VICE (2013) s05e07 Episode Script
Life Under Sharia & Plastic Oceans
1 Shane Smith: This week on Vice: Indonesia's internal struggle over Sharia.
(man speaking foreign language) Suroosh Alvi: This is the Sharia police division.
We're about to go on patrol with them, as they make sure people are abiding by Islamic law.
Smith: And then, the monumental effort to clean up the plastic in our ocean.
This is the very first time that the Ocean Cleanup guys have had their product actually in the water.
What we're seeing here is just one segment, and eventually, the thing will be about a thousand times larger than this.
We're finding plastic in Antarctic species.
So, this is really a global issue.
(theme music playing) Yeung: Go! Go! Go! Refugee: We are not animals! Sharia is a strict code of Islamic law based on the Quran, which has been in the news a lot lately because it's the underlying philosophy of ISIS, who believe that all countries in the world should practice this type of governance.
But adherence to Sharia has also been gaining ground in other countries.
Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, usually known for its moderate brand of Islam, is now experimenting with Sharia in the province of Aceh.
Suroosh Alvi went to Indonesia to investigate.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: So, it's Wednesday night in Aceh.
This is the Sharia police division behind me, and we're about to go on patrol with them as they go around town and make sure people are abiding by Islamic law.
If they see couples that are just sitting together, they'll talk to them, make sure that they are a married couple.
So everybody is getting on their motorcycles and running away.
(indistinct police radio transmission) The buzzkill division.
Sharia police (siren wailing) killing good vibes.
Alvi: The strict Islamic code of Sharia is most common in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, but now it's taking root in parts of Indonesia, a historically secular country.
Previously common practices like socializing between unmarried men and women, drinking alcohol, or even wearing Western clothing, are violations of the law.
Unfortunately, this interpretation of Sharia targets some communities more than others.
Alvi: We've read a lot about the Sharia police going after gay couples, and people having gay sex.
How do you actually patrol? (speaking foreign language) Alvi: Prejudice against Aceh's LGBTQ population, already widespread in the region, has now effectively become state-sanctioned.
These two teens were arrested for homosexual behavior and agreed to speak to us about life under Sharia.
What is life for you like here in Aceh? (speaking foreign language) The Indonesian Ulama Council released a fatwa against the LGBT community proposing punishments ranging from a hundred canings to the death penalty for individuals accused of homosexual acts.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: While the death penalty has only been proposed by Aceh's most extreme hardliners, those caught violating Sharia law face harsh and very public repercussions.
Alvi: Why are you here? Why did they put you in this cell? (speaking foreign language) Are they gonna punish you by caning you, in front of everyone? Alvi: These taxi drivers were jailed for nearly a month for violating Sharia, awaiting the same fate that people across Aceh are becoming accustomed to.
(man speaking foreign language) (crowd cheers) Alvi: But even the executioners of Sharia law have mixed feelings about it.
You're a moral enforcer.
Do you see this job as an honor? (speaking foreign language) Alvi: The call for enforcement of Sharia is actually relatively new to Aceh, and was amplified in the wake of one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history, which many here interpreted as a religious reckoning.
Alvi: We're standing in front of the grand mosque in Aceh, which was built in the late 1800s.
When the tsunami happened in 2004, everything was destroyed around the mosque for miles, and this is one of the only structures that survived.
And this event was a turning point in terms of the evolution of Sharia in Aceh.
Alvi: The tsunami killed over 230,000 people but also forced the end of a decades-long civil war between Aceh separatists and the Indonesian central government.
Aceh was given partial autonomy as part of a peace agreement, allowing them to enforce Sharia as the law of the land.
Syahrizal Abbas was instrumental in upholding Sharia in Aceh and explained its evolution to us.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: Abbas and fellow hardliners believe the tsunami was the wrath of God, punishing the people of Aceh for living in sin, and that the way to fix their society was through punishment for these moral crimes.
So, if you're caught having gay sex, you could get caned up to a hundred times? Mm-hmm.
That seems a little extreme, no? Yeah, uh (speaking foreign language) Really? Does it appear that the behavior is being modified of the population by the implementation of caning? (speaking foreign language) Alvi: As the citizens of Aceh find themselves increasingly under this control, Sharia may be gaining traction in the rest of Indonesia, as a recent poll found up to 72 percent of Indonesian Muslims support Sharia law.
And with a recent surge in attacks targeting minority Buddhists and Christians, there's a growing fear that as Sharia gains strength in the Indonesian capital, the country's long-standing legacy of secularism is at risk.
