In a closed-door session, Craig Leeson, the director of the 2016 documentary A Plastic Ocean, answered questions from Gen.T honourees about the world’s plastic problem
We are obsessed with plastic. More than 300 million tonnes of plastic is produced globally—half of which is designed to be used just once.
What's more, 90 percent of all plastic produced isn't recycled, meaning at least 8 million tonnes of plastic waste ends up in the ocean every year. At a minimum, plastic can take over 400 years to degrade—and even in its reduced state the plastic is likely to have degraded into toxic microplastic particles, which end up in our food. Our throwaway culture is threatening not only our natural world, but our food systems and health.
The global dependency on single-use plastics has become so ingrained into every part of our everyday lives that attempting to untangle from the endless plastics is undeniably hard. "There's no easy solution to plastic pollution," says filmmaker Craig Leeson during this week's Cloud Talk virtual event.
Leeson is the man behind the award-winning 2016 documentary, A Plastic Ocean. The film captures the full extent of our plastic plight as he travelled to 20 locations around the world with a team of researchers and scientists over a four-year period.
In this week's Cloud Talk, which took the form of a virtual roundtable discussion, 10 Gen.T honourees from the sustainability industry spoke with Leeson and asked questions about his experiences and learnings. From the importance of empathetic storytelling to the role financial institutions play in the climate change solution, here are Leeson's answers to the honourees' questions.
Climate Change Is Not A Slow Process
Melati Wijsen
Co-founder, Bye Bye Plastic Bags
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us that governments can adapt to situations like this very quickly. However, it’s not the case when it comes to climate change or plastic pollution. Why is this so?
CL: Generally, governments are not proactive, they are reactive. They wait until they receive pressure, and this may be from consumers, lobby groups, corporates, and so on.
Human health, as I've found out, is one of the toughest and most expensive issues for a government to tackle. When I was advising governments around the world following the release of A Plastic Ocean, I had difficulty getting their attention until I started talking about the dangers that the chemicals found in plastic posed to our next generation, and how they are causing cancers, diabetes and other health issues.
In my opinion, we also don't see governments acting quickly on the climate crisis because it isn’t a tangible thing. It's not like a virus; we can't see the coronavirus, but we can see the effects of it almost immediately. People get sick, they need to be hospitalised.
Climate change can alter our environment very quickly as well, but there’s still the perspective that it is a very slow process, and therefore not affecting us immediately.
Governments also tend to be run by older men, who are looking 20 to 30 years into the future because that's as far as they can see their [own] future. They're not considering the future of the next generation. This is something I address in my next film, The Last Glaciers.
We also see governments making five, 10, 15-year plans because they are thinking about businesses. Businesses need time to transition when there’s a change in government regulation and legislation; they need time to spend capital on new equipment, and time for design, research and development. Nonetheless, we need to see more urgency here.
See also: What Matters To Me: Melati Wijsen, Co-Founder Of Bye Bye Plastic Bags