If you were expecting a fun story about occasional Lego finds, and instead got a horrifying story about waste plastic... so was I. Tracey's photography project and book are some of the best ecological messaging I've seen in a long time! There are links in the description.
Watched a film several years ago, but I can't remember what it was called. It opened with shots of a beach completely covered in trash while the narrator said, "This is Away. When you throw something away, this is where it goes." That's always stuck with me.
So here's a question: When you pick up a bag of plastic trash from the beach how do you then dispose of it with a guarantee so it doesn't end up "away" again?
@@dgris7944 you can’t, and therein lies the problem. As long as we keep producing plastic en masse the issue will only get worse. Plastic has its uses, particularly in medicine, but there are also so many places where it could be replaced by metal (infinitely recyclable) or biodegradable materials (paper, ceramics, etc.)
@@breck1637 Paper is not really a good option due to it being weak, plus because paper is not infinitely recyclable nor gotten in environmentally friendly ways (deforestation) there are better options. For example, silk, a strong, durable material that is biodegradable, safe and able to be made by genetically modified bacteria. It's a good way to replace plastic.
@@Ze_eT There still must be many cases where you could use paper *without a plastic coating* instead of plastic, and it would be better for the environment, doesn't it? I mean, there are stores for products without packaging that you just have to carry home once and can then put in a glass container you already have, for example. Those products you should be able to take home without any plastic involved.
It's sort of become an informal series where Tom goes to film some place and returns to us with unmet expectations and an implied, existential warning.
The best videos are the ones that go "here's the pat story you can read all over the internet I meant to retell, and here's why that story isn't the real truth."
Well walking on a clean beach isn't that comfortable either... the sand gets in your shoes and it's a hundred tiny legos following you everywhere for the next week
"it's sad" those were the two words my friends said when they saw just how much plastic i had picked up from one of the beaches in long beach california after we had just spend 5 hours there. The fact that anyone can find more pieces of plastic than shells is honestly heartbreaking, and now matter how hard we try there will always be more of it under the sand and in the water. I hope that more and more people realize and understand that everything they do leaves and impact, whether it be good or bad and that we can clean these beaches up for our future generations.
its fine ,plastic is from oil and oil is from ther sea and sandy places anyway so its just going bsvk to where it camer from innit bruv and its somewhere for fishes to live
This hits harder because Tom isn’t the type to use a grim reality to make himself popular. This really touched him enough to make it a story worth telling
Imagine every enviromental activist that blocks the streets were like that... Oh wait they are, but they are getting ignored. Send from my Lenovo plastic device.
Yup, the plastics in our oceans are very much still a problem. It doesn't just solve itself. Reminds me of the Laysan albatross. Their range is across the North Pacific, but over 99 percent of them can be found on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, most notably the famous Midway Atoll. They've had to face lead-poisoning (from paint chips from the structures; this has thankfully been stopped and cleaned up after a decade-long effort) and plastics. Five tons of plastic are brought by the birds each year to feed their young...and you can just see all the plastic they ate poking out when they're dead
That's so horrifying. Plastic is such a huge issue and it goes ignored by so many as its been inserted into our lives and we're just used to it, not realizing things like this.
So sad especially because when we throw things out in the garbage we expect them to go to a dump and be compressed and squished into a tiny square somehow they're still ending up in the ocean how is this possible? I'm aware of the garbage just doesn't go away but it's like people are literally dumping it into the ocean on purpose
@@3333927 Plastic is carbon, hydrogen, and usually oxygen, three elements which can form extremely poisonous or toxic compounds, like CO, (carbon mono oxide), or acids like carboxylic acids or carbonic acid, which can harm living things, and so much more. Bacteria aren't magically going to avoid this, and I guarantee you if bacteria can ever digest plastic then it would atleast have some kind of toxic compound in the products of the digestion, and at the most simple it would be CO gas which is an extremely toxic gas due to missing one oxygen atom it was supposed to have (CO2).
It's insane to think plastic has only been around for around 100 years yet you can find it everywhere, not to mention microplastics inside marine life.
Evolution has seen this before. Once there was no oxygen. Then 98% died. What we see now is the remnants of those times fully developed across the planet. Now we will see it again with micro and Nano-plastics. The things that can evolve to handle the presence of plastic everywhere will succeed and live off of that resource until its all used up. We will be dead along with every plant and animal we rely on. Then who knows what will come next. Oh. I see in the replies that people think I expect it to be ok. Forgive me but I expect a 98% die off of all species, just like when oxygen happened. I expect that it's unreasonable and impossible for us to stop the process we started when we created and mass produced plastic from oil. We will die for this. And everything we know except a few bacteria and simple organisms will die with us. Plastic is actually in your blood. It's in fish blood. It's in jellyfish bulbs. It's in coral reef cellular walls. Nano plastic exists. And I bet everyone who reads this in 2021 will die of something not related to micro-plastic and Nano-plastic particles. The tipping point for the global death is about 150 years away. It's unstoppable but it will probably not be what kills me.
As someone who lives in Cornwall, and someone who has grown up around this their whole life. This is not news to anyone from the area, this is something that has been on the forefront of Cornish politics for a long time and is subduing that most of not all primary/secondary schools cover. I really appreciate that Tom saw it from the perspective as someone who had previously overlooked this and the realisation that it is a real poignant topic in the SW. Thank you Tom for bringing this topic and your perspective to the masses!
It is perhaps a good thing that a large proportion of the worlds plastic pollution stays close to shore so we cannot ignore it. Ref: 'Why 99% of ocean plastic pollution is "missing"'
@@Darkness251 But as mentioned in the video, that's all well and good (and should be done), but it all just gets replaced very quickly. It can be really disheartening seeing a beach look as bad as before you cleaned it just a short time later.
I really commend this women for not going on camera. Also for Tom for not pressuring her to do so. I’ve generally not liked being on camera, but with the SMS boom, I’ve forced myself to learn to be more comfortable with it. It’s just nice to see others who are similar, and more so that someone is accommodating.
a few of my friends make fun of me for not signing the release at my university and work. one said "its just somthing you do" which is kind of revealing. it shouldnt be somthing you "do" it should be somthing you consider
@@benjamind.collette6468 SMS stands for Short Message Service and is commonly known as texting. It's a way to send text-only messages of up to 160 characters between phones. Play video. More or less synonymous with Smartphones
That pebble is astounding. If I understand correctly, it's not a plastic pebble in the sense of a plastic ornament; it's a pebble formed by natural processes out of plastic. That's how present plastic has become.
Wow I assumed it was a pebble made from plastic, like it was made to look like a pebble. So this could have originally been something else and has eroded to look like a pebble over the years you’re saying? That’s crazy!
The pebble was rather more literal, which it was a term used to imply how pebble sized mineral are supposed to be The plastic is reformed under pressure and created a higher density structure , thus they also known as plastiglomerate which is taken from the appearance depicting conglomerate grains with their rather large size and faiy rounded and spherical shape
I'm glad this is a story Tom decided to tell. As somebody who walks "isolated" beaches since I was a child, people don't seem to realise how almost impossible it was to get away from human waste. When you go to a beach and it seems clean, that's quite often because somebody has been paid to get rid of the rubbish.
I remember as a child, so late 1970’s, we were vacationing in the mountains and stopped to see a glacier. My father excitedly explained to me what a glacier was, how old it was, why this was amazing. When we got there, all I saw was dirty snow and cigarette butts. It saddened me.
@@insert_username_here actually earth doesn't give a f about us, the ecosystem is what we are hurting and why don't we deserve the 'luck' that we had, there is no universal law that says that everything should be preserved, actually it's the other way, everything changes, not in a nice or clean way, just change; the reason we should stop the plastic waste and save the ecosystem is for us, is to save ourselves and to preserve places for us to use(visit, relax, observe, tourism etc.); don't get this wrong, i'm not saying we shouldn't save the ecosystem, but don't get the reason and our drive to do it wrong, it's not for anything else, it's for us
@@FailedAragorn I love the Lego movie. It's existence that is pain; Not A Lego World- Simply all worlds. Which, sadly, includes The Lego World and MCU and everything we know and love probably... Oops. xD
I'm starting to notice just how much plastic I end up using just from groceries. Everything is in a plastic container or plastic bag. It's crazy how plastic has just taken over everything.
The problem is that the industries don't really want to swap packaging. And they can't because we don't really have an alternative tbh. But some things are really far too extreme, Idk if you know it but where I live there's this candy called "Maoam" and it's literally a paper packaging filled with plastic packaging. There's like 8 small soft candies in there all packaged individually in plastic. Not to mention stuff like "Kinder Schoko-Bons" which is literally a plastic bag filled with chocolate packaged in more plastic. It is really insane.
I went to Japan and it was crazy how every little thing you bought they wanted to wrap separately in plastic bags and how much of it was used in the packaging itself. Had to always ask them not to do that. In the two weeks I was there I probably got more plastic for free than what you rack up in a year in scandinavia.
We've recognized the problem, so now lets do something about it. What I find troubling in our wasteful society is that many people take notice of the problems, but aren't AWARE enough to actual be apart of a positive CHANGE. There are easy ways to be more efficient. It may seem futile to just do something small and individual, but it adds up if you tell your friends and family and they are all AWARE and know what to do to CHANGE.
The ironic thing is, a lot of people usually dump their rubbish in areas where there already is rubbish. It's subconscious "my impact will be minimal" thing. Of course, it doesn't matter where you drop your rubbish, the impact is always the same, but if I remember this correctly, most people fall for this fallacy.
Our local beach had volunteers come and pick up the trash but it's never enough... Never leave trash behind you, on a nature trip, never. Pick up and carry away everything you carried with you to the location.
My scout troop (4 kids 2 adults) was doing a beach clean up, and in less than 45 minutes we filled 4 huge plastic trashbags. When we got back to the beach access point, we still needed to carry the trash about 50 meters back to the picnic area by the parking lot to the dumpster they had there. They had 2 huge drums as trash barrels at the access point on the beach, they were both full to overflowing and people had started leaving their waste all around the base of them. When the wind gusted it grabbed more of it, and flung it into the ocean. We'd gone past at least 10 other barrels away from the access point that were empty or nearly so. So that was all because people were too lazy to carry their trash with them another 50 meters-- on the way to their cars even! even when they saw the bin was full....
@@FiksIIanzO Tragedy of the Commons. When everyone thinks their impact is minimal in respect to the entirety of the issue, and you multiply that by the thousands/millions/billions of people thinking the same thing (depending on the issue), it becomes massive. That's why we have a movement trying to convince people otherwise, to believe that their individual impact is much larger than it really is, hoping enough people change that it will actually make a difference.
Here in France, we have a beach where Garfield phones keep washing up. (Yes, plastic phones with the face of the comic cat Garfield) Quite horrifying also
When I was in Belize I was horrified by the amount of plastic that can be found on the beaches. If you’re near a resort they keep it clean and tidy so you’d never notice, but if you go anywhere else it seemed like the beach was practically 50% composed of plastic. The sight of all the plastic haunts me to this day. Literally can’t throw something away without thinking about it.
The crazy thing is that even those "clean" beaches are full of plastic. It just is the pebbles the lady picket up, the ones that looked like tiny stones instead of the bright coloured plastic and all the plastic buried down into the sand and beetween the rocks that you can not see on the surface.