In the capital of Jakarta, we spoke to Islamic preacher Syamsudin Uba about why he supports the spread of Sharia.
We just spent a few days in Aceh to look at the Sharia system that they have there.
What is your view on the Sharia system that they have implemented in Aceh? (speaking foreign language) (woman speaking foreign language) What was the last thing you said? (woman answers in English) (speaking in English) Alvi: To clarify what I thought he meant by Syria and Iraq, I asked him about some cities that until now had been exclusively controlled by ISIS.
Are you referring to the Sharia that is in Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq, and in Raqqa in Syria? Are those the cities that you're talking about? (speaking foreign language) May I see? Yikes.
What does it say? (speaking foreign language) (thunder booming) I said "Islamic Caliphate" and then (laughing) Good timing.
Alvi: And this isn't the first time that he's pledged support for Al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.
In March of 2014, the preacher led a rally of hundreds of people encouraging them to join the Islamic State.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: And he was arrested and briefly detained for publicly promoting ISIS in 2015.
What you're preaching is that there should be the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Indonesia in which the leader will be Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
(speaking foreign language) Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is leader of an organization that perpetrated attacks in Paris, California.
Baghdadi's organization is responsible for countless atrocities and violations of human rights, and death, and rape, and lots of bad shit.
So, I'm having trouble reconciling your pitch.
(speaking foreign language) Don't you think what you're preaching is creating a psychological environment that makes it very easy to take that next step and to pick up a gun, and-- and fight? Alvi: While Uba maintains that his messaging is that Indonesians should not engage in violence or radicalism, hundreds of Indonesians have left the country to join ISIS in Syria (sirens wailing) (explosion) and ISIS attacks have recently struck very close to home.
And as the Indonesian government attempts to stop further attacks, along with ISIS recruitment attempts, it's clear that there's a battle for hearts and minds raging in the world's most populous Muslim country, with extremists like Uba opposing activists like Alissa Wahid, the daughter of Indonesia's former president, who is fighting for the secular ideals Indonesia was founded on.
Does the existence of a Sharia state create an environment of religious intolerance? The Sharia should live in the personal and everyday life of a Muslim.
It should not be formalized.
Because the fundamental of Islam is belief that God creates people from different types, from different background to help each other.
We're the fundamentalists, not them.
They're the extremists.
(shouting in foreign language) One of Vice's first-ever documentaries focused on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous mass of plastic swirling in the Pacific Ocean that some have estimated to be larger than the state of Texas.
Now, what we found was tons of discarded plastic breaking down into a mix of debris and chemical sludge.
Thomas Morton: We're nowhere near land.
We're nowhere near any other ships.
We've changed the composition of ocean water almost a thousand miles from shore.
Smith: It's always been Vice's mission to keep following the issues even after they fade from the news cycle.
And today there are some major new developments in this story.
So we sent Isobel Yeung to see if there might finally be some workable solutions for saving the world's oceans.
Yeung: We are just driving towards the very southern tip of Hawaii's big island, which, not so long ago, was an absolute paradise.
But this one-time paradise has become a magnet for the ocean's plastic.
All you can see as far as the horizon is the remains of human refuse.
This could be from Asia, it could be from the mainland, America, and a lot of this stuff comes from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Yeung: The Garbage Patch, also known as the North Pacific Gyre, is where ocean currents converge to create a concentration of plastics.
A lot of the plastic at Kamilo Beach has been circulating in the ocean for so long it's been broken down into tiny particles, or micro-plastics.
Which are nearly impossible to clean up.
How frequently do you do these beach clean-ups? You know, we've done 32 so far this year.
We're gonna pick this stuff up and come back down here next week, and it could potentially be just as dirty, if not worse.
Yeung: This plastic doesn't just ruin a day at the beach.
It's estimated that nearly 700 marine species have encountered man-made debris.
At Hawaii's Oceanic Institute Dr.
David Hyrenbach is studying how plastic is becoming a permanent part of our ecosystem.
So this bird was incidentally killed-- Whoa, that is a beast! Then you see the hooks coming out of the neck there.
- Oh.
This is the gizzard.
(indistinct) so the heart's out of the way.
Let me just (gasps) I see some plastic! - Whoa.
Look at that.
- Okay.
Yeung: A 2015 study predicted that as many as 90 percent of all seabirds worldwide now consume plastic as part of their diet.
How far do you think most of this plastic has traveled from? It could be coming from anywhere.
I mean, we're finding plastic in Antarctic species.
You know, places where people don't really go.
So this is really a global issue.
Yeung: And it's not just birds eating this plastic.
