“A world of environmentalists agree.”
This is about the last line of Addicted To Plastic. After saying that a “world of environmentalists agree”, we get a series of clips to close out the film where a world of environmentalists don’t agree. Well. They don’t agree that they are environmentalists. Some say they aren’t, some say they are, some say well…I guess…but they all agree about plastic. That all of us, people around the world, are addicted to the stuff and that we really need to do something about it.
Most of Addicted To Plastic is fairly conventional when it comes to activist documentaries – like in the little animations that explain things like “bioaccumulation” and other complicated terms. I expected to see the things I saw in the film. Landfills full of plastic bottles and plastic bags. Seabirds dying from having eaten plastic. The LEGO factory in Denmark. OK, I didn’t exactly expect to see the LEGO factory. But the environmental impact of thrown away plastic is well known. And although seeing the dissection of a sea bird was poignant, and the sheer volume of plastic garbage in the ocean is staggering, I was hoping for something more, something I hadn’t seen before.
And that’s what makes this documentary excellent. I did get something more. And that is – in a rather unusual twist for an activist doc such as this one – hope. Signs that we are not, after all, moving down some irreconcileable path toward destruction. That people are doing something. And a good half of the movie looked at the people who were recycling plastic and making use of the crap in our landfills. Toronto film maker Ian Connacher travels around the world, visiting an extensive program in Kenya that makes use of plastic waste, even without a recycling program. He goes to India, where in some cases they are buying OUR plastic garbage.
At a university in Germany, we meet scientists who have managed to turn waste plastic back into the oil from which it came, harnessing its energy. We see bioplastics made in Australia that dissolve in water instead of lasting forever. A California company that makes fleece jackets out of waste plastic. A firm called WastAway in Tennessee where an executive talks about how, in the future, people will be mining landfills to get to our old plastic! This is a theme that came up a couple of times through the film – the idea that these massive deposits of plastics will somehow become a worthwhile resource in the future.
The idea is echoed by people who use waste plastic to make car bumpers, flower trays, railroad ties, and carpets. The guy at the carpet factory suggests that landfills will be the oil wells of the future. Now that’s hopeful! It may be a little (or a lot) hyperbole, but it’s nice to hear anyway. And that’s what makes this movie good. The balance between “this is what we’re doing wrong” and “this is what we’re doing right”. Now, there are a few stylistic touches I didn’t like – too many long, slow montages that I really wanted to skip, for example. But the message and the information contained in Addicted To Plastic are the reason the movie was made, and for those reasons it’s more than worthwhile.