If everyone was haunted in such a way we might actually be able to get something done about it, then eventually we might be haunted less. I watched Seaspiracy with a my flatmates a few weeks ago and literally the next day one of them had salmon for dinner, just boggles my mind that some people can be quite that detached from these serious issues!
@@emmao6578 It's strange to think of isn't it. I wonder where that comes from, is it just IQ maybe? Can't possibly be, I know a lot of smart people who still do things like these. Is it upbringing? Some people can turn out to be like that even when their parents are eco friendly. It really does boggle one's mind.
@@1_Trident edgy?? Like one of the least edgy jokes I've ever heard tf you on about. And you think making a joke about legos washing up on the beach actually has a negative affect on anything? Like chill yikes
The sheer variety is what got to me. Little lego pieces, indiscernible chunks, tiny beads, every single little thing you think of once before discarding is there. Practically forever. This video breaks my heart.
1500 years is not "forever"... Even 10 000 years is a tiny moment compared to millions of years when continents shift or billions of years of Earth history. As George Carlin said - "The planet will be fine"... All the species killed by the plastic will be replaced by another species, long after last remains of so called "human civilization" will turn to dust. And the only trace of "humanity" will be a tiny geological stratum with raised radiation levels or slightly altered chemical composition due to deposits of trash.
@@Edi_J but nobody cares for the eons we wont be around to witness. The heat death of the universe makes your every action meaningless unless you accept a more reasonable scale of measurement.
@@JhoTerra yes, but few thousand of years are much much (million times) closer to "human perspective" than tens of billions needed for cosmological changes. So talking about "dying planet" or "killing the nature" is just centering everything about homo supposedly-sapiens and simply misleading. The nature is and will be fine, even if for 10k years stones on the beach will be lighter than usual...
It might not've been the story you wanted to tell. But it's the story that needs to be told more often, because - as you stated correctly - we're still somewhere between blind and oblivious to the problem.
@@Bryophytan not only that, but so many documentaries only focus on how we're all doomed, rather than talking about the actions we need fi take and what a sustainable world would look like. People get so terrified about how we're screwing up the environment that it seems like an impossible task to fix, and so do nothing. There's a really good documentary called 2040, I believe, about how the world could change to be more sustainable by 2040 and how all is not yet lost
There was this german youtube series where seven people go and spend a week isolated on some patch of nature with a limited set of survival items, and the second season featured San José, an island in Panama. Half of that show became about how it's kinda silly to have a survival production where so many plastic things washed up onto the island take care of many needs in terms of items. But many were also disappointed to see just how much plastic garbage was just there in general.
My upper school was still having students make "don't spray away the ozone layer" campaign posters as part of the environmental part of the curriculum. CFCs have been illegal for years now. We won't have this taught in schools until its solved.
This doesn't need to be taught in schools, it needs to be shown to adults. Kids don't have purchasing power, and kids don't get companies' attention when they say, "this has to change." Sometimes, yes, but it's adults who need to face this.
@@KiKiStarling I agree that we should change the point of view of adults (some of them won't care unfortunately), but remember that kids will become adults one day too, and it's better if they are aware from very beggining, so that it's natural for them to care about environment.
These beaches are combed daily by people like this lady, who remove all the worst stuff, and keep an eye out for wildlife in danger. Imagine how much worse it could be without those( often voluntary) people and then place it in a country with less waste processing and recycling. The problem is so much worse than it looks here.
@@lucie4185 Should be more of a hobby. More people should do it. Get to go for a little walk on the beach and collect a bunvh of weird stuff. There are companies like 4 Ocean that take away a pound of plastic or something and them you can buy a bracelet made from some of it for $20. In places like Dubai in the slums they recycle nearly everything. They have people stripping wires and things like that. Despite their horrible living conditioms they still manage to make use of the waste. We should be more like that.
I think about this a lot... It's not just oceans, plastic is everywhere. The park by my house has so much plastic in it. I suspect many people don't realize how bad the problem is because they stick to the paths... go a bit off the path and you'll find oodles of plastic that's blown into the woods, some of it buried in the dirt & leaves. One of the most depressing things that regularly happens while trying to clean it up is pulling a disintegrating plastic bag out of the ground. They don't last long(intact.) Unfortunately, after a few years they're impossible to clean up, but the fragments will still be there hundreds of years from now. Styrofoam is the same way; it'll just crumble after a while. And that synthetic filler from inside winter jackets... tends to get everywhere. I just grab the big pieces and move on... you could spend hours cleaning up one little spot if you wanted. It can make you really sad and angry. I find a lot of balloons. That always makes me laugh... it's very important that people in 400-1300 years know you had a birthday once you know.
And on the balloons, helium is a crucial element in cooling superconductors, MRI machines, and quantum computers. When the helium leaves the balloon, it just goes to the upper atmosphere and we lose it to space... I don't like balloons.
I live on the coast, albeit not the ocean, but a bay that eventually spills out into it. I took a walk, and left the path to walk on the sand and rocks, and started picking up garbage. The amount of garbage is painful and saddening. I came back a week later thinking that my good deed will have made a difference. Nope, just like her, I found that didn't even look like I did anything. New trash, all quite old by the look of the cans and bottles. We've only seen such a small portion of the ocean, and yet we've managed to pollute the ever loving crap out of it. I haven't stopped cleaning. I know that the trash I remove is at least that much less that is gone.
The only way to truly put an end to it is to stop it at the source. We need to stop producing so much damn plastic. Only then will any cleanup efforts actually be viable, because the rate at which plastic is cleaned up must exceed the rate it enters the ocean. And right now, that's impossible.
“My biggest nightmare is that I’m going to be at the beach one day, and one of these dolls is going to wash up on the shore like garbage.” - Stephen Hillenburg, reacting to his character, SpongeBob SquarePants, getting a line of dolls (recounted by Sherm Cohen)
That's messed up. Imagine him seeing where all the SpongeBob toys go in the afterlife. Seeing sea creatures being choked by them and sand being littered by them. He'd must think he's in hell.
You are awesome. This planet needs people like you. At the beginning I felt sick because of pollution, but now I am sick because of humanity. You are bringing me hope.
The sad thing is that even if every human stopped sending plastics into the sea and we started to cleaning the seas and beaches, we will encounter the waste we already produced in the next few hundred years...
@@lachlanlandreth9069 nah the planet itself is strong enough, but we as human species is not that strong. We're not killing our planet, we're just killing the life inside the planet, including ourself.
@@da_pawz You say that, but we’ve advanced to the point that anything short of an asteroid strike or total nuclear annihilation won’t be able to kill us all. We’ve got all the technology we need to survive on a barren planet with a toxic atmosphere and regular super storms.
@@williaml840 wow that sounds fun dude. im sure you'll be one of the people living like that and not dying in squalor in a collapsed civilization. good luck
@@TeHzoAr They didn't say they wanted to live in a world like that. And it's probably a more realistic view of us than some naive view that it will all be sunshine and rainbows.
Hi, Oceanography student here: when you go to the beach and decide to pick up plastic waste like this, be careful! Plastic (especially when it's somewhat eroded by sand and stuff) can hold on to a lot of bacteria, viruses and other nasty stuff. So wear gloves and bring some desinfectant! (also, another fun fact; 'plastic rocks' are called plastiglomerates officially)
Hi there, when I plan to go Lego hunting on that beach, which desinfectant would you recommend to wash out the bacteria, virus and other stuff from the Legos
This is depressing. I feel like picking up beach plastic is one of those never ending tasks, like that guy in mythology who had to push a rock up a hill for all time.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s the story of the guy and the oysters. You can’t solve it all. But you can make the difference of one. And maybe if everyone was willing to do the difference of one things would change. As long as you have hope to be willing to face the impossible
On the plus side it seems like there are naturally evolved plastic eating bacteria out in the wilds now. If they keep spreading, they might eventually help out in this regard. Of course, the downside of that is that we're going to have to accept that everything we ever made out of plastic might start slowly falling apart, too. Can you imagine how that'll affect our electronics and vehicles and packaging and medical equipment? Interesting times ahead, I believe.
This is one of the best videos you've done Tom I hope you continue to document and share your learnings about the sea and what it has to offer before it is gone.
I've had this "once you see it" moment with cigarette butts. After reading an article about a clean-up event that scraped them out of the city's pavement and such, I started looking while waiting for the tram - and now I can't not see them everywhere. I've actually started picking them up while waiting now, most of them are right underneath the trashcans anyway. I went for a walk through the forest with my mum, in my grandma's village where only the people who live there will go into that forest, and even most of them probably don't. And there was trash everywhere. Not the big trash like an old mattress or a set of tires that someone didn't want to bring to the recycling depot. But small trash like someone went there with bag of a McDonalds and dumped the boxes as they emptied them. It's such a horrible feeling when you can't even go for a walk anymore without thinking "I should have brought a trash bag".
@@Qsie Try to find a local environmental organisation and other people who are concerned about the environment. It really helps when you have other people to talk to and to act together to make a change. Be it cleaning the beaches, trying to appeal to local politicians to make better regulations and legislation concerning the environment, waste management, recycling, factory regulations etc. Educate yourself and try to educate others on these issues. Also pressuring your government is really important, because problems on this scale demand action on a national (and global) level. Individual action (recycling, cleaning beaches etc.) is important but we also need to make bigger changes. I personally take part in demonstrations and civil disobedience to try and make our government do better.
I used to volunteer with a beach cleanup effort near Auckland. We went to the same stretch of marshy beach once a week, and every week we would bring out roughly the same amount of plastic. Dozens of trash bags full... I realized then how overwhelming it all is. We have created a whole layer in the geologic history of Earth that is just full of plastic.
I remember reading about the human impacts to the future history of the world. People tend to think about our stone monuments, or radioactivity because we get told about thousands of years, and to a human that's a long time. To geological history of the world? That's nothing. If humans become extinct, and aliens turn up in a million+ years, all our radiological impact from nuclear power and weapons would have long since degraded back into stable elements. The pyramids, Petra and Mount Rushmore? Warn away by weathering. Literally the one remaining source of evidence of intelligent life? Unnatural monomers of plastic hidden in new sedimentary rock. It'll take billions of years until there's been a complete cycle of new sedimentary rock, subduction and melting leading to new igneous/metamorphic rock before there's no trace of human life.
It's crazy that the ship sunk 20+ years ago and the LEGO pieces still look kinda new, despite being exposed to the elements for so long, and I can't imagine how many pieces of LEGO haven't been washed up to shore yet. Our plastic really is a disease to our enviroment
Lego blocks are made from ABS which has a specific gravity of 1.04-1.07 so it doesn't float. Means they're not exposed to light and air until they're washed up. [Edit] Seawater has a SG of around 1.025.
As someone who lives on the coast of SW England, the sad reality is the plastic waste on beaches isn't all legos or things that wash up from cargo/cruise/naval ships its mostly tampon applicators, needles, bottles, fishing line and cigarette filters. the sad and frankly disgusting reality is that the locals will dump trash wherever because of how polluted the beaches already are (broken window effect).
This is how it feels all the time as a marine scientist. The harm we do without thinking is astounding. There is essentially nowhere in the oceans that you can't find human garbage in some form.
