We Are All Plastic People Now: A Documentary of Global Concern

 

by Nancy Corson Carter

In the fall of 2024, my local earth care group showed “We Are All Plastic People Now,” a fifty-six-minute documentary available on PBS for free, “for community events as well as university screenings.” As we watched four generations of a family be tested for plastics in their bodies, we were confronted with the unsettling reality of danger to human health and the environment.

What to do? First, we wrote a letter for us and others to send:

Dear Senators and Representatives,

We have just seen the documentary “We Are All Plastic People Now.” We are deeply concerned with what is shown in it for human beings as well as for wildlife. That’s why we’re seeking your support for the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act (S. 2337, H.R. 7634), reintroduced by Representative Mike Levin (D-CA-49) in 03/12/2024, which would stop the dumping of plastic nurdles into our waterways and their spread into more expansive environments of life on Earth.

Nurdles are tiny plastic pellets that form the raw material for plastic manufacturing—these little bits, like 99% of all plastics, come from fossil fuels. Because nurdles are small, cheap, and easily contaminated, they’re often dumped by plastics manufacturers or spilled during transport. In the United States, clean water organizations and volunteers have documented pellet dumping and spills in Texas, S. Carolina, Pennsylvania, and beyond. A study of 66 beaches in the Great Lakes region found 60 percent contained nurdles.  

Once plastic enters our waterways, it is easy for animals to mistake it for food. Eighty kinds of seabirds and every sea turtle species have ingested plastic, and concentrations of microplastics have significantly increased in freshwater fish in the Chicago region. Animals who eat plastic can starve to death, and plastic pellets can also absorb toxic chemicals, including DDT, PCBs, and mercury. It’s easy to see that easy pathways are open to include human beings.

Plastic pellets are extremely difficult to clean up once they reach our waterways, and often, polluters are not held accountable. One example: In Louisiana, 743 million pellets were spilled from a container ship in the Port of New Orleans. It took weeks to begin clean-up while agencies and companies debated who was responsible, by which point a local expert estimated as many as 75 percent of the pellets had already swept downstream.

We need to protect clean water and put wildlife and human beings over waste. The Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act would do just that by banning the dumping of plastic pellets into our waterways. 

Congress must act before the problem gets any worse. Pellets dumped into our waterways are contaminating the streams and rivers Americans enjoy for fishing, swimming, and recreation, and an estimated 10 trillion plastic pellets flow into the ocean each year.

We urge you to support the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act to protect, in short, our lives!

Signed by our group

When the group urged others to join us in sending the letter, there were high hopes that the UN’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee-5 held in Busan, Republic of Korea, from November 25 to December l, 2024, would develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution. 

However, the thousands of meeting participants representing member states, civil society, industry, academia, indigenous peoples, local governments, and others, like ourselves, were disappointed. No agreement was reached, so an extra session to continue negotiations is planned for sometime in 2025.

The issues of production caps, program funding and chemical phaseout lists continue to be hurdles. Unfortunately, countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China, with large oil and petrochemical industries that form the basis of plastics, were major obstacles to a successful plastics treaty. 

At home, the US had some hope for the “Accelerating a Circular Economy for Plastics and Recycling Innovation Act of 2024,” the first comprehensive bipartisan effort by Congress in years to tackle plastic pollution in the United States. Now, in 2025, this is highly unlikely under the Trump administration.  

Though the US has not banned single-use plastics at the federal level, states and cities have taken on this responsibility. As of 2024, 12 states have banned single-use plastic bags: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. California has also passed legislation to ban all plastic bags from grocery stores by 2026.  A notable finding: In 2022, New Jersey banned single-use carryout grocery bags. A study by Freedonia Custom Research found that the use of these bags decreased by over 60%. 

How can we continue to ignore the terrible poisonings and devastations of plastics in our world? Remember the now-famous photo of a baby albatross dead from eating colorful plastics its mother mistook for food? One study estimates that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans. 

We keep alert for encouraging signs in individual nations until global agreements can be reached. Based on the European Union (EU) Single-Use Plastics Directive regulations, Germany will implement a Single-Use Plastics levy for single-use plastics released on the market from 2024, with first payments expected to be due in 2025. The measure aims to reduce waste and stimulate better use of plastic as a resource and is also aligned to broader circular-economy objectives. As a result, producers of single-use plastic items will be responsible for waste management, cleaning, and awareness building. 

Also: Kenya is considered one of the leading countries in banning plastic, particularly plastic bags, with a strict ban implemented in 2017, making it a model for other nations like Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan who have also introduced plastic bag bans in recent years; some other countries with notable plastic bans include France, Taiwan, Canada (certain regions), and, as already mentioned, parts of the United States like California and New York. These countries give us hope for global action. 

In these uncertain times, I try to remember this important quote by a great, courageous American, Martin Luther King:

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."

Nancy Corson Carter, professor emerita of humanities at Eckerd College, has published THREE poetry books, Dragon Poems The Sourdough Dream Kit, and  A Green Bough:  Poems for Renewal (most recent) and three poetry chapbooks. Some of her poems, drawings, and photos appear in her nonfiction book, Martha, Mary, and Jesus: Weaving Action and Contemplation in Daily Life, and in her memoir, The Never-Quite-Ending War: a WWII GI Daughter's Stories. Website: nancycorsoncarter.com