It has been known for a long time that plastic is very harmful to the environment. Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong have edited a film which reveals its effect on our bodies.
“Plastic People” is one of those must-see documentaries about our world. Whenever it is released (it had its premiere this week at SXSW), I would urge you to watch it, to dwell upon its message, to consider what it says about the way microplastics — plastic particles less than 5mm long, though some may be tiny have infiltrated our food, our water, our air and, indeed, ourselves.
For years in environmental filmmaking we have shown the hideousness of landfill sites and asked where all this discarded material will ultimately end up. “Plastic People” has that element too. But its depiction of what plastic does TO us is even more chillingly developed. Yes, plastic is bad news for the planet (which isn’t nothing), but the film’s argument is that it’s also poisoning us FROM the planet: Diabetes, heart disease and cancer can all be caused by breathing or swallowing plastic particles; there’s strong evidence presented here that rising infertility levels are largely down to it as well. It wrecks our hormones; there’s an queasy moment when we see a placenta with plastics in it. This is a horror movie about plastic people. It could easily have been called: “Attack Of The Killer Polymers.”
Do I think it’s alarmist? No. If anything utopian hippie-dippy during its last half-hour (the film lasts 80 minutes) “Plastic People” takes a turn towards imagining itself into a post-plastic world. “We became the first plastic-free community in North America,” says a Bayfield resident as teenagers hand out reusable produce bags and a take-out restaurant owner serves his brussel sprout tacos in plastic free fast food wrappers. “We can sort of turn back the clock, one piece at a time,” says one of the film’s talking heads. Maybe, maybe not. The movie has already made the scary point that plastic is so part of everything we do that the idea we’re going to get rid of it must be a Luddite dream.
Directed by Ben Addelman and co-directed/interviewed by Ziya Tong, “Plastic People” is a fascinating history of plastic itself, how it took over. It began with ivory yes, ivory tusks, in the 19th century they were used to make brushes and all kinds of utensils because ivory was very plastic like. In the early 20th century products like celluloid could mimic ivory’s hardness. Bakelite was an early automobile-age plastic; then in the ’20s and ’30s came the petrochemical companies, which needed something to do with all their processing waste products (that became what we know as modern plastics).
It is not a coincidence that many of the large plastic companies are branches of oil companies. Big Oil and Big Plastic are closely related to each other. For instance, Dow, Mobil, Dupont and other known plastic firms had groups of industrial chemists who developed materials that nobody needed or asked for (except nylons which were in great demand because they could imitate silk stockings which were expensive). Then an enormous amount of plastics was produced during the World War II. And all this led to the ’50s!
The movie shows us edited historic footage from Atomic Age and tells how after WWII shoes were made with plastics for example, fabrics (dacron, orlon), appliances were made with it too; cars and vinyl records, Naugahyde furniture etcetera you name it! When these products achieved certain penetration into middle-class homes there arose such notion as disposables! It was a conscious strategy. That’s when really started taking off at this point in time. Suddenly cups or cigarette lighters became single use items things like that which had always been durable goods before then and Life ran a cover story called “Throwaway Living.” But perhaps nowhere is this more evident than our relationship with bottled water: did you know we buy 1.5 billion plastic bottles every day? Yeah Documentaries like these are full of stats like that one which will make people stop and think about what they’re doing
A word about the word plastic, which is layered with connotations, none of which (like plastic itself) has ever gone away. First, it was this strange new hardened-chemical product. Then it was a shiny durable miracle. Then, in the ’60s, it became a grand metaphor for the fake quality of our lives and for the greedy corporate culture that packaged it. That was “Plastics” of “The Graduate,” and the introduction of the notion that a middle-class rebel like Dustin Hoffman’s Ben could “reject” the world of plastic. There were many eloquent passages written by Norman Mailer about plastic: what it looked and smelled like, what it was doing to our souls and our bodies. What Norman would do with a movie like “Plastic People” yeah, I told you 60 years ago.
If Mailer served as the cautionary bard of New Plastic America, the bard of “Plastic People” is Rick Smith the Canadian environmentalist who co-authored “Slow Death by Rubber Duck. How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health.” In the film he says “‘Microplastics’ are possibly the most serious type of pollutant our society has ever created these invisible particles have been found on highest mountains and deepest ocean sediments and now we’re finding microplastics wherever we look in human body. And once these tiny particles are in our bodies they’re oozing their toxic ingredients on a minute-by-minute basis.”
Every molecule of plastic that has ever been created still exists somewhere on Earth. It doesn’t go away, it just gets smaller and smaller, from bigger to macro to micro to nano plastics. The conversion of oil into polymers has contributed to climate change but since they know they’re facing a world using less fossil fuels all the time anyway so oil companies need another way to keep making money so they have a motivation, says Smith, to “increase the plasticization of human life” because that’s where they gonna put it oil companies are talking about tripling the production of plastic over the next few decades.
You probably know some of this already. But one of the great values of a documentary like “Plastic People” is that it takes an issue you think you’ve grasped and colors it in. It takes your scattershot information and fuses it into a fuller vision of the past and the future.
Watch Plastic People (2024) For Free On Putlocker.