Marine biologist here. Everytime I try to talk to my family about global climate change and the plastic crisis, they asked me if I want a therapist and some Xanax
The only way there could really be no plastic in an area would be if the currents miraculously kept it out, and I'm not sure such conditions exist. A plastic bag was seen in the Challenger Deep for Pete's sake.
@@typoriver3651 as a scientist, what do you recommend an average person do to lower their waste consumption? I'm not a huge corporation but every bit helps
Oh god. This really puts into perspective just how bad our plastic problem is. Edit: I don't know why everyone seems to be taking this in such a weird way. I just meant that, while you can read statistics and think "that's terrible," it doesn't really hit you just how bad the problem is when you're just reading a viral stats post on Twitter. Seeing this video puts a physical visual on it. That's all I meant, I didn't mean that this is the extent of the problem. Obviously it isn't.
Funfact we only know of where less than 20% of ocean plastic is. The amount we know are on beaches, bottom of the ocean or Floating on top, the rest is not accounted for.
I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room. Thank you SO much for using the proper term for Lego (not Legos). Thank you for even paying attention to the details like this.
I was born in 78 and have been going to this beach for holidays all my life. I love this beach. If this inspires anyone to pick up an extra piece of rubbish from this or anywhere else. This is Tom best video ever.
Used to be so bad on my local beach but we've cleaned it to the point where it's just fresh stuff washing up from trawlers mostly. Rope, nets, broken fish boxes. They just discarded what's not wanted overboard.
The fact that the legos were ocean-themed is just amazing. (Obviously, plastic pollution is terrible, but that doesn't mean we can't cracks a few jokes.)
This went from a quirky-sounding story to planetary existential nightmare really fast. Thank you for making this video! I don't know if enough people understand just how much plastic waste floats in the oceans right now. Maybe a video like this can open some eyes and minds.
It is important however it isn’t hitting the root of the problem. Unfortunately I am not very optimistic and feel like this problem will never get better and will only get worse.
@@lordbatz7363 thank you, most ppl dont realize this and think that buying metal straws will solve the problem. For the most part, it's the energy and manufacturing that cause the most pollution and the only organizations that can control these industries are our governments
I used to work at a plastic extrusion plant and I can't believe some of the raw materials end up there. Especially from this far inland. That's amazing.
I think it was a little over a year ago I was watching a video by Rachel & Jun called We cleaned a beach... Or something close to that. They and several volunteers worked on cleaning a beach in Japan and it was REALLY bad. As I understand it, this was one of their cleanups of many, just this one was filmed. I know there are several folks that work on cleaning up the crap washed back up on shore and they're doing a great job. However, it just seems like a Sisyphean feat. Some friends in Puerto Vallarta and their families have been doing clean-up their whole lives. Their attitude on the entire magnitude of the trash on the beaches is, "If we didn't do this, what would these beaches look like today?" What a great and terrible thought.
I remember once I went to Bali on a school trip, you can sign up to clear the beach from trash for community service, I didn't sign up as I've already done mine, but after a few minutes got bored so decided to clear the beach anyway, what I found was Funny and sad, some toys left behind, washed up cartons, and a singular shoe, this place was a tourist attraction yet it's still overwhelmed
@@masonmunkey6136 Some of the non-accessible beaches get a lot of garbage washed up too. In the touristy place I live, some of the boat tours carry extra garbage bags and make a slightly illegal trip to military-reserved beaches to pick up all the plastic bottles and broken shipping crates that wash ashore regularly. Iirc the captains would try to go every other week to gather the new piles, if the winds and the guests permit. It's easy to fill up a jumbo bag between two people in half an hour. The accessible beaches on the other hand, are not as accessible to the winds and waves, so they only get the occasional lost swim goggles from the tourists instead.
This reminds me of the story I used to hear all the time of a person walking along a beach tossing crabs back into the water, and about how you may not be making a difference in the total crabs on the beach, but you made a difference in the lives of the crabs you threw back in. Nowadays, you don't see crabs on the beach, so the story's changed. You may not impact the total mass of plastic floating about the ocean, but you could remove that tiny bit more each time you go to the beach.
I used to like that story, i thought it was originally a biblical story but i might be wrong. I always identified as the person who would want to save all the crabs but couldn't so just give up under the pointlessness of the exercise but to those crabs that you do potentially rescue, it means something substantial to them.
i get people laugh at me all the time saying im wasting my time when to comes to me using less plastic, i know i cant escape it totally, but i can be more responsible with it and try to miss it when i can. this video breaks my heart that's for sure, you see this on all beaches sadly
@@TheBrutalFlan i work in a butchers and no one uses the counter its all pre pack. ready to go don't want to talk to anyone. companies will do what they can until they are told otherwise. so governments need to do something. but in the end the cost is pu on to the buyer sady
Doesn't as much break my hart but makes me want to go to that very location and stay for weeks upon weeks looking for plstic treasures in the sand and throwing away several metric tons of garbage from said beaches.
No, we are not wasting our time. I know that locally our recycling program isn't very successful so I make a real effort to reduce and reuse everything. No I can't solve these problems on my own because they are systemic and need to be addressed systemically. But i can do my best to not make it worse than it is. And I can vote consistently for the health of our planet and everyone who lives here.
When I was smaller on vacation my family liked to take our small boat to one of the hundreds of small uninhabited islands of croatia for that "private beach" feeling. We of course made sure to pack up everything we brought and take it with us. But for me as a child those islands were mostly boring with no other people and not much to do except for that I could make elaborate "models" of sailboats out of all the trash I found. Mostly an empty styrofoam cooler for the hull, a stick or rod for the mast, a sheet of plastic wrap or a piece of fabric for the sail. Some strings and lots of small bits for decoration. My rule was that I could only use materials and "tools" that I found on the beach. It was fun to do but sad that it is even possible. My family wouldn't even let me bring them with us so I just left them there.
I want plastic to be demonised outside of practical uses like medical and heck even in objects used for more than a day. It just sucks how much unnecessary waste there is. like in Costco when they wrap 2 packets of cereal together.
@eBic Don't pretend companies don't overuse plastic. A product, inside plastic packaging, which is then inside more plastic packaging just so the packaging looks nicer. We can't really stop using plastic or we'll go back to the dark ages but let's not pretend we don't overuse it.
@eBic going "things are bad so don't think of changing it" is just an excuse to not think and just insult people. so what if the worlds not perfect? why is that a reason not to try to make things better? if anything, "the world isn't perfect" should be a Reason to make things better, not a reason to wallow behind like you.
@eBic The problem is that it's "cheaper" because companies are able to just externalise all the costs. If they were forced to pay for the damage and cleanup, it would much more expensive, and then the market might self-regulate a bit
Officially the most depressing video I've watched in quite some time. I appreciate the folks who are putting in such conservation efforts, but sometimes, it just feels like we already lost a long time ago.
Thankfully its not just a few 'hippys' or other outlayers of society screaming conservation efforts now, its getting more and more 'normal' for people to try and do their bit.
Want something more depressing? Watch the TH-cam documentary Plastic Wars by FRONTLINE PBS. Those 50 minutes alone will make you hyper aware of the current issue with plastics, recycling, and litter.
We haven't lost. We can turn it around. Every day is a choice, billions of people make small little choices that can add up. We haven't lost but I'm not sure we've even begun to fight.
It’s so insane to see Tom at perrenporth, I have so many nostalgic memories there as a kid going there every summer, playing in a river that runs through the beach and learning to body board. Never found any Lego though, shame, finding Lego on a beach with my cousin would have been the best day of our lives when we were 10
They should make cleaning the beach a kind of tourist attraction. Something like 'keep as much plastic as you'd like and deposit the rest in a bin to be recycled as a filler in cement for paving roads or sidewalks and making bricks'.
@@abcdef-qk6jf Making a side walk would be fine. But anything load bearing i wouldn't trust. look at china's buildings that fall apart because they add filler stuff to construction material.
I on e found a lego piece in the middle of the Mojave Desert in California , it's amazing how plastic has found it's way everywhere as a relatively recent invention.
Thirty years ago on a mangrove Island in the lower keys I found a cove covered with light bulbs. Most were American but there were German, Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian bulbs also. The arching mangrove roots only allowed certain size floating objects into the cove. I would guess at least 500 bulbs.
This was really interesting! In truth it’s wild to me though that Tom has ever been to a beach before and *not* noticed that it’s absolutely teaming with plastic everywhere. At this point it’s just a sad fact of life.
It really depends on where you go. The closest beach to me regularly have planks coming from the sea, others I have seen nothing at, yet others have some plastic ice-cream spoons but nothing else.
I’m from the south of NZ and remember taking a friend from Europe to a local beach and her being shocked at how there was no rubbish / plastic. Really makes me appreciate it and worry about how it will (and is) change
My father used to work for the maxi trimaran Groupama 3, and when it capsize near the coast of NZ, and you guys are so protective of your environment (and that's awesome) that they had to go and find EVERY bit of carbonfiber and plastic that washed on shores. The capsized happened in 2008 and to this day we still have 3-4 meters of the carbon fiber mast in our backyard, probably gonna make it into some furniture.
Small story: Our family has a tradition, where we spend new year in denmark for a week and walks on the beach are a big part of that. The german word for trash etc. that you find on the beach is "Strandgut". The word "gut" means good in german but all that garbage really isnt so we decided to rename it "Strandschlecht" with "schlecht" simply meaning bad.
nice play on words, but just to make clear to anyone not speaking German, the word "gut" does not only mean "good", but as a noun "Gut" also means "goods" in the sense of commodities (similar as in English), that's how the word Strandgut is composed, literally meaning beach goods.
@@TigruArdavi so beach bads? in english looking for interesting finds is "beach combing", but with all the trash it's more like another phrase "dumpster diving."
I do recognize trash in the forests, on the fields where I live, but it's true that you get used to it, even when you are sensitized to it. When I was on a photo excursion in the Dolomites in northern Italy, I was instantly seeing how clean the mountains are. Barely any trash lying around. So sad that we realize how clean places can be compared to others.
I couldn't believe how bad the beaches were on Stewart Island, the small southern island to the south of the mainland in New Zealand. It's extremely isolated with a very small local population but many of the beaches are full of plastic. It just catches plastic from the ocean currents. It's kinda heartbreaking to see.
I’m from NZ , I live in an area called Taranaki. As a teen I lived next to a beach. Every time I took the dog for a walk (daily) I would pick up the plastic. It did make a difference you would notice over time there was less and less . But as soon as you stop picking it up it gets worse again
Seeing the rubbish on the beach makes me feel sick. Melbourne city council did an audit of the trash exiting the city's stormwater drains and they found 40+% was cigarette butts. Almost half of the drain bound trash is from one particular habit. Not only is smoking bad for the health of those who smoke but also of the local environment and those animals which make it home.
I'm a smoker myself and when I don't have an ash tray to get rid of a butt, it's going in my back pocket or my portable tray. I live in Cologne, a city with trash bins (including ash trays) every 25m in some areas. Some people stil can't get fu**ed to throw their trash or butts away properly and I wanna strangle them.
This is why I dislike smokers. If it wasn't bad for the environment, I would feel bad, but when you harm other living things for a moment of pleasure thats when I start getting mad.
time to bring back pipe smoking, less pollution that way. Cigarettes are filled with added chemicals too, just smoking straight tobacco from a pipe wouldn't be as bad
That beach is where I tried out surfing once. Expectedly I got knocked down into the water a lot, but what I wasn't expecting was the feeling of the random bits of trash brushing past me that were floating around below the surface.