Oceanographer Dr.
Anela Choy is studying the plastics impact on the entire ocean food chain.
This is a lancetfish, and what's great about these guys is they sample the environment for us.
So, we sample the stomachs from different locations in the ocean um, take a look at what-- what they're feeding on.
Whoa! Look what we have here.
Whoa! Wow.
What the hell is that? That's a giant piece of plastic.
Oh, God.
These pieces of plastic are made out of petroleum and other chemical contaminants.
When pieces of plastic are in the water column, they sort of act as little sponges.
They actually accumulate toxins, and then they get ingested by animals, and so, we're still learning about the chemistry of what happens when fish like that eats it.
How out of hand is this situation getting? Animals at almost every single trophic level of the food web in the open ocean are ingesting plastics.
Yeah, it's the biggest habitat on the planet.
Mm-hmm.
- And if there's plastic throughout that habitat, it's gonna have some really serious impacts.
Yeung: Many of the species humans eat prey on lancetfish.
Meaning plastic is likely finding its way up the food chain and into our dinners.
(indistinct chattering) Are you worried that any of that plastic might find its way into the fish? Of course this happens.
You know, I mean, how are we gonna stop it? I don't know.
It's coming from all over the world.
So, what happens when you gut the fish on the boat? You find like a plastic bag, or like, bottle caps, things like that.
Wow.
You are what you eat depending on what the fish ingests, so it's probably not the best for the fish, and for you.
Yeung: Plastic in our world's oceans is reaching crisis levels.
Since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered in 1997, four additional patches have been found across the globe, accumulating more and more plastic.
We spoke with Dominic Waughray at the World Economic Forum, who is tracking the problem on a global scale.
Plastic is one of the most pervasive human-made materials that we have.
We have the problem that we make a lot of plastic.
We kind of use it once, or at the most twice, and then we get rid of it, and ultimately, it can only go into three places.
It can be burnt, it can be landfilled, or it can be dumped, and dumping often then means the sea.
Don't forget with the mass urbanization that we're going through a lot of this is in coastal areas.
Most big cities are by the sea.
Eight million tons of that plastic goes into the ocean every year.
That's about an equivalent of one garbage truck every minute.
That one garbage truck will become four garbage trucks by 2050 or so.
If we carry on that rate, there will be more plastic, by weight, in the ocean than fish.
So as a human, sort of, conundrum, this, surely, can't be good.
What is the wake-up call? Yeung: With 165 million tons of plastic already in the ocean, and more being dumped in every day, it's hard to imagine how we would even begin to clean this up.
But there is someone who is attempting to do just that.
When talking about environmental issues, I think a common response is, "Well, that's, pfft, a long way off.
That's for our children to worry about.
" So, hello, here I am.
Yeung: Since Boyan was 16, he's been on an environmental mission.
Now, six years later, he's crowd-funded millions of dollars to start his own company: The Ocean Cleanup.
Along with a team of top engineers and scientists, their goal is simple: to rid the world's oceans of plastic.
We caught up with Boyan at the Ocean Cleanup offices and plastic laboratory.
So, this is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
This is the concentration of plastic, - these little specks here? - Right.
So, there are-- there are five of them in the world.
- Mm-hmm.
And because the North Pacific is most polluted, we'll start with that.
We're trying all these different variables, like how large should it be, what angle should it be, to get to a system that collects most plastic for as little cost as possible.
Yeung: Boyan and his team spent years mapping the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to understand how to go about cleaning it up.
So talk me through how the Ocean Cleanup works.
So really the problem is that although there is a lot of plastic, it's spread out over a very large area, so you first need to concentrate it before you get it out.
So, what we propose is to deploy sort of an artificial coastline, where there is no coastline, So we have this very long array of floating barriers that is anchored to the sea bed.
The ocean current does the hard work for us, brings the plastic towards it, and concentrates in the center.
And once it's in the center, it's so dense you can hardly see the water, and that's the spot where we can then easily take it out, and store it before shipping it to land for recycling.
Over 95 percent of the mass is still in those big objects, which is so urgent to clean up, because all that big stuff will become micro-plastics over the next few decades, which is the problem.
Why has no one else attempted to clean up on the scale that you're proposing? People assume that a complex problem requires a complex solution, but I think the simpler a solution can be, the better.
When I started this, I didn't know whether it would work, but I thought, considering the scale of the problem, that it was just important to at least try.
Yeung: After months spent perfecting the design, Boyan's invention is ready for the ultimate test.
(applause) To find out whether it can survive in the ocean.
