was supposed to be humorous I suppose but it didn’t help in the argument of the story at all. At the end of the scene he even said that the Lego factory was not a major polluter of plastic and that its products were made of recycled plastic.
 * 5. What parts of the film were you not compelled or convinced by?**

This film introduces a lot of current ways in which people are efficiently recycling plastic and creating more sustainable plastics. I would like to look further into these methods and see where else they could possibly be used. I would like to see whether the new plastics are non-toxic like they are said to be. I would also like to look more deeply into the change from re-usable glass containers (such as for milk) to throw away plastic containers. There was some brief history on this but I would like to know more on the specific factors that caused this shift to occur.
 * 6. What additional information does this film compel you to seek out? Where do you want to dig deeper and what connections do you want to make with other issues, factors, problems, etc.?**

This film is good for everyone. Pretty much everyone uses plastic products in their lives and this film gives a convincing, easy to understand story of why plastics are harmful and how they can be changed.
 * 7. What audiences does the film best address? What kind of imagination is fostered in viewers? Do you think the film is likely to change the way viewers think about and act on environmental problems?**

This film suggests that we stop using plastic containers and throwing them away. We need to start using re-usable containers and containers made from materials that are more easily recycled such as glass. We need to find alternative materials to plastics that will decompose. We need to product products in a way that makes them easily recyclable, like using one material for every piece of the product so that it does not need to be disassembled in order to be recycled. We need to find more uses for plastics and other products that we have thrown away in landfills. If we can find uses for this trash then we can clean up the pollution we have already created.
 * 8. What kinds of action or points of intervention are suggested by the film?**

This film went into depth on how plastics in the ocean affect fish but they did not talk much on how plastics in soils can affect plant life. One of the alternative plastics shown in this film was bio plastics, but the movie did not say how much oil was burned in order to produce the crops that would then need to be processed into the plastics. It did not look at the whole embodied energy of these bio plastics.
 * 9. What could have been added to this film to enhance its environmental educational value?**