When my gf and I go for walks in forests or at the seaside we try to always take a big trash bag with us. It's depressing how quickly it's full on our average walk while we're not even going out of our way to pick stuff up, just picking up what's "right in front of us".…
@@Wintercourse That's the issue that you hit spot on right here. The people who throw it away, don't care. And if they see it gets cleaned, they will throw away even MORE. For example; there's an apartment building near where I used to live. There's some sketchy people who live there, and they literally throw bin bags, old tv's, couches etc over their balcony into the bushes below. What does the local government do? They clean it up, because rats started to appear and it looks bad + smelled bad. Now, these people see that they can just toss whatever they don't want over their balcony AND someone will come clean it up. So what happened next, more bin bags. More old furniture. More trash. More rats. The only solution to this issue, is by attacking the source. In the example I gave; kick those idiots out of their house, bankrupt them with fines, or even put them in jail if they keep going.
Hi Tom When I moved to Alaska in 1999, ending up for a incredible time in Elfin cove, everyone had a plastic toy. The story is some one let them go on purpose! to see the waters ways around the world! The stupidity of this meaningless experiment, 30 years after, still stands out as an example of how stupid humans are and can still amaze and hurt me years later at the same time.
I heard something similar but it was that a big container of ducks fell into the ocean off of ship the plastic rubber ducks you use in the bath so they started washing up all over the world so scientists started collecting them and using the information of where they ended up to help figure out which way tides go around the world
@@matthewpitre8159 see the book by Donovan Hohn: "Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them"
Came here expecting a cutesy story, ended up with another small amount of despair at the decay of our biosphere and the creeping dread that we aren't changing anything about it.
You're quite correct, it wasn't the story I expected but it was a very well told story none the less. Fascinating about the Lego. In Australia we have "Clean Up Australia Day" where everybody can come together and spend the day cleaning various areas of the countryside, roads and beaches or just their local communities. It's a great public event once a year that gives people of all ages and backgrounds the chance to get to know each other while doing some good for the community. Hundreds of tonnes of waste are collected every year. I wonder why more countries don't do that?
@@lilyhawthorne1196 We do Earth Day as well, but it's mostly centred around reducing energy consumption, and recycling, rather than something like clean up aus day, which is like massive efforts into physically reducing trash. Earth day has some of those components - but the really major clear ones are things like Melbourne's CBD going dark, and similar.
I've had a similar experience in Iceland. I drove to a really remote beach on the Reykjanes peninsula, far away from where any cars or tourists would go and the beaches there were littered with tons and tons of plastic. Tons of fishing nets and huge plastic tons were among the trash too. It's sad to see pristine nature littered with trash that will survive all of us.
As someone who was raised in a house so close to the sea that you can fish from the bathroom or kitchen windows, this isn't a surprise. There is CONSTANTLY all kinds of plastic washing up even up here in Scotland, in the more sheltered sea lochs, where it's harder for the general ocean plastics to get in... there's so much plastic waste from the fish farms in the loch and just yesterday after a walk along the beach with the dogs i brought back a bunch of tubs and containers for cleaning product and nylon ropes/strings/nets and a few of these plastic dagger looking things that are used in the fish nets and mussel farms in the loch.
I saw somewhere recently that beach clean-ups are actually a good idea because quite a lot of rubbish does stay close to the coast so removing it does make a difference.
I have a pair of Lego dragons, dubbed Albert and Renoir (and a few other bits and pieces of beach Lego) recovered from Whitsands Bay in South Cornwall, also from the Toyio Express deposit. But, aside from the cuteness - plastics and microplastics are an enormous problem for our marine environments.
We've all heard someone say, don't take pebbles from the beach because if everyone took one there'd be none left. Take plastic from the beach though! This lady is doing a tremendous job and could do with some help!
Take plastic from the beach, but even if everyone took as much as they possibly could it would still not be enough, that's how bad the situation is, and it's only getting worse and worse |:
I spent 2 weeks in a condo on a beach in Florida visiting a friend. Every single day a volleyball would wash up on the shore , it was so common to find things on the beach.
If you were expecting a fun story about occasional Lego finds, and instead got a horrifying story about waste plastic... so was I. Tracey's photography project and book are some of the best ecological messaging I've seen in a long time! There are links in the description.
Three weeks ago
oh hi scott, nice to meet you
lego!@@
Hi Tom
17th april?
Watched a film several years ago, but I can't remember what it was called. It opened with shots of a beach completely covered in trash while the narrator said, "This is Away. When you throw something away, this is where it goes."
That's always stuck with me.
So here's a question: When you pick up a bag of plastic trash from the beach how do you then dispose of it with a guarantee so it doesn't end up "away" again?
@@dgris7944 you can’t, and therein lies the problem. As long as we keep producing plastic en masse the issue will only get worse. Plastic has its uses, particularly in medicine, but there are also so many places where it could be replaced by metal (infinitely recyclable) or biodegradable materials (paper, ceramics, etc.)
@@breck1637 Paper is not really a good option due to it being weak, plus because paper is not infinitely recyclable nor gotten in environmentally friendly ways (deforestation) there are better options. For example, silk, a strong, durable material that is biodegradable, safe and able to be made by genetically modified bacteria. It's a good way to replace plastic.
@@dgris7944 I was asking myself this exact question. So much trash is sent by boat, that the bag you just filled up might go back into the sea.
@@Ze_eT There still must be many cases where you could use paper *without a plastic coating* instead of plastic, and it would be better for the environment, doesn't it? I mean, there are stores for products without packaging that you just have to carry home once and can then put in a glass container you already have, for example. Those products you should be able to take home without any plastic involved.
It's sort of become an informal series where Tom goes to film some place and returns to us with unmet expectations and an implied, existential warning.
Don't worry, we're _incredibly_ good at ignoring those! ):
@@Phourc it’s what we’re the best at!
The best videos are the ones that go "here's the pat story you can read all over the internet I meant to retell, and here's why that story isn't the real truth."
It's better than the ones with met expectations.
I kind of like it when a video goes sideways, but I hope it doesn't cause him any existential dread.
Right when you think you can go on vacation without stepping on a lego.
*NO ONE IS SAFE*
Somewhere in the future lego will overtake even the air.
Ok checkmark
no no no No No NO NO NO NO *NONONONO*
Keep on deniying it
Well walking on a clean beach isn't that comfortable either... the sand gets in your shoes and it's a hundred tiny legos following you everywhere for the next week
"it's sad" those were the two words my friends said when they saw just how much plastic i had picked up from one of the beaches in long beach california after we had just spend 5 hours there. The fact that anyone can find more pieces of plastic than shells is honestly heartbreaking, and now matter how hard we try there will always be more of it under the sand and in the water. I hope that more and more people realize and understand that everything they do leaves and impact, whether it be good or bad and that we can clean these beaches up for our future generations.
Massive respect and thanks to this lady who spends her time cleaning up the beaches. 🙏🏻👏🏻
its fine ,plastic is from oil and oil is from ther sea and sandy places anyway so its just going bsvk to where it camer from innit bruv and its somewhere for fishes to live
@@girlsdrinkfeck I can't believe this is a real coomemt
@@girlsdrinkfeck can you live with just inhaling oil then?
That's like saying drinking bleach is safe because it came from salt and water.
@@barrotem5627 I know I'm a genius
This hits harder because Tom isn’t the type to use a grim reality to make himself popular. This really touched him enough to make it a story worth telling
Imagine every enviromental activist that blocks the streets were like that...
Oh wait they are, but they are getting ignored.
Send from my Lenovo plastic device.
As someone who lives in Cornwall, it's good to see our plastic problem getting some attention
As someone living on earth... 😑
It seems really really bad
Your plastic problem is NOTHING compared to places like Bangladesh, Oceania etc. They have islands *MADE* of plastic...
Ok
@@aceman0000099 that doesn't mean this issue isnt a problem, though. Come on dude, global pollution isn't a game you have to 1-up people on.
Yup, the plastics in our oceans are very much still a problem. It doesn't just solve itself. Reminds me of the Laysan albatross. Their range is across the North Pacific, but over 99 percent of them can be found on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, most notably the famous Midway Atoll. They've had to face lead-poisoning (from paint chips from the structures; this has thankfully been stopped and cleaned up after a decade-long effort) and plastics. Five tons of plastic are brought by the birds each year to feed their young...and you can just see all the plastic they ate poking out when they're dead
That's so horrifying. Plastic is such a huge issue and it goes ignored by so many as its been inserted into our lives and we're just used to it, not realizing things like this.
So sad especially because when we throw things out in the garbage we expect them to go to a dump and be compressed and squished into a tiny square somehow they're still ending up in the ocean how is this possible? I'm aware of the garbage just doesn't go away but it's like people are literally dumping it into the ocean on purpose
Actually it does solve itself. There a bacteria found, that now capable of eating and digesting plastic. It just takes some time.
@@3333927 Unless that bacteria turns out to be worse than the plastic...
@@3333927 Plastic is carbon, hydrogen, and usually oxygen, three elements which can form extremely poisonous or toxic compounds, like CO, (carbon mono oxide), or acids like carboxylic acids or carbonic acid, which can harm living things, and so much more.
Bacteria aren't magically going to avoid this, and I guarantee you if bacteria can ever digest plastic then it would atleast have some kind of toxic compound in the products of the digestion, and at the most simple it would be CO gas which is an extremely toxic gas due to missing one oxygen atom it was supposed to have (CO2).
It's insane to think plastic has only been around for around 100 years yet you can find it everywhere, not to mention microplastics inside marine life.
lots of demand when you have near 8 billion humans on earth
inside US
We ourselves are breathing it in daily. It’s scary
Evolution has seen this before. Once there was no oxygen. Then 98% died. What we see now is the remnants of those times fully developed across the planet. Now we will see it again with micro and Nano-plastics. The things that can evolve to handle the presence of plastic everywhere will succeed and live off of that resource until its all used up. We will be dead along with every plant and animal we rely on. Then who knows what will come next.
Oh. I see in the replies that people think I expect it to be ok. Forgive me but I expect a 98% die off of all species, just like when oxygen happened. I expect that it's unreasonable and impossible for us to stop the process we started when we created and mass produced plastic from oil. We will die for this. And everything we know except a few bacteria and simple organisms will die with us. Plastic is actually in your blood. It's in fish blood. It's in jellyfish bulbs. It's in coral reef cellular walls. Nano plastic exists. And I bet everyone who reads this in 2021 will die of something not related to micro-plastic and Nano-plastic particles. The tipping point for the global death is about 150 years away. It's unstoppable but it will probably not be what kills me.
@@MinecraftianFlutterguy you mean the facial masks???
I went from childlike wonder to a sense of impending doom in under two minutes
haha
Every Millennial's coming-of-age story.
one more like til 1000
Wow that's true
... on the other hand, FREE TOYS!
As someone who lives in Cornwall, and someone who has grown up around this their whole life. This is not news to anyone from the area, this is something that has been on the forefront of Cornish politics for a long time and is subduing that most of not all primary/secondary schools cover. I really appreciate that Tom saw it from the perspective as someone who had previously overlooked this and the realisation that it is a real poignant topic in the SW. Thank you Tom for bringing this topic and your perspective to the masses!