Welcome to the Ocean Cleanup's prototype unveiling.
Boyan and his team have got their first prototype in the sea going out today.
So, we're gonna go and see the progress in getting it out.
And there's going to be tests for all weather sorts, which is the perfect place to do it here on the North Sea.
It gets pretty stormy out here.
(speaking foreign language) (man over radio answers in foreign language) The conditions in the North Sea are pretty severe.
Now, with the first minor storm, we'll get forces higher than during a hundred-year storm in the Pacific Ocean.
It's pretty safe to say that if it survives here, it will survive anywhere.
Yeung: But to scale the array to be scooping up the Pacific Garbage Patch, Boyan has a way to go.
What we're seeing here is just one segment, and eventually, the thing will be about a thousand times larger than this.
- Wow.
- And then somewhere in the center of the giant V-shaped array, we would have these conveyor belts and pumps to extract the plastic.
I mean, 100 kilometers, it's very large for a manmade structure, but it's peanuts compared to the size of the Pacific Ocean.
Yeung: Assuming everything does go to plan, what's the next step? We should be ready to deploy the first full operational system uh, by late 2017.
So that will be the first time we're actually removing plastic from the ocean at a large scale.
And then, if that goes well, we should be ready to start the largest cleanup in history by 2020.
So, this is just the beginning, it's not the end.
Yeung: While Boyan works towards hitting the next milestone of his experiment, he's simultaneously planning what to do with the degraded plastic he's able to collect and how to make it valuable again.
Boyan: This is one of the companies we're working with to actually produce the recycling product, because eventually, this is sort of how we want to finance the whole Ocean Cleanup.
This is a machine, where we put in the flakes Mm-hmm.
so the ground-up ocean plastic objects.
So to get the-- the highest quality of, uh, of plastic we really want to sort it first before recycling it.
Then it should exit here as Ooh! It's coming out like spaghetti.
It's like a pasta machine.
It is exactly as a pasta machine.
Yeung: The process involves chopping up the plastic into tiny beads, known as nurdles.
These are then sold and melted down into the objects we use in everyday life.
So then it's just shredding it up in nuggets? Boyan: Yeah, so this is sort of the whole currency of the plastic industry.
So, car companies buy these nurdles to make their products, and furniture companies use them as well.
So, it's sort of giving ocean plastic a second life.
This is pretty cool to know that this plastic has been around for the last few decades, and could have come from anywhere in the world.
Oh, yeah, and this could have well been some of the first plastic that was ever produced at scale in the '50s and the '60s.
Yeung: While Boyan is recycling ocean plastics into more permanent uses, the vast majority of the world's plastics are never recycled at all.
In fact, even the most commonly used are only recycled 14% of the time.
But at IBM, Dr.
Jeannette Garcia is developing a process called "chemical recycling" that could change how we think about plastics altogether.
How do you see plastic? Is it a big problem or a great invention? I think of plastic as being a great invention, because it permeates our entire life.
Garcia: Plastic is ubiquitous, in everything from shoes, pills, to healthcare, to disposable syringes, and so to try to do away with it completely, is probably not a viable option.
Tell us about chemical recycling and why you think that's the answer.
The main difference is that in mechanical recycling, what you're doing is you're taking the material and you have to shred it down, then melt it down, remold it, and it can only happen a certain number of times before it loses the properties.
Chemical recycling is different, because what you actually do is you take the material, and you chemically react it so it goes back down to its most fundamental unit.
That fundamental unit can then be reacted again back into the same thing or into something different, and we can reach a 100 percent, like, full cycle process.
Yeung: If we can scale this process up, we could take the hundreds of millions of tons of discarded plastics recycle them, and move towards a zero waste economy.
People are gonna start realizing that we can save money, and a lot of money by recycling materials, and so that it makes sense from all standpoints.
We have to start thinking of our landfills as gold mines.
Yeung: With the right approach, and the will to make it happen, all this trash would become valuable again, and solving this mammoth environmental task could create an economic miracle.
Waughray: Economically, if we had to pay for all that plastic, which we could do something better with, between $80 and $120 billion a year that you can make valuable with straight away, effectively we're dumping, but like anything in life, if there's a problem, then there's gonna be opportunity.
We know through history in terms of disruptions in industries or new products that it's kind of innovators and disruptors who kind of take us to the next level.
Boyan: The fact that we now are creating a path in which there is a chance that we can have clean oceans again, that could potentially inspire a lot more people to get involved with this problem.
Boyan: Human history is a long list of things that couldn't be done and then were done.
