By Sarah Currie-Halpern
The new documentary Plastic People doesn’t sugarcoat the microplastics crisis.
It does the opposite, in fact. Directed by Ziya Tong and Ben Addelman, the film offers a broad and sobering depiction of the origins and extent of the crisis. The filmmakers rightly assume that much of their audience doesn’t realize just how bad the situation is, and the film sets out to rectify that in no uncertain terms.
Context is key, so Plastic People first teases apart the complex tangle of factors that have led us to the current moment. It breaks down the history of plastic production beginning in the early 20th century and highlights the critical shift in the 1950s, when plastic manufacturers started mass producing single-use plastics in pursuit of ever-increasing profits. Its timeline ends in the present, when the decreasing demand for oil is pushing corporations to ramp up plastic production to maintain their bottom lines.
Faceless corporations, however, aren’t the main storytellers here. The film follows co-director and science journalist Ziya Tong as she gives samples of her own blood and tissue to various labs, using herself as a guinea pig to determine how much the average person is affected by microplastics. The findings are harrowing. Her mission is interspersed with interviews with a wide array of people fighting a global problem: an environmental researcher in Turkey dealing with littered beaches and contaminated soil, a waterkeeper in Texas whose estuaries have been devastated by plastic production waste dumping, a permanently disabled ex-employee of one such production plant, and an Italian doctor researching microplastics in the human reproductive system. The film lets them talk, and what they have to say is shocking.
The film pulls no punches in identifying the culprit. We arrived at this point by way of corporate greed. Scientists can’t even study exactly what’s in the plastic filling our bodies because those ingredients are protected trade secrets. In short, a handful of business executives are poisoning the human race to keep profits up. There is no getting around the ruthless capitalist greed at the core of this problem, and Plastic People contends that the microplastic crisis can’t be addressed without In short, microplastics have become not only part of our environment but part of all of us. Our bodies no longer contain strictly organic material. Plastic is everywhere, and it’s entered into our brain matter, lungs, and bloodstream. It’s found in placentas and breastmilk. Increasingly linked to cancer and infertility, the consequences of the microplastic crisis are already disastrous yet only just beginning to be understood confronting this economic reality. Plastic People is an incredibly timely and powerful film. No matter your level of familiarity with the crisis, it’s nothing short of essential viewing.
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