You could organize a garbage gathering event with other locals to clean up the beach. Would be a great cause!
It is perhaps a good thing that a large proportion of the worlds plastic pollution stays close to shore so we cannot ignore it. Ref: 'Why 99% of ocean plastic pollution is "missing"'
What is the political argument about it exactly? Whether the council should do a mass clean up or something?
@@Darkness251 But as mentioned in the video, that's all well and good (and should be done), but it all just gets replaced very quickly. It can be really disheartening seeing a beach look as bad as before you cleaned it just a short time later.
The issue with beach cleans is that your only scratching the surface
I really commend this women for not going on camera. Also for Tom for not pressuring her to do so.
I’ve generally not liked being on camera, but with the SMS boom, I’ve forced myself to learn to be more comfortable with it.
It’s just nice to see others who are similar, and more so that someone is accommodating.
a few of my friends make fun of me for not signing the release at my university and work. one said "its just somthing you do" which is kind of revealing. it shouldnt be somthing you "do" it should be somthing you consider
What is SMS? Asking because I'm genuinely wondering what it means
@@benjamind.collette6468
SMS stands for Short Message Service and is commonly known as texting. It's a way to send text-only messages of up to 160 characters between phones. Play video.
More or less synonymous with Smartphones
The same question as the person above. What is SMS?
@@polygontower Probably sms as in text messaging I'd imagine
"the beach where lego keeps washing up. Except its not just lego, and its not just this beach" nice
ironic
it's* x2
@@CreeperPookie asked* x0
@@CreeperPookie shut up
@@cyril3793 loser* xInfinite
That pebble is astounding. If I understand correctly, it's not a plastic pebble in the sense of a plastic ornament; it's a pebble formed by natural processes out of plastic. That's how present plastic has become.
Wow I assumed it was a pebble made from plastic, like it was made to look like a pebble. So this could have originally been something else and has eroded to look like a pebble over the years you’re saying? That’s crazy!
I believe they're called plastiglomerates.
I thought they said it was the raw material form of plastic
you can probably make one on your own by burning a couple lego pieces, just wont get the grey you get from corrosion in the sea
The pebble was rather more literal, which it was a term used to imply how pebble sized mineral are supposed to be
The plastic is reformed under pressure and created a higher density structure , thus they also known as plastiglomerate which is taken from the appearance depicting conglomerate grains with their rather large size and faiy rounded and spherical shape
I'm glad this is a story Tom decided to tell. As somebody who walks "isolated" beaches since I was a child, people don't seem to realise how almost impossible it was to get away from human waste.
When you go to a beach and it seems clean, that's quite often because somebody has been paid to get rid of the rubbish.
I remember as a child, so late 1970’s, we were vacationing in the mountains and stopped to see a glacier. My father excitedly explained to me what a glacier was, how old it was, why this was amazing. When we got there, all I saw was dirty snow and cigarette butts. It saddened me.
@@IJustWantToUseMyName humans are the worst thing to happen to earth. We don’t deserve the luck we’ve had in the universe to live.
@@insert_username_here actually earth doesn't give a f about us, the ecosystem is what we are hurting and why don't we deserve the 'luck' that we had, there is no universal law that says that everything should be preserved, actually it's the other way, everything changes, not in a nice or clean way, just change; the reason we should stop the plastic waste and save the ecosystem is for us, is to save ourselves and to preserve places for us to use(visit, relax, observe, tourism etc.); don't get this wrong, i'm not saying we shouldn't save the ecosystem, but don't get the reason and our drive to do it wrong, it's not for anything else, it's for us
A LEGO SHIP FULL OF LEGO SEEMS LIKE AN ART PROJECT.
This is the most heartbreaking Lego themed existential wound I've received since The Lego Movie.
You didn't like the Lego Movie?
The Lego movie was great
@@FailedAragorn I love the Lego movie. It's existence that is pain; Not A Lego World- Simply all worlds.
Which, sadly, includes The Lego World and MCU and everything we know and love probably...
Oops. xD
@@deviousxen pain.
You forget - EVERYTHING IS AWESOME
I'm starting to notice just how much plastic I end up using just from groceries. Everything is in a plastic container or plastic bag. It's crazy how plastic has just taken over everything.
The problem is that the industries don't really want to swap packaging. And they can't because we don't really have an alternative tbh. But some things are really far too extreme, Idk if you know it but where I live there's this candy called "Maoam" and it's literally a paper packaging filled with plastic packaging. There's like 8 small soft candies in there all packaged individually in plastic. Not to mention stuff like "Kinder Schoko-Bons" which is literally a plastic bag filled with chocolate packaged in more plastic. It is really insane.
suddenly
KB
fr tho im a huge fan of yours hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii🏳️⚧️💞🏳️⚧️💞🏳️⚧️💞🏳️⚧️💞🏳️⚧️💞
So much of the packaging isn't even necessary. Packages inside packages just so the brand sticker looks a little nicer.
I went to Japan and it was crazy how every little thing you bought they wanted to wrap separately in plastic bags and how much of it was used in the packaging itself. Had to always ask them not to do that.
In the two weeks I was there I probably got more plastic for free than what you rack up in a year in scandinavia.
We've recognized the problem, so now lets do something about it. What I find troubling in our wasteful society is that many people take notice of the problems, but aren't AWARE enough to actual be apart of a positive CHANGE. There are easy ways to be more efficient. It may seem futile to just do something small and individual, but it adds up if you tell your friends and family and they are all AWARE and know what to do to CHANGE.
I love that you referred to her not appearing on camera as sensible
As if this were not bad enough, people who visit the beaches often just dump their cans and waste when they leave. It's all heartbreaking.
The ironic thing is, a lot of people usually dump their rubbish in areas where there already is rubbish. It's subconscious "my impact will be minimal" thing. Of course, it doesn't matter where you drop your rubbish, the impact is always the same, but if I remember this correctly, most people fall for this fallacy.
Unfortunately that’s most beaches, even ones without plastic coming from a massive cargo ship some 20odd years ago
Our local beach had volunteers come and pick up the trash but it's never enough... Never leave trash behind you, on a nature trip, never. Pick up and carry away everything you carried with you to the location.
My scout troop (4 kids 2 adults) was doing a beach clean up, and in less than 45 minutes we filled 4 huge plastic trashbags. When we got back to the beach access point, we still needed to carry the trash about 50 meters back to the picnic area by the parking lot to the dumpster they had there. They had 2 huge drums as trash barrels at the access point on the beach, they were both full to overflowing and people had started leaving their waste all around the base of them. When the wind gusted it grabbed more of it, and flung it into the ocean.
We'd gone past at least 10 other barrels away from the access point that were empty or nearly so. So that was all because people were too lazy to carry their trash with them another 50 meters-- on the way to their cars even! even when they saw the bin was full....
@@FiksIIanzO Tragedy of the Commons. When everyone thinks their impact is minimal in respect to the entirety of the issue, and you multiply that by the thousands/millions/billions of people thinking the same thing (depending on the issue), it becomes massive. That's why we have a movement trying to convince people otherwise, to believe that their individual impact is much larger than it really is, hoping enough people change that it will actually make a difference.
Here in France, we have a beach where Garfield phones keep washing up.
(Yes, plastic phones with the face of the comic cat Garfield)
Quite horrifying also
Damn
Haunted by Garfield
i'm sorry jon
Where is my lasagna Frank?
They recently found the Container those were coming from wedged into a sea cave
When I was in Belize I was horrified by the amount of plastic that can be found on the beaches. If you’re near a resort they keep it clean and tidy so you’d never notice, but if you go anywhere else it seemed like the beach was practically 50% composed of plastic. The sight of all the plastic haunts me to this day. Literally can’t throw something away without thinking about it.
The crazy thing is that even those "clean" beaches are full of plastic. It just is the pebbles the lady picket up, the ones that looked like tiny stones instead of the bright coloured plastic and all the plastic buried down into the sand and beetween the rocks that you can not see on the surface.
I believe you when you say you think about it every time cus every single time I tear a cardboard box I think of my job from 5 years ago
If everyone was haunted in such a way we might actually be able to get something done about it, then eventually we might be haunted less.
I watched Seaspiracy with a my flatmates a few weeks ago and literally the next day one of them had salmon for dinner, just boggles my mind that some people can be quite that detached from these serious issues!
@@emmao6578 It's strange to think of isn't it. I wonder where that comes from, is it just IQ maybe? Can't possibly be, I know a lot of smart people who still do things like these. Is it upbringing? Some people can turn out to be like that even when their parents are eco friendly. It really does boggle one's mind.
@@laurel5432 no, it's selfishness, people just don't care, until it starts affecting them
oregon has a beach clean up day and we all pitch in and clean them all up. it helps a ton to have HUNDREDS of people trying.
“ it’s not that bad today “
....my heart sank
The Lego didnt
@@abdur-rahmancheema8625 Ba-dum Tss
@@abdur-rahmancheema8625 wow so funny edgy joke about something that can murder billions
@@abdur-rahmancheema8625 good one
@@1_Trident edgy?? Like one of the least edgy jokes I've ever heard tf you on about. And you think making a joke about legos washing up on the beach actually has a negative affect on anything? Like chill yikes
The sheer variety is what got to me. Little lego pieces, indiscernible chunks, tiny beads, every single little thing you think of once before discarding is there. Practically forever.
This video breaks my heart.
I remember going to Perranporth and I obviously wasn't looking for plastic so didn't see any but I wish I did now
Just think of all the microscopic stuff you can't see anymore..
1500 years is not "forever"... Even 10 000 years is a tiny moment compared to millions of years when continents shift or billions of years of Earth history. As George Carlin said - "The planet will be fine"...
All the species killed by the plastic will be replaced by another species, long after last remains of so called "human civilization" will turn to dust. And the only trace of "humanity" will be a tiny geological stratum with raised radiation levels or slightly altered chemical composition due to deposits of trash.
@@Edi_J but nobody cares for the eons we wont be around to witness. The heat death of the universe makes your every action meaningless unless you accept a more reasonable scale of measurement.
@@JhoTerra yes, but few thousand of years are much much (million times) closer to "human perspective" than tens of billions needed for cosmological changes. So talking about "dying planet" or "killing the nature" is just centering everything about homo supposedly-sapiens and simply misleading. The nature is and will be fine, even if for 10k years stones on the beach will be lighter than usual...
It might not've been the story you wanted to tell.
But it's the story that needs to be told more often, because - as you stated correctly - we're still somewhere between blind and oblivious to the problem.
Ignorant. The original definition of the word is "to willingly ignore or suppress knowledge." That is the word you're looking for.
Both ignorant and apathetic to the problem. As is to be sadly expected.
@@Bryophytan not only that, but so many documentaries only focus on how we're all doomed, rather than talking about the actions we need fi take and what a sustainable world would look like. People get so terrified about how we're screwing up the environment that it seems like an impossible task to fix, and so do nothing. There's a really good documentary called 2040, I believe, about how the world could change to be more sustainable by 2040 and how all is not yet lost
There was this german youtube series where seven people go and spend a week isolated on some patch of nature with a limited set of survival items, and the second season featured San José, an island in Panama. Half of that show became about how it's kinda silly to have a survival production where so many plastic things washed up onto the island take care of many needs in terms of items. But many were also disappointed to see just how much plastic garbage was just there in general.
