AliciaLin10

= **Addicted to Plastic** =


 * Title, director and release year?**
 * Title:** Addicted to Plastic
 * Director:** Ian Connacher
 * Release Year:** 2007

Nowadays, almost everything is made out of plastics, and everything is disposable. Plastic is ubiquitous. From our oceans to our water bottles, plastic is essentially everywhere. In some remote places in our oceans, there is more plastic than organisms. Ever since World War 2, there has been an increase demand for plastics worldwide. Most Jellyfish, which are a good indicator of animal ingestion of plastics in the ocean because they travel to the surface to feed, contain plastics. By nature, plastics collect oily pollutants such as pesticides and herbicides. 10% of plastics in the oceans are nurdles, and they can be mistaken for fish eggs. So fish eat these nurdles, and other fish eat these fish, and this causes bio accumulation of the plastic. Plastics also end up on our beaches. 90% of the a particular species of birds dissected by this scientist have plastics in them.
 * What is the central argument or narrative of the film?**

Majority of plastics recycled are number 1 and 2 plastics, the rest go to landfills. Since, plastic recycling facilities can never predicts the products they are going to recycle, many of the plastics they get do not get recycled, since many products aren’t made of just one material or plastic. Denmark has a good program because coke plastic bottles can be reused as much as 20 times; however, only certain bottles are recycled, but the ones that aren’t sometimes are ground up and made into flower pots. In general, recycling isn’t really recycling, it’s downcycling because new plastic items are not purely made from the old plastic items.

Kenya is one of the few countries to either restrict or ban plastic bags. The kenyans call plastic bags the nation’s flower. Villagers core out the flip flops to be made into bowls, jewelry, and various items. There are no recycling facility in kenya, so the villagers use their creative to recycling the plastics.

A lot of the plastics in the US are shipped to china and india. Also, plastics are a huge industry, so they find ways to get around government regulations or bans on plastic bags.

Plastics is an inherently unsustainable material because it can never be truly recycled, so having plastics become so popular and ubiquitous is a problem. Additionally, plastics are made with a wealth of toxic chemicals which can disrupt gene expression and cause various health problems, and steps to get rid of plastics is often undermined by the plastic industry.
 * What sustainability problems does the film draw out?**

Probably the amount of plastics found in animals was the most shocking, because not only do we eat those animals and thus ingest plastic, but the prevalence of the problem is disturbing. Additionally, the idea that plastics change the expression of genes in the system is scary. Almost every person has traces of Bisphenol A in their bodies, especially children. Bisphenol A leads to cancer, and was used originally to make a synthetic estrogen before it was used to make plastics.
 * What parts of the film did you find most persuasive and compelling? Why?**

The cartoon that explains how plastics are made is very amateurish. This cartoon may be good for those who don’t know a thing or two about plastics, or perhaps for kids in elementary school, but i believe this portion of the film could have been done much better because conveying it in a cartoon kind of ruins the seriousness of the problem.
 * What parts of the film were you not compelled or convinced by?**

Additionally, the director dismisses legos as an issue even though it is made out of plastics because he said it wasn’t the disposable. Legos are made out of plastic, and plastic is the problem, so dismissing it I felt like was annoying. Additionally, if he didn’t want to talk about non-disposable plastics, then perhaps he shouldn’t have included the clips of Lego land.

This film compels me to seek out how other countries without recycling programs find innovative ways to reuse non-biodegradable materials. For instance, how in China, some company decided to turn used condoms into hairbands. Also, I found it interesting that in Denmark, a plastic coke bottle could be reused as much as 20 times. I feel like I would like to know how we can make that possible in the U.S. and why we don’t do that here.
 * 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.?**

I believe this film best addresses an audience that is unaware of the prevalence and impact of plastics worldwide. I think this film allows users to think of innovative ways to truly recycle plastics and the policies that need to change, that companies can’t undermine, to change the system. I think the film is likely to change the way viewers think and act about plastic because they’re more aware of the negative impacts of plastics.
 * 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?**

The film advocates to use alternative to plastics, such as cooking in glassware, using bioplastics, or making plastics of chicken feathers. A company called Waste Away diverts 90% of a communities waste into “fluff”Also, it suggests that more research should be done to figure out how to biodegrade plastics. For instance, paralisis can turn plastics back into petrochemicals, and learning how certain bacterias can eat plastics and how to harvest the plastics from the bacteria.
 * What kinds of action or points of intervention are suggested by the film?**

I believe if the film actually covered the positive and negative aspects of bioplastics, the film could have been more informative in terms of the options it presented to standard plastics. Also, the film should have touched on plastic packaging buffers, because it takes up approximately 30% in volume of our landfill space and does not biodegrade.
 * What could have been added to this film to enhance its environmental educational value?**