Addicted To Plastic

director: Gad Reichman, Ian Connacher, Canada 2008, 1h 25m

A documentary focusing on the worldwide production and environmental effects of plastic. The host takes a 2-year trip around the world to give us a better understanding of the life cycle of plastic. It’s probably fair to say that we all believe buying goods (pencils, food, electronics, etc.) with less packaging is a good thing, and when we separate our trash and drop the plastic rubbish into the blue box for the morning pickup, it all gets recycled, and we can feel confident we’ve done our part for the environment.

The development of degradable plastics is a good thing, but a lot of what we use – new trash as well as old – has penetrated some very disturbing levels of the food chain and the ecosystem, and the makes the case that all is not well in our world via a simple boat trip to the North Pacific Central Gyre, aka the Eastern Garbage patch, where air pressure and rotating water currents swirl and push all kinds of floating trash to the water’s surface.