Really, the challenge in this century is to convert a lifestyle created in a previous century into one that will still be around in the next century.
(man speaking foreign language) Suroosh Alvi: This is the Sharia police division.
We're about to go on patrol with them, as they make sure people are abiding by Islamic law.
Smith: And then, the monumental effort to clean up the plastic in our ocean.
This is the very first time that the Ocean Cleanup guys have had their product actually in the water.
What we're seeing here is just one segment, and eventually, the thing will be about a thousand times larger than this.
We're finding plastic in Antarctic species.
So, this is really a global issue.
(theme music playing) Yeung: Go! Go! Go! Refugee: We are not animals! Sharia is a strict code of Islamic law based on the Quran, which has been in the news a lot lately because it's the underlying philosophy of ISIS, who believe that all countries in the world should practice this type of governance.
But adherence to Sharia has also been gaining ground in other countries.
Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, usually known for its moderate brand of Islam, is now experimenting with Sharia in the province of Aceh.
Suroosh Alvi went to Indonesia to investigate.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: So, it's Wednesday night in Aceh.
This is the Sharia police division behind me, and we're about to go on patrol with them as they go around town and make sure people are abiding by Islamic law.
If they see couples that are just sitting together, they'll talk to them, make sure that they are a married couple.
So everybody is getting on their motorcycles and running away.
(indistinct police radio transmission) The buzzkill division.
Sharia police (siren wailing) killing good vibes.
Alvi: The strict Islamic code of Sharia is most common in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, but now it's taking root in parts of Indonesia, a historically secular country.
Previously common practices like socializing between unmarried men and women, drinking alcohol, or even wearing Western clothing, are violations of the law.
Unfortunately, this interpretation of Sharia targets some communities more than others.
Alvi: We've read a lot about the Sharia police going after gay couples, and people having gay sex.
How do you actually patrol? (speaking foreign language) Alvi: Prejudice against Aceh's LGBTQ population, already widespread in the region, has now effectively become state-sanctioned.
These two teens were arrested for homosexual behavior and agreed to speak to us about life under Sharia.
What is life for you like here in Aceh? (speaking foreign language) The Indonesian Ulama Council released a fatwa against the LGBT community proposing punishments ranging from a hundred canings to the death penalty for individuals accused of homosexual acts.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: While the death penalty has only been proposed by Aceh's most extreme hardliners, those caught violating Sharia law face harsh and very public repercussions.
Alvi: Why are you here? Why did they put you in this cell? (speaking foreign language) Are they gonna punish you by caning you, in front of everyone? Alvi: These taxi drivers were jailed for nearly a month for violating Sharia, awaiting the same fate that people across Aceh are becoming accustomed to.
(man speaking foreign language) (crowd cheers) Alvi: But even the executioners of Sharia law have mixed feelings about it.
You're a moral enforcer.
Do you see this job as an honor? (speaking foreign language) Alvi: The call for enforcement of Sharia is actually relatively new to Aceh, and was amplified in the wake of one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history, which many here interpreted as a religious reckoning.
Alvi: We're standing in front of the grand mosque in Aceh, which was built in the late 1800s.
When the tsunami happened in 2004, everything was destroyed around the mosque for miles, and this is one of the only structures that survived.
And this event was a turning point in terms of the evolution of Sharia in Aceh.
Alvi: The tsunami killed over 230,000 people but also forced the end of a decades-long civil war between Aceh separatists and the Indonesian central government.
Aceh was given partial autonomy as part of a peace agreement, allowing them to enforce Sharia as the law of the land.
Syahrizal Abbas was instrumental in upholding Sharia in Aceh and explained its evolution to us.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: Abbas and fellow hardliners believe the tsunami was the wrath of God, punishing the people of Aceh for living in sin, and that the way to fix their society was through punishment for these moral crimes.
So, if you're caught having gay sex, you could get caned up to a hundred times? Mm-hmm.
That seems a little extreme, no? Yeah, uh (speaking foreign language) Really? Does it appear that the behavior is being modified of the population by the implementation of caning? (speaking foreign language) Alvi: As the citizens of Aceh find themselves increasingly under this control, Sharia may be gaining traction in the rest of Indonesia, as a recent poll found up to 72 percent of Indonesian Muslims support Sharia law.
And with a recent surge in attacks targeting minority Buddhists and Christians, there's a growing fear that as Sharia gains strength in the Indonesian capital, the country's long-standing legacy of secularism is at risk.
In the capital of Jakarta, we spoke to Islamic preacher Syamsudin Uba about why he supports the spread of Sharia.
