Trashed (2012)

Charles Moore: Self

Photos 

Quotes 

• Jeremy Irons : So when a fish eats plastic, what, what does it ingest? I mean, if we were to eat that fish, would it be - would we just cut out the plastic from its stomach?

  Charles Moore : Well, uh, we've all grown up with this idea, since it's part of our food delivery system, that plastic is inert. We think of plastic as not transferring anything to the food because we get our milk in plastic, we get our yogurt in plastic, we get our meat in plastic, and we really wouldn't like it if we had some concept that plastic was bioactively transferring chemicals to the food that were a problem for our body. Turns out that's actually what's occurring. And in the ocean, it's not only the compounds that have been mixed into the plastic at the time of manufacture, but it's the compounds that have been absorbed by the plastic as they float in the ocean.

• Charles Moore : Releasing bad chemicals into the atmosphere doesn't mean they stay up in the atmosphere. They condense into the ocean. Creatures in the ocean then take them into their bodies. That starts the biomagnification process. This is why the whales are having difficulty reproducing. They're the sentinel, they're the canaries in the coal mine, they're the harbingers of what's going to happen to us. There may only be a few, uh, generations before human beings won't be able to reproduce, and plastic floating on the ocean is nature's way of telling us to get after a problem.