Must see this when it comes out. If it receives the appropriate media attention, this could be a very influential film.
The first picture is of the carcass of a Laysan Albatross chick. It’s obvious what killed the chick: the fact that the only thing in its stomach was garbage.
Albatrosses fly hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles in search of food for their chicks. They look for squid and fish eggs floating on the surface of the water. Unfortunately, plastic floats, and Laysan albatross are particularly attracted to it. They eat it, mistaking if for food, then they fly back to the nest and feed bottle caps, lighters, fishing lures and other pieces of plastic to their young. The chicks starve to death, with stomachs full of plastic.
The second picture is of the contents of a different chick that was found to have greater than a half pound of plastic in its stomach.
(source)
Oceanic trash has been growing tenfold every decade since 1950. The two pictures shown above are of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is a part of the ocean twice the size of Texas that is just, well, garbage. Its biggest constituents are plastics, which can take hundreds of years to degrade. For every pound of plankton in the ocean, there are six pounds of non-biodegradable plastics.