We just spent a few days in Aceh to look at the Sharia system that they have there.
What is your view on the Sharia system that they have implemented in Aceh? (speaking foreign language) (woman speaking foreign language) What was the last thing you said? (woman answers in English) (speaking in English) Alvi: To clarify what I thought he meant by Syria and Iraq, I asked him about some cities that until now had been exclusively controlled by ISIS.
Are you referring to the Sharia that is in Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq, and in Raqqa in Syria? Are those the cities that you're talking about? (speaking foreign language) May I see? Yikes.
What does it say? (speaking foreign language) (thunder booming) I said "Islamic Caliphate" and then (laughing) Good timing.
Alvi: And this isn't the first time that he's pledged support for Al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.
In March of 2014, the preacher led a rally of hundreds of people encouraging them to join the Islamic State.
(speaking foreign language) Alvi: And he was arrested and briefly detained for publicly promoting ISIS in 2015.
What you're preaching is that there should be the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Indonesia in which the leader will be Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
(speaking foreign language) Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is leader of an organization that perpetrated attacks in Paris, California.
Baghdadi's organization is responsible for countless atrocities and violations of human rights, and death, and rape, and lots of bad shit.
So, I'm having trouble reconciling your pitch.
(speaking foreign language) Don't you think what you're preaching is creating a psychological environment that makes it very easy to take that next step and to pick up a gun, and-- and fight? Alvi: While Uba maintains that his messaging is that Indonesians should not engage in violence or radicalism, hundreds of Indonesians have left the country to join ISIS in Syria (sirens wailing) (explosion) and ISIS attacks have recently struck very close to home.
And as the Indonesian government attempts to stop further attacks, along with ISIS recruitment attempts, it's clear that there's a battle for hearts and minds raging in the world's most populous Muslim country, with extremists like Uba opposing activists like Alissa Wahid, the daughter of Indonesia's former president, who is fighting for the secular ideals Indonesia was founded on.
Does the existence of a Sharia state create an environment of religious intolerance? The Sharia should live in the personal and everyday life of a Muslim.
It should not be formalized.
Because the fundamental of Islam is belief that God creates people from different types, from different background to help each other.
We're the fundamentalists, not them.
They're the extremists.
(shouting in foreign language) One of Vice's first-ever documentaries focused on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous mass of plastic swirling in the Pacific Ocean that some have estimated to be larger than the state of Texas.
Now, what we found was tons of discarded plastic breaking down into a mix of debris and chemical sludge.
Thomas Morton: We're nowhere near land.
We're nowhere near any other ships.
We've changed the composition of ocean water almost a thousand miles from shore.
Smith: It's always been Vice's mission to keep following the issues even after they fade from the news cycle.
And today there are some major new developments in this story.
So we sent Isobel Yeung to see if there might finally be some workable solutions for saving the world's oceans.
Yeung: We are just driving towards the very southern tip of Hawaii's big island, which, not so long ago, was an absolute paradise.
But this one-time paradise has become a magnet for the ocean's plastic.
All you can see as far as the horizon is the remains of human refuse.
This could be from Asia, it could be from the mainland, America, and a lot of this stuff comes from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Yeung: The Garbage Patch, also known as the North Pacific Gyre, is where ocean currents converge to create a concentration of plastics.
A lot of the plastic at Kamilo Beach has been circulating in the ocean for so long it's been broken down into tiny particles, or micro-plastics.
Which are nearly impossible to clean up.
How frequently do you do these beach clean-ups? You know, we've done 32 so far this year.
We're gonna pick this stuff up and come back down here next week, and it could potentially be just as dirty, if not worse.
Yeung: This plastic doesn't just ruin a day at the beach.
It's estimated that nearly 700 marine species have encountered man-made debris.
At Hawaii's Oceanic Institute Dr.
David Hyrenbach is studying how plastic is becoming a permanent part of our ecosystem.
So this bird was incidentally killed-- Whoa, that is a beast! Then you see the hooks coming out of the neck there.
- Oh.
This is the gizzard.
(indistinct) so the heart's out of the way.
Let me just (gasps) I see some plastic! - Whoa.
Look at that.
- Okay.
Yeung: A 2015 study predicted that as many as 90 percent of all seabirds worldwide now consume plastic as part of their diet.
How far do you think most of this plastic has traveled from? It could be coming from anywhere.
I mean, we're finding plastic in Antarctic species.
You know, places where people don't really go.
So this is really a global issue.
Yeung: And it's not just birds eating this plastic.
Oceanographer Dr.
Anela Choy is studying the plastics impact on the entire ocean food chain.
