Soups of plastic in our seas: An ecological disaster which caused Italy to impose a total ban on plastic bags in 2011. Out of 15,000 EU citizens questioned, 70% said they were against these bags. In the EP the overuse of plastic bottles has attracted the attention of MEPs. EuroparlTV has looked at the impact on the environment of this material which is part of our everyday lives. This soup of waste is in the Mediterranean. It's nothing compared to the trash vortex found in the North Pacific in the 1990s, a swirl of waste over an area of 700,000 to 2 million square kilometres, or three to six times the size of France. Although comparable to a continent in size it's invisible to the naked eye despite its 3 million pieces of plastic per square kilometre. The microparticles float near the surface. Thilo, a marine biologist, saw it for himself on a Greenpeace expedition. You can't really explore it from space, for example. You can't see it like the Chinese Wall. But if you are there and you dive in the area and you are, say, five metres under the surface and you look up in the sunlight, then you see all the colourful sprinkles of the plastic. 90% of this waste is thought to be plastic, like this bag which will have made a long journey to end up here. Part of consumers' everyday lives for about 50 years, each plastic bag contains about two centilitres of oil and takes up to five centuries to completely disintegrate. Bruno set up Expédition MED a few years ago. With his crew he sails the Mediterranean to analyse its microplastic pollution. We met him before his next trip this summer. This is an insidious and invisible pollution because you can't really see it with the naked eye. When you sail in the Mediterranean you think it's still beautiful, blue and clean. Unfortunately we are facing a very major source of pollution. Bruno lives in Brittany, a region known for being one of the cleanest in France. But when we arrive at the jetty, we come across a boat full of rubbish. Jean-Stéphane is back from an activity to make a company's employees more aware of sustainable development. We had a little challenge to bring back the rubbish with the longest life span. Plastic, bottles... Telephone or bank cards last a very long time but you don't find many of them. People don't throw them away on the beach! It just shows that they can take care of things when they want to. Bruno is shocked at the result. 30 people in one hour have filled eight baskets. Philippe heads an association that cleans the beaches in the Morbihan, Brittany. There are sweet wrappers - that's everyone. That's from boating, obviously. That buoy has been floating loose for quite a while. And I've never seen this before. A whole roll of netting for making oyster-farming sacks under the trees. That glove is used in oyster-farming. And this is a bit of a wreck. Today they're not picking it up. Bruno even wonders if it's worth picking up rubbish at all. The problem is earlier on and I think it should be solved at its source. Isn't it in the end the problem of the plastics manufacturers? The expedition leader then shows us the samples collected and analysed by the lab network he has set up. Here we have some polystyrene, fragments of plastic, we also have some flakes of paint from boats. We often find that. In certain places that have been sampled you find more microplastics than plankton. Plastics are doubly dangerous at sea. Microparticles can be ingested by fish and large pieces can injure animals before they decompose. This is the first major damage, because about 1 million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals die from this waste every year. We've seen terrible examples, with sea mammals, seabirds, as well as fish or whales. This summer Bruno will go to the Mediterranean to map the sea's microdebris, to assess the level of pollution, and thus alert the authorities. For this expedition he will have eco-volunteers on his boat. The aim is to raise awareness of the harmful effects of plastic.
EuroparlTV video ID: cca1abd1-5873-46f4-acd9-a089008eb18c
