Do the preparation task first. Then watch the video and do the exercise. Remember you can read the transcript at any time.
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Narrator: I remember the first time I saw a blue whale.
Man on boat: Look, look! (… Wow!)
Narrator: I’d followed them since childhood.
Diver: Where do you think it’s from? Is it from a ship?
Narrator: I could see plastic everywhere.
Every year 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into our oceans
Presenter: We were in what we thought was a relatively pristine environment. I started to wonder what was happening in oceans elsewhere on the planet.
A journalist who loves the ocean
Narrator: Growing up, my world was the ocean. It’s where I feel the most spiritual.
And a champion who dives below
Diver: As a free diver, it was a place where I proved myself to myself. Finally have the opportunity to pay the sea back.
A crisis with global stakes
Narrator: Only a fraction of the plastic that we produce is recycled.
Man 2 on boat: This is never going to degrade. It’s got nowhere to go.
Narrator: It’s something that these animals are forced to endure because it was man made and we put it into their environment.
Diver: The record is two hundred and seventy-six pieces of plastic inside one ninety-day-old chick. If the plastics are in the food chain for the dolphin then they're also in our food chain.
Lady on boat: Exactly!
Narrator: Communities are built on these landfill sites … So sweet potatoes, corn, sugar cane, all growing on forty years of garbage.
Do you have anything not wrapped in plastic?
To save our future
Narrator: We have to make our life better for our kids' children.
We need a wave of change
Narrator: Change is possible! It starts with us!
- A Plastic Ocean
Do you use a lot of plastic? What do you think we can do, as individuals, to help improve the problem of having too much plastic in our oceans?