This is a lancetfish, and what's great about these guys is they sample the environment for us.
So, we sample the stomachs from different locations in the ocean um, take a look at what-- what they're feeding on.
Whoa! Look what we have here.
Whoa! Wow.
What the hell is that? That's a giant piece of plastic.
Oh, God.
These pieces of plastic are made out of petroleum and other chemical contaminants.
When pieces of plastic are in the water column, they sort of act as little sponges.
They actually accumulate toxins, and then they get ingested by animals, and so, we're still learning about the chemistry of what happens when fish like that eats it.
How out of hand is this situation getting? Animals at almost every single trophic level of the food web in the open ocean are ingesting plastics.
Yeah, it's the biggest habitat on the planet.
Mm-hmm.
- And if there's plastic throughout that habitat, it's gonna have some really serious impacts.
Yeung: Many of the species humans eat prey on lancetfish.
Meaning plastic is likely finding its way up the food chain and into our dinners.
(indistinct chattering) Are you worried that any of that plastic might find its way into the fish? Of course this happens.
You know, I mean, how are we gonna stop it? I don't know.
It's coming from all over the world.
So, what happens when you gut the fish on the boat? You find like a plastic bag, or like, bottle caps, things like that.
Wow.
You are what you eat depending on what the fish ingests, so it's probably not the best for the fish, and for you.
Yeung: Plastic in our world's oceans is reaching crisis levels.
Since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered in 1997, four additional patches have been found across the globe, accumulating more and more plastic.
We spoke with Dominic Waughray at the World Economic Forum, who is tracking the problem on a global scale.
Plastic is one of the most pervasive human-made materials that we have.
We have the problem that we make a lot of plastic.
We kind of use it once, or at the most twice, and then we get rid of it, and ultimately, it can only go into three places.
It can be burnt, it can be landfilled, or it can be dumped, and dumping often then means the sea.
Don't forget with the mass urbanization that we're going through a lot of this is in coastal areas.
Most big cities are by the sea.
Eight million tons of that plastic goes into the ocean every year.
That's about an equivalent of one garbage truck every minute.
That one garbage truck will become four garbage trucks by 2050 or so.
If we carry on that rate, there will be more plastic, by weight, in the ocean than fish.
So as a human, sort of, conundrum, this, surely, can't be good.
What is the wake-up call? Yeung: With 165 million tons of plastic already in the ocean, and more being dumped in every day, it's hard to imagine how we would even begin to clean this up.
But there is someone who is attempting to do just that.
When talking about environmental issues, I think a common response is, "Well, that's, pfft, a long way off.
That's for our children to worry about.
" So, hello, here I am.
Yeung: Since Boyan was 16, he's been on an environmental mission.
Now, six years later, he's crowd-funded millions of dollars to start his own company: The Ocean Cleanup.
Along with a team of top engineers and scientists, their goal is simple: to rid the world's oceans of plastic.
We caught up with Boyan at the Ocean Cleanup offices and plastic laboratory.
So, this is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
This is the concentration of plastic, - these little specks here? - Right.
So, there are-- there are five of them in the world.
- Mm-hmm.
And because the North Pacific is most polluted, we'll start with that.
We're trying all these different variables, like how large should it be, what angle should it be, to get to a system that collects most plastic for as little cost as possible.
Yeung: Boyan and his team spent years mapping the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to understand how to go about cleaning it up.
So talk me through how the Ocean Cleanup works.
So really the problem is that although there is a lot of plastic, it's spread out over a very large area, so you first need to concentrate it before you get it out.
So, what we propose is to deploy sort of an artificial coastline, where there is no coastline, So we have this very long array of floating barriers that is anchored to the sea bed.
The ocean current does the hard work for us, brings the plastic towards it, and concentrates in the center.
And once it's in the center, it's so dense you can hardly see the water, and that's the spot where we can then easily take it out, and store it before shipping it to land for recycling.
Over 95 percent of the mass is still in those big objects, which is so urgent to clean up, because all that big stuff will become micro-plastics over the next few decades, which is the problem.
Why has no one else attempted to clean up on the scale that you're proposing? People assume that a complex problem requires a complex solution, but I think the simpler a solution can be, the better.
When I started this, I didn't know whether it would work, but I thought, considering the scale of the problem, that it was just important to at least try.
Yeung: After months spent perfecting the design, Boyan's invention is ready for the ultimate test.
(applause) To find out whether it can survive in the ocean.
Welcome to the Ocean Cleanup's prototype unveiling.