7 vs wild
This should be shown in every high school at some point. Really puts it in perspective.
My upper school was still having students make "don't spray away the ozone layer" campaign posters as part of the environmental part of the curriculum. CFCs have been illegal for years now. We won't have this taught in schools until its solved.
@@dafoex Then we won't have this taught in schools.
This doesn't need to be taught in schools, it needs to be shown to adults. Kids don't have purchasing power, and kids don't get companies' attention when they say, "this has to change." Sometimes, yes, but it's adults who need to face this.
@@KiKiStarling I agree that we should change the point of view of adults (some of them won't care unfortunately), but remember that kids will become adults one day too, and it's better if they are aware from very beggining, so that it's natural for them to care about environment.
The title is romantic but once you realise what it really is, it's a proper slap in the face about how bad it is.
Romantic? The title is infuriating. Lego isn't fun or cool. It's industrial waste masquerading as a toy.
the world has a lot bigger environmental problems than some lego.....
Fancy seeing you here ;)
@@Daniel-sk9my they’re building blocks made for children. There are a lot dumber toys than lego
It’s because people who weren’t born in the country don’t care for it
i knew it would be bad, but this is terrifying
Seen some beaches on the US west coast, and... _sigh_ refuse is everywhere.
These beaches are combed daily by people like this lady, who remove all the worst stuff, and keep an eye out for wildlife in danger. Imagine how much worse it could be without those( often voluntary) people and then place it in a country with less waste processing and recycling. The problem is so much worse than it looks here.
Keep buying and consuming things that come wrapped in plastic. Because that's what drives this.
not to be that one stupid guy but
700th like
@@lucie4185 Should be more of a hobby. More people should do it. Get to go for a little walk on the beach and collect a bunvh of weird stuff.
There are companies like 4 Ocean that take away a pound of plastic or something and them you can buy a bracelet made from some of it for $20.
In places like Dubai in the slums they recycle nearly everything. They have people stripping wires and things like that. Despite their horrible living conditioms they still manage to make use of the waste. We should be more like that.
I think about this a lot... It's not just oceans, plastic is everywhere. The park by my house has so much plastic in it. I suspect many people don't realize how bad the problem is because they stick to the paths... go a bit off the path and you'll find oodles of plastic that's blown into the woods, some of it buried in the dirt & leaves. One of the most depressing things that regularly happens while trying to clean it up is pulling a disintegrating plastic bag out of the ground. They don't last long(intact.) Unfortunately, after a few years they're impossible to clean up, but the fragments will still be there hundreds of years from now. Styrofoam is the same way; it'll just crumble after a while. And that synthetic filler from inside winter jackets... tends to get everywhere. I just grab the big pieces and move on... you could spend hours cleaning up one little spot if you wanted. It can make you really sad and angry. I find a lot of balloons. That always makes me laugh... it's very important that people in 400-1300 years know you had a birthday once you know.
And on the balloons, helium is a crucial element in cooling superconductors, MRI machines, and quantum computers. When the helium leaves the balloon, it just goes to the upper atmosphere and we lose it to space... I don't like balloons.
I don’t think it’s balloons 😬 Make sure to wear gloves.
I live on the coast, albeit not the ocean, but a bay that eventually spills out into it.
I took a walk, and left the path to walk on the sand and rocks, and started picking up garbage. The amount of garbage is painful and saddening. I came back a week later thinking that my good deed will have made a difference. Nope, just like her, I found that didn't even look like I did anything. New trash, all quite old by the look of the cans and bottles.
We've only seen such a small portion of the ocean, and yet we've managed to pollute the ever loving crap out of it.
I haven't stopped cleaning. I know that the trash I remove is at least that much less that is gone.
Now you gonna throw it again in a "recycling" bin and it will get back into the ocean, becoming the never ending cycle....
The only way to truly put an end to it is to stop it at the source. We need to stop producing so much damn plastic. Only then will any cleanup efforts actually be viable, because the rate at which plastic is cleaned up must exceed the rate it enters the ocean. And right now, that's impossible.
Sand's here to filter out this stuff. It's not nice to see but it's not doomsday.
Ok
@@smokyz_ The trash put in land fills does not get into the ocean (at least in all developed countries).
“My biggest nightmare is that I’m going to be at the beach one day, and one of these dolls is going to wash up on the shore like garbage.”
- Stephen Hillenburg, reacting to his character, SpongeBob SquarePants, getting a line of dolls (recounted by Sherm Cohen)
That's messed up. Imagine him seeing where all the SpongeBob toys go in the afterlife. Seeing sea creatures being choked by them and sand being littered by them.
He'd must think he's in hell.
He's dead. Sorry.
@@LordSorus we know
And you know what? This likely happened.
I’ve yet to see one, but if I ever do that’ll be haunting
As someone who volunteers weekly to walk the banks of a local pond to remove trash from it, iI felt this video in my bones.
Thank you!
Thanks!
Nice humble brag.
You are awesome. This planet needs people like you. At the beginning I felt sick because of pollution, but now I am sick because of humanity. You are bringing me hope.
Good on you, keep doing what you are doing
I can watch this over and over! It’s mind blowing and I opening! There is one thing “knowing” and another thing fully understanding.
The sad thing is that even if every human stopped sending plastics into the sea and we started to cleaning the seas and beaches, we will encounter the waste we already produced in the next few hundred years...
Yep. It's a sad reality that we may sooner kill the planet from plastic then from other forms of pollution
@@lachlanlandreth9069 nah the planet itself is strong enough, but we as human species is not that strong. We're not killing our planet, we're just killing the life inside the planet, including ourself.
@@da_pawz You say that, but we’ve advanced to the point that anything short of an asteroid strike or total nuclear annihilation won’t be able to kill us all. We’ve got all the technology we need to survive on a barren planet with a toxic atmosphere and regular super storms.
@@williaml840 wow that sounds fun dude. im sure you'll be one of the people living like that and not dying in squalor in a collapsed civilization. good luck
@@TeHzoAr They didn't say they wanted to live in a world like that.
And it's probably a more realistic view of us than some naive view that it will all be sunshine and rainbows.
Hi, Oceanography student here: when you go to the beach and decide to pick up plastic waste like this, be careful! Plastic (especially when it's somewhat eroded by sand and stuff) can hold on to a lot of bacteria, viruses and other nasty stuff. So wear gloves and bring some desinfectant! (also, another fun fact; 'plastic rocks' are called plastiglomerates officially)
So plastic rocks are just called “conglomerate plastic”?
Hi there, when I plan to go Lego hunting on that beach, which desinfectant would you recommend to wash out the bacteria, virus and other stuff from the Legos
@@Game-7113 any of them they all claim to kill 99% of bacteria but there is always that 1% you got to watch out for
Or don't be a germaphobe and just keep living your life and doing things how you want to.
@@officialmetalwill does living your life how you want to involve getting a disease from the bottom of the ocean
This is depressing. I feel like picking up beach plastic is one of those never ending tasks, like that guy in mythology who had to push a rock up a hill for all time.
Sisyphus.
Sisyphu- oh.... Someone already said that.
Hm
Maybe. Or maybe it’s the story of the guy and the oysters. You can’t solve it all. But you can make the difference of one. And maybe if everyone was willing to do the difference of one things would change. As long as you have hope to be willing to face the impossible
On the plus side it seems like there are naturally evolved plastic eating bacteria out in the wilds now. If they keep spreading, they might eventually help out in this regard.
Of course, the downside of that is that we're going to have to accept that everything we ever made out of plastic might start slowly falling apart, too. Can you imagine how that'll affect our electronics and vehicles and packaging and medical equipment? Interesting times ahead, I believe.
@@LadySnowfaerie true. honestly i think development might go into antibacterial plastic, but then we'd have 2 problems on our hands...
This is one of the best videos you've done Tom I hope you continue to document and share your learnings about the sea and what it has to offer before it is gone.
On a serious note... being stuck inside really makes you forget just how much trash is *everywhere*. This was genuinely frightening to see.
Actually, I now realize how often I have to go to put out the trash, as that is down the street and we weren't allowed to go out.
I've had this "once you see it" moment with cigarette butts. After reading an article about a clean-up event that scraped them out of the city's pavement and such, I started looking while waiting for the tram - and now I can't not see them everywhere. I've actually started picking them up while waiting now, most of them are right underneath the trashcans anyway.
I went for a walk through the forest with my mum, in my grandma's village where only the people who live there will go into that forest, and even most of them probably don't. And there was trash everywhere. Not the big trash like an old mattress or a set of tires that someone didn't want to bring to the recycling depot. But small trash like someone went there with bag of a McDonalds and dumped the boxes as they emptied them. It's such a horrible feeling when you can't even go for a walk anymore without thinking "I should have brought a trash bag".
That is why I don't go out!
I'm just disappointed and sad now, and am figuring out courses of action for how to help. This provokes an indescribable pain for me.
@@Qsie Try to find a local environmental organisation and other people who are concerned about the environment. It really helps when you have other people to talk to and to act together to make a change. Be it cleaning the beaches, trying to appeal to local politicians to make better regulations and legislation concerning the environment, waste management, recycling, factory regulations etc. Educate yourself and try to educate others on these issues.
Also pressuring your government is really important, because problems on this scale demand action on a national (and global) level. Individual action (recycling, cleaning beaches etc.) is important but we also need to make bigger changes. I personally take part in demonstrations and civil disobedience to try and make our government do better.
I used to volunteer with a beach cleanup effort near Auckland. We went to the same stretch of marshy beach once a week, and every week we would bring out roughly the same amount of plastic. Dozens of trash bags full... I realized then how overwhelming it all is. We have created a whole layer in the geologic history of Earth that is just full of plastic.
I remember reading about the human impacts to the future history of the world. People tend to think about our stone monuments, or radioactivity because we get told about thousands of years, and to a human that's a long time. To geological history of the world? That's nothing.
If humans become extinct, and aliens turn up in a million+ years, all our radiological impact from nuclear power and weapons would have long since degraded back into stable elements. The pyramids, Petra and Mount Rushmore? Warn away by weathering. Literally the one remaining source of evidence of intelligent life? Unnatural monomers of plastic hidden in new sedimentary rock. It'll take billions of years until there's been a complete cycle of new sedimentary rock, subduction and melting leading to new igneous/metamorphic rock before there's no trace of human life.
😥😢
Wow
And then those dozens of trash bags end up in a landfill to be eventually washed into the sea again. Just to keep you busy.
@@Boris_V or burned
It's crazy that the ship sunk 20+ years ago and the LEGO pieces still look kinda new, despite being exposed to the elements for so long, and I can't imagine how many pieces of LEGO haven't been washed up to shore yet. Our plastic really is a disease to our enviroment
and then you realise that 20 years isn't long at all
@@patricksteinsen1147 20 years out in the sun and exposed to the elements is quite long
Lego pieces don't really go bad though. They look much worse for wear than my old legos.
Lego blocks are made from ABS which has a specific gravity of 1.04-1.07 so it doesn't float. Means they're not exposed to light and air until they're washed up.
[Edit] Seawater has a SG of around 1.025.
Plastic (sadly) takes a very long time to decompose, it could stay there for up to 500+ years.