Boyan and his team have got their first prototype in the sea going out today.
So, we're gonna go and see the progress in getting it out.
And there's going to be tests for all weather sorts, which is the perfect place to do it here on the North Sea.
It gets pretty stormy out here.
(speaking foreign language) (man over radio answers in foreign language) The conditions in the North Sea are pretty severe.
Now, with the first minor storm, we'll get forces higher than during a hundred-year storm in the Pacific Ocean.
It's pretty safe to say that if it survives here, it will survive anywhere.
Yeung: But to scale the array to be scooping up the Pacific Garbage Patch, Boyan has a way to go.
What we're seeing here is just one segment, and eventually, the thing will be about a thousand times larger than this.
- Wow.
- And then somewhere in the center of the giant V-shaped array, we would have these conveyor belts and pumps to extract the plastic.
I mean, 100 kilometers, it's very large for a manmade structure, but it's peanuts compared to the size of the Pacific Ocean.
Yeung: Assuming everything does go to plan, what's the next step? We should be ready to deploy the first full operational system uh, by late 2017.
So that will be the first time we're actually removing plastic from the ocean at a large scale.
And then, if that goes well, we should be ready to start the largest cleanup in history by 2020.
So, this is just the beginning, it's not the end.
Yeung: While Boyan works towards hitting the next milestone of his experiment, he's simultaneously planning what to do with the degraded plastic he's able to collect and how to make it valuable again.
Boyan: This is one of the companies we're working with to actually produce the recycling product, because eventually, this is sort of how we want to finance the whole Ocean Cleanup.
This is a machine, where we put in the flakes Mm-hmm.
so the ground-up ocean plastic objects.
So to get the-- the highest quality of, uh, of plastic we really want to sort it first before recycling it.
Then it should exit here as Ooh! It's coming out like spaghetti.
It's like a pasta machine.
It is exactly as a pasta machine.
Yeung: The process involves chopping up the plastic into tiny beads, known as nurdles.
These are then sold and melted down into the objects we use in everyday life.
So then it's just shredding it up in nuggets? Boyan: Yeah, so this is sort of the whole currency of the plastic industry.
So, car companies buy these nurdles to make their products, and furniture companies use them as well.
So, it's sort of giving ocean plastic a second life.
This is pretty cool to know that this plastic has been around for the last few decades, and could have come from anywhere in the world.
Oh, yeah, and this could have well been some of the first plastic that was ever produced at scale in the '50s and the '60s.
Yeung: While Boyan is recycling ocean plastics into more permanent uses, the vast majority of the world's plastics are never recycled at all.
In fact, even the most commonly used are only recycled 14% of the time.
But at IBM, Dr.
Jeannette Garcia is developing a process called "chemical recycling" that could change how we think about plastics altogether.
How do you see plastic? Is it a big problem or a great invention? I think of plastic as being a great invention, because it permeates our entire life.
Garcia: Plastic is ubiquitous, in everything from shoes, pills, to healthcare, to disposable syringes, and so to try to do away with it completely, is probably not a viable option.
Tell us about chemical recycling and why you think that's the answer.
The main difference is that in mechanical recycling, what you're doing is you're taking the material and you have to shred it down, then melt it down, remold it, and it can only happen a certain number of times before it loses the properties.
Chemical recycling is different, because what you actually do is you take the material, and you chemically react it so it goes back down to its most fundamental unit.
That fundamental unit can then be reacted again back into the same thing or into something different, and we can reach a 100 percent, like, full cycle process.
Yeung: If we can scale this process up, we could take the hundreds of millions of tons of discarded plastics recycle them, and move towards a zero waste economy.
People are gonna start realizing that we can save money, and a lot of money by recycling materials, and so that it makes sense from all standpoints.
We have to start thinking of our landfills as gold mines.
Yeung: With the right approach, and the will to make it happen, all this trash would become valuable again, and solving this mammoth environmental task could create an economic miracle.
Waughray: Economically, if we had to pay for all that plastic, which we could do something better with, between $80 and $120 billion a year that you can make valuable with straight away, effectively we're dumping, but like anything in life, if there's a problem, then there's gonna be opportunity.
We know through history in terms of disruptions in industries or new products that it's kind of innovators and disruptors who kind of take us to the next level.
Boyan: The fact that we now are creating a path in which there is a chance that we can have clean oceans again, that could potentially inspire a lot more people to get involved with this problem.
Boyan: Human history is a long list of things that couldn't be done and then were done.
Really, the challenge in this century is to convert a lifestyle created in a previous century into one that will still be around in the next century.