This went from fun to sad really fast
As someone who lives on the coast of SW England, the sad reality is the plastic waste on beaches isn't all legos or things that wash up from cargo/cruise/naval ships its mostly tampon applicators, needles, bottles, fishing line and cigarette filters. the sad and frankly disgusting reality is that the locals will dump trash wherever because of how polluted the beaches already are (broken window effect).
Stinking hoomans.
me too, I live the Star Wars England
@@gumbum1988 bro you are such a 🤓. This is serious and you compare it to starwars. Rude
@@WhiteKneeOnBlackNeck2 what?
@@WhiteKneeOnBlackNeck2 what?
This is how it feels all the time as a marine scientist. The harm we do without thinking is astounding. There is essentially nowhere in the oceans that you can't find human garbage in some form.
I've heard that essentially 100% of marine life have microplastics inside them now...
Marine biologist here. Everytime I try to talk to my family about global climate change and the plastic crisis, they asked me if I want a therapist and some Xanax
The only way there could really be no plastic in an area would be if the currents miraculously kept it out, and I'm not sure such conditions exist. A plastic bag was seen in the Challenger Deep for Pete's sake.
@@typoriver3651 as a scientist, what do you recommend an average person do to lower their waste consumption? I'm not a huge corporation but every bit helps
@@typoriver3651 your fathers are the state?
Oh god. This really puts into perspective just how bad our plastic problem is.
Edit: I don't know why everyone seems to be taking this in such a weird way. I just meant that, while you can read statistics and think "that's terrible," it doesn't really hit you just how bad the problem is when you're just reading a viral stats post on Twitter. Seeing this video puts a physical visual on it. That's all I meant, I didn't mean that this is the extent of the problem. Obviously it isn't.
Funfact we only know of where less than 20% of ocean plastic is. The amount we know are on beaches, bottom of the ocean or Floating on top, the rest is not accounted for.
The great pacific garbage patch that is about the same size as Texas and made out of rafts of floating plastic
There is more plastic in the oceans than there are fish. And we're very steadily eliminating the fish quite nicely.
Not to mention our plastic-infused/based clothes releasing microplastics with each wash...
Guess who created the 3 Rs reuse reduce recycle movement?
I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room. Thank you SO much for using the proper term for Lego (not Legos). Thank you for even paying attention to the details like this.
This is the saddest video Tom Scott has ever done...
Toms face at the very last second as well :(
Perranporth is my local beach and its genuinely saddening how much dead marine life you see because of it :(
I think his video about hearing loss can compete :(
This goes up there with the high pitched noise video and the grey hoodie video...
@@maxcaddis4254 Same here, it's always depressing walking up that end.
Very cool listening to her pick up the most random objects and instantly describing where they're from.
I was born in 78 and have been going to this beach for holidays all my life. I love this beach. If this inspires anyone to pick up an extra piece of rubbish from this or anywhere else. This is Tom best video ever.
Used to be so bad on my local beach but we've cleaned it to the point where it's just fresh stuff washing up from trawlers mostly. Rope, nets, broken fish boxes. They just discarded what's not wanted overboard.
The fact that the legos were ocean-themed is just amazing.
(Obviously, plastic pollution is terrible, but that doesn't mean we can't cracks a few jokes.)
"legos" isnt the plural of "lego", just look at the title of this video
@@Zarrykotter huh. Never noticed that before
@@Zarrykotter only because the makers of the legos don't want it genericised.
@@Zarrykotter grammar police inbound
@@Zarrykotter I love legos
This went from a quirky-sounding story to planetary existential nightmare really fast.
Thank you for making this video! I don't know if enough people understand just how much plastic waste floats in the oceans right now. Maybe a video like this can open some eyes and minds.
This is why projects like The Ocean Cleanup are so important.
I hope people won‘t use such projects as an excuse to continue using huge amounts of plastic...
It is important however it isn’t hitting the root of the problem. Unfortunately I am not very optimistic and feel like this problem will never get better and will only get worse.
As noble as those projects are, we need real systemic change. As painful as it is to hear this is a political battle.
@@lordbatz7363 thank you, most ppl dont realize this and think that buying metal straws will solve the problem. For the most part, it's the energy and manufacturing that cause the most pollution and the only organizations that can control these industries are our governments
I used to work at a plastic extrusion plant and I can't believe some of the raw materials end up there. Especially from this far inland.
That's amazing.
Why did you work in a plastic plant? Why did you work at all for an apple and an egg?
@@Magic-Marv420 Do you always speak in riddles?
I think it was a little over a year ago I was watching a video by Rachel & Jun called We cleaned a beach... Or something close to that. They and several volunteers worked on cleaning a beach in Japan and it was REALLY bad. As I understand it, this was one of their cleanups of many, just this one was filmed. I know there are several folks that work on cleaning up the crap washed back up on shore and they're doing a great job. However, it just seems like a Sisyphean feat. Some friends in Puerto Vallarta and their families have been doing clean-up their whole lives. Their attitude on the entire magnitude of the trash on the beaches is, "If we didn't do this, what would these beaches look like today?" What a great and terrible thought.
I saw that video, it was scary to think that the beach they cleaned would no doubt be in just as bad a condition a few weeks later
I remember once I went to Bali on a school trip, you can sign up to clear the beach from trash for community service, I didn't sign up as I've already done mine, but after a few minutes got bored so decided to clear the beach anyway, what I found was Funny and sad, some toys left behind, washed up cartons, and a singular shoe, this place was a tourist attraction yet it's still overwhelmed
its overwhelmed BECAUSE its a tourist attraction. tourists are usually wayyy messier than locals for those kinda places.
Where I live, the more touristy beaches get trashed the most. The islands only accessible by boat are usually pristine minus some random charcoal.
@@masonmunkey6136 Some of the non-accessible beaches get a lot of garbage washed up too. In the touristy place I live, some of the boat tours carry extra garbage bags and make a slightly illegal trip to military-reserved beaches to pick up all the plastic bottles and broken shipping crates that wash ashore regularly. Iirc the captains would try to go every other week to gather the new piles, if the winds and the guests permit. It's easy to fill up a jumbo bag between two people in half an hour. The accessible beaches on the other hand, are not as accessible to the winds and waves, so they only get the occasional lost swim goggles from the tourists instead.
@@deniz_dee Differences in local geography I guess.
This reminds me of the story I used to hear all the time of a person walking along a beach tossing crabs back into the water, and about how you may not be making a difference in the total crabs on the beach, but you made a difference in the lives of the crabs you threw back in. Nowadays, you don't see crabs on the beach, so the story's changed. You may not impact the total mass of plastic floating about the ocean, but you could remove that tiny bit more each time you go to the beach.
And now those crabs that were thrown back are throwing the plastic on the beach. 🦀🦀🦀
I used to like that story, i thought it was originally a biblical story but i might be wrong. I always identified as the person who would want to save all the crabs but couldn't so just give up under the pointlessness of the exercise but to those crabs that you do potentially rescue, it means something substantial to them.
maybe u will be saving something that piece of plastic could have been the piece to choke an animal
Imagine being a kid an needing that one Lego figure or piece you needed just washes up on the beach one day
When “cool beach where LEGO washes up” turns into a public service announcement
Dr Breen in half life 2 has a good line about what humanity would leave behind without the combine
Save the environment. Pick up that can.
@@idlemessiah now put it in the trash can.
@@ashketchum9566 *static*
what's the quote?
WELCOME. WELCOME TO CITY 17. YOU CHOSEN OR BEEN CHOSEN TO RELOCATE TO ONE OF OUR FINEST REMAINING URBAN CENTERS.
i get people laugh at me all the time saying im wasting my time when to comes to me using less plastic, i know i cant escape it totally, but i can be more responsible with it and try to miss it when i can. this video breaks my heart that's for sure, you see this on all beaches sadly
@@TheBrutalFlan i work in a butchers and no one uses the counter its all pre pack. ready to go don't want to talk to anyone. companies will do what they can until they are told otherwise. so governments need to do something. but in the end the cost is pu on to the buyer sady
Doesn't as much break my hart but makes me want to go to that very location and stay for weeks upon weeks looking for plstic treasures in the sand and throwing away several metric tons of garbage from said beaches.
No, we are not wasting our time. I know that locally our recycling program isn't very successful so I make a real effort to reduce and reuse everything. No I can't solve these problems on my own because they are systemic and need to be addressed systemically. But i can do my best to not make it worse than it is. And I can vote consistently for the health of our planet and everyone who lives here.
When I was smaller on vacation my family liked to take our small boat to one of the hundreds of small uninhabited islands of croatia for that "private beach" feeling. We of course made sure to pack up everything we brought and take it with us. But for me as a child those islands were mostly boring with no other people and not much to do except for that I could make elaborate "models" of sailboats out of all the trash I found. Mostly an empty styrofoam cooler for the hull, a stick or rod for the mast, a sheet of plastic wrap or a piece of fabric for the sail. Some strings and lots of small bits for decoration. My rule was that I could only use materials and "tools" that I found on the beach. It was fun to do but sad that it is even possible. My family wouldn't even let me bring them with us so I just left them there.
I want plastic to be demonised outside of practical uses like medical and heck even in objects used for more than a day.
It just sucks how much unnecessary waste there is. like in Costco when they wrap 2 packets of cereal together.
Didn’t expect to see you here. Well, I guess everyone loves Tom Scott. Agree with you on your point, too.
@eBic Don't pretend companies don't overuse plastic. A product, inside plastic packaging, which is then inside more plastic packaging just so the packaging looks nicer. We can't really stop using plastic or we'll go back to the dark ages but let's not pretend we don't overuse it.
@eBic going "things are bad so don't think of changing it" is just an excuse to not think and just insult people. so what if the worlds not perfect? why is that a reason not to try to make things better? if anything, "the world isn't perfect" should be a Reason to make things better, not a reason to wallow behind like you.
@eBic The problem is that it's "cheaper" because companies are able to just externalise all the costs. If they were forced to pay for the damage and cleanup, it would much more expensive, and then the market might self-regulate a bit
Your car is about 40% plastic bicycles same the alternative is wood or stone even synthetic but all of those cause pollution
Officially the most depressing video I've watched in quite some time. I appreciate the folks who are putting in such conservation efforts, but sometimes, it just feels like we already lost a long time ago.
I see you haven't been watching videos about factory farming or tropical deforestation or rare earth mining or yemen.
Thankfully its not just a few 'hippys' or other outlayers of society screaming conservation efforts now, its getting more and more 'normal' for people to try and do their bit.
Want something more depressing?
Watch the TH-cam documentary Plastic Wars by FRONTLINE PBS. Those 50 minutes alone will make you hyper aware of the current issue with plastics, recycling, and litter.
We haven't lost. We can turn it around. Every day is a choice, billions of people make small little choices that can add up. We haven't lost but I'm not sure we've even begun to fight.
You know, it's shocking, you never really notice the plastic around, but after watching this it really sinks in how much is around..
It’s so insane to see Tom at perrenporth, I have so many nostalgic memories there as a kid going there every summer, playing in a river that runs through the beach and learning to body board. Never found any Lego though, shame, finding Lego on a beach with my cousin would have been the best day of our lives when we were 10
Gotta love that Tracey not wanting to be on camera didn't stop her from contributing and thanks to Tom for not setting the bar at what people expect.
They should make cleaning the beach a kind of tourist attraction. Something like 'keep as much plastic as you'd like and deposit the rest in a bin to be recycled as a filler in cement for paving roads or sidewalks and making bricks'.
Regular bricks or Lego bricks?
@@abcdef-qk6jf Making a side walk would be fine. But anything load bearing i wouldn't trust. look at china's buildings that fall apart because they add filler stuff to construction material.
Wouldn't even make a dent in the amount of plastic trash still out in the ocean. More will just wash ashore.
@@rum-ham If a lot of people make a small dent a larger dent is made, and if lots and lots of people make a larger dent it makes a difference
@@masonsykes2240 yes
This is really concerning and is a problem that needs to be addressed. Thank you for sharing this through such a nice video
I on e found a lego piece in the middle of the Mojave Desert in California , it's amazing how plastic has found it's way everywhere as a relatively recent invention.
Thirty years ago on a mangrove Island in the lower keys I found a cove covered with light bulbs. Most were American but there were German, Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian bulbs also. The arching mangrove roots only allowed certain size floating objects into the cove. I would guess at least 500 bulbs.
Not a very bright idea to throw them out eh
@@w8m4n
Bruh lmao
I have no idea what you're talking about, or which herb you have been smoking.
This was really interesting! In truth it’s wild to me though that Tom has ever been to a beach before and *not* noticed that it’s absolutely teaming with plastic everywhere. At this point it’s just a sad fact of life.
It really depends on where you go. The closest beach to me regularly have planks coming from the sea, others I have seen nothing at, yet others have some plastic ice-cream spoons but nothing else.
And the saddest part is a fair fraction of what you pick up and send off to the landfill is going to end up back in the ocean.
There is actually a good chance that the exact plastic you pick up end in the ocean again
how would it end up back into the ocean who puts landfill on a beach
@@captainsupermaket8003 doesn't have to be on or even near a beach, a slight breeze is enough to blow most plastic parts off a landfill
@@Krokoklemmee ahh yes land fil coverd with soil or plastic sheeting could get blown by a gust of wind
This is true but almost all plastic can be recycled so shouldn’t be in the landfill
The fact i live 20-30 minutes from here upsets but also delights me.
Thanks Tom
My names Thomas
@@VeryTastySoup87 thanks thomas
@@gedemartha9534 no problem
I’m from the south of NZ and remember taking a friend from Europe to a local beach and her being shocked at how there was no rubbish / plastic. Really makes me appreciate it and worry about how it will (and is) change
Same in Patagonia. Pacific coast is cleaner than Atlantic (fewer cities), but its matter of time to ruining the shorelines.
My father used to work for the maxi trimaran Groupama 3, and when it capsize near the coast of NZ, and you guys are so protective of your environment (and that's awesome) that they had to go and find EVERY bit of carbonfiber and plastic that washed on shores. The capsized happened in 2008 and to this day we still have 3-4 meters of the carbon fiber mast in our backyard, probably gonna make it into some furniture.
Take them to fox glacier river and their opinion will change
NZ is one of those places worth escaping to.
It's because all the Australian and NZ plastic washes up on south East Asian and Pacific island beaches
Small story: Our family has a tradition, where we spend new year in denmark for a week and walks on the beach are a big part of that. The german word for trash etc. that you find on the beach is "Strandgut". The word "gut" means good in german but all that garbage really isnt so we decided to rename it "Strandschlecht" with "schlecht" simply meaning bad.
Dat is goed voor je
nice play on words, but just to make clear to anyone not speaking German, the word "gut" does not only mean "good", but as a noun "Gut" also means "goods" in the sense of commodities (similar as in English), that's how the word Strandgut is composed, literally meaning beach goods.
@@TigruArdavi so beach bads? in english looking for interesting finds is "beach combing", but with all the trash it's more like another phrase "dumpster diving."
I do recognize trash in the forests, on the fields where I live, but it's true that you get used to it, even when you are sensitized to it.
When I was on a photo excursion in the Dolomites in northern Italy, I was instantly seeing how clean the mountains are. Barely any trash lying around. So sad that we realize how clean places can be compared to others.
I couldn't believe how bad the beaches were on Stewart Island, the small southern island to the south of the mainland in New Zealand. It's extremely isolated with a very small local population but many of the beaches are full of plastic. It just catches plastic from the ocean currents. It's kinda heartbreaking to see.
I’m from NZ , I live in an area called Taranaki. As a teen I lived next to a beach. Every time I took the dog for a walk (daily) I would pick up the plastic. It did make a difference you would notice over time there was less and less . But as soon as you stop picking it up it gets worse again
Seeing the rubbish on the beach makes me feel sick. Melbourne city council did an audit of the trash exiting the city's stormwater drains and they found 40+% was cigarette butts. Almost half of the drain bound trash is from one particular habit. Not only is smoking bad for the health of those who smoke but also of the local environment and those animals which make it home.
I'm a smoker myself and when I don't have an ash tray to get rid of a butt, it's going in my back pocket or my portable tray. I live in Cologne, a city with trash bins (including ash trays) every 25m in some areas. Some people stil can't get fu**ed to throw their trash or butts away properly and I wanna strangle them.
This is why I dislike smokers. If it wasn't bad for the environment, I would feel bad, but when you harm other living things for a moment of pleasure thats when I start getting mad.
@@drafezard7315 not every smoker is the same mate? But we all hate you too.
@@SoupyMittens well it's not up to you now is it?
time to bring back pipe smoking, less pollution that way. Cigarettes are filled with added chemicals too, just smoking straight tobacco from a pipe wouldn't be as bad
That beach is where I tried out surfing once. Expectedly I got knocked down into the water a lot, but what I wasn't expecting was the feeling of the random bits of trash brushing past me that were floating around below the surface.
I was there earlier this year, and it's a common place my family goes. I recognised it as soon as I saw that iconic rock
Well that was an unfortunate twist. At least it was good opportunity to bring awareness to the beach's plastic problem.
When my gf and I go for walks in forests or at the seaside we try to always take a big trash bag with us. It's depressing how quickly it's full on our average walk while we're not even going out of our way to pick stuff up, just picking up what's "right in front of us".…
Good people. Keep it up
You are making a mistake. You are cleaning up after people, go for the source and start throwing the people away.
That is a great idea!
@@Wintercourse That's the issue that you hit spot on right here. The people who throw it away, don't care. And if they see it gets cleaned, they will throw away even MORE.
For example; there's an apartment building near where I used to live. There's some sketchy people who live there, and they literally throw bin bags, old tv's, couches etc over their balcony into the bushes below. What does the local government do? They clean it up, because rats started to appear and it looks bad + smelled bad. Now, these people see that they can just toss whatever they don't want over their balcony AND someone will come clean it up. So what happened next, more bin bags. More old furniture. More trash. More rats.
The only solution to this issue, is by attacking the source. In the example I gave; kick those idiots out of their house, bankrupt them with fines, or even put them in jail if they keep going.
The world needs more people like you mate. Well done 👍
This went from a "Huh, that's neat" moment to a depressing realization of our plastics problem way too fast.
Hi Tom
When I moved to Alaska in 1999, ending up for a incredible time in Elfin cove,
everyone had a plastic toy. The story is some one let them go on purpose! to see the waters ways around the world!
The stupidity of this meaningless experiment, 30 years after, still stands out as an example of how stupid humans are and can still amaze and hurt me years later at the same time.
I heard something similar but it was that a big container of ducks fell into the ocean off of ship the plastic rubber ducks you use in the bath so they started washing up all over the world so scientists started collecting them and using the information of where they ended up to help figure out which way tides go around the world
@@matthewpitre8159 see the book by Donovan Hohn: "Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them"
Came here expecting a cutesy story, ended up with another small amount of despair at the decay of our biosphere and the creeping dread that we aren't changing anything about it.
You're quite correct, it wasn't the story I expected but it was a very well told story none the less. Fascinating about the Lego. In Australia we have "Clean Up Australia Day" where everybody can come together and spend the day cleaning various areas of the countryside, roads and beaches or just their local communities. It's a great public event once a year that gives people of all ages and backgrounds the chance to get to know each other while doing some good for the community. Hundreds of tonnes of waste are collected every year. I wonder why more countries don't do that?
I love cleanup Australia Day.
In America we have earth day but it doesn't look like it's as celebrated as the Australian equivalent, at least where I live
@@lilyhawthorne1196 We do Earth Day as well, but it's mostly centred around reducing energy consumption, and recycling, rather than something like clean up aus day, which is like massive efforts into physically reducing trash. Earth day has some of those components - but the really major clear ones are things like Melbourne's CBD going dark, and similar.
Where I live, there are yearly communal clean-up days. Often, there's food afterward. I often participated in the village I grew up in.
Some people in Germany do earth day. Like geocachers or my paddle boat club.
I've had a similar experience in Iceland. I drove to a really remote beach on the Reykjanes peninsula, far away from where any cars or tourists would go and the beaches there were littered with tons and tons of plastic. Tons of fishing nets and huge plastic tons were among the trash too. It's sad to see pristine nature littered with trash that will survive all of us.
what's more depressing is that you can spend hours picking it up, but there is a high chance it'll just end up back in there
As someone who was raised in a house so close to the sea that you can fish from the bathroom or kitchen windows, this isn't a surprise. There is CONSTANTLY all kinds of plastic washing up even up here in Scotland, in the more sheltered sea lochs, where it's harder for the general ocean plastics to get in... there's so much plastic waste from the fish farms in the loch and just yesterday after a walk along the beach with the dogs i brought back a bunch of tubs and containers for cleaning product and nylon ropes/strings/nets and a few of these plastic dagger looking things that are used in the fish nets and mussel farms in the loch.
Make it 🫵🏻 life’s passion and mission to live plastic free…
@@nigel900 I'm afraid I've got many more pressing issues. 🤷
@@jamisojo Just offering a simple solution to a wordy complaint…
♫ Pappa told Mama and Laura told Nick, You can clean a beach if you do it brick by brick ♫
Henry Salvia & Kathleen Enright Salvia - (Lego island was my childhood.)
Clam oyster and lego cockles!
@@plumtucker9514 mine as well
Brick by brick, tock by tick!
@@FooPanda No matter how thin, no matter how thick.
I saw somewhere recently that beach clean-ups are actually a good idea because quite a lot of rubbish does stay close to the coast so removing it does make a difference.
Really wished i lived closer to this beach
This is so depressing. Our situation with the planet is really dire.
But its free lego
Honestly though, I feel as though there is too much plastic to clean up anytime soon
I have a pair of Lego dragons, dubbed Albert and Renoir (and a few other bits and pieces of beach Lego) recovered from Whitsands Bay in South Cornwall, also from the Toyio Express deposit. But, aside from the cuteness - plastics and microplastics are an enormous problem for our marine environments.
We've all heard someone say, don't take pebbles from the beach because if everyone took one there'd be none left. Take plastic from the beach though! This lady is doing a tremendous job and could do with some help!
pebbles should be fine. I'd be more worried about sea shells
Never heard of that. I like my cool rocks.
Take plastic from the beach, but even if everyone took as much as they possibly could it would still not be enough, that's how bad the situation is, and it's only getting worse and worse |:
@@LordDragox412 doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our share to help though
I spent 2 weeks in a condo on a beach in Florida visiting a friend. Every single day a volleyball would wash up on the shore , it was so common to find things on the beach.