Earth Day Highlights Environmental Crisis
ALLEN: Welcome back. I'm Natalie Allen. Here are our top stories.</s>ALLEN: Sunday we celebrate the planet we all call home. More than --</s>ALLEN: -- 1 billion people around the world observe Earth Day. And this year, they'll focus on plastic pollution. Look at that video right there to get a sense of how bad it is. It is a global problem that is much more than just not recycling a water bottle. Environmentalists say enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the Earth four times; 50 percent is used only once before being thrown away. And it can take from 500 to 1,000 years for plastic to decompose. Our meteorologist Ivan Cabrera is joining us with more on the plastic pollution wrapping our planet and it is certainly a huge problem.</s>IVAN CABRERA, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Happy Earth Day.</s>ALLEN: Happy Earth Day. We have a long way to go.</s>CABRERA: We usually do not have good news about it. You've got your reusable bag; we do what we can. But it's up to governments and corporations to --</s>ALLEN: Some cities have banned plastic straws, won't use plastics --</s>CABRERA: Australia has done that; California, no plastic bags, either, but we've got a ways to go and that plastic, by the way, also not only does it not degrade for 500-1,000 years but it does so slowly and as that happens, the particles become small enough for marine life to have issues here. Eight million metric tons we dump it into the ocean to add to the 5 trillion pieces of plastic that are already in the world's oceans. And about a million sea birds get killed annually as a result of that, about 100,000 marine mammals as well. Plastic does degrade and when it degrades to the point where you can no longer see it and it becomes microscopic, that's when marine life can ingest it. So fish will eat it, inadvertently, and then we eat the fish. And you know what happens there. So absolutely not only harming marine life but also us as well. Let's talk about where the garbage patches are. The word is a bit of a misnomer because it's not something you can see from space. Even if you were in a cruise ship it's not like it's a giant island of trash. It's widely dispersed, which is why it's difficult to get rid of. And the boundaries aren't perfectly circular. In fact because of waves and currents, they become diffuse. So this is the area that we know most of the concentration is at across the Eastern Pacific and across the Western Pacific. The problem is you get this convergence zone here, where the wind doesn't do much and so all that garbage just kind of sits there and accumulates to the point where we're now at 5 trillion pieces of plastic. As I mentioned, marine life has a very hard time doing so, but there is what we have here on this Earth Day 2018. We always focus on different things. There are so many things to focus on. How do you make plastic? You need oil. So there's that. CO2 emissions go up about 50 percent under the atmosphere and half of that goes into the world's oceans. We have had issues with marine life and also with coral, almost half of it at the Great Coral Barrier Reef in Australia is gone because of the bleaching there. The water temperature is going up.</s>ALLEN: We are going to talk about a possible solution and talk with a plastic expert about what he thinks about that. Ivan, thank you. Despite the dangers of plastic pollution, there is some hope; scientists may have accidentally discovered how to break plastic up. Robyn Curnow has that for us.</s>ROBYN CURNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): PET is found in everything, from plastic bottles to clothing. First developed in the 1940s, it is now a major part of our plastic problem. Euromonitor International forecasts that more than 600 billion PET bottles will be made next year alone. PET can take hundreds of years to break down in the environment. But now, scientists have stumbled upon a shortcut.</s>JOHN MCGEEHAN, PROFESSOR, STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH: To a couple of years ago, there was a Japanese group that have made this spectacular discovery of a bacteria that can digest PET plastic in a recycling dump in Japan. And what we've done is we've taken the enzyme that this bacteria produces --</s>CURNOW: That enzyme is called PETase. It works, but it doesn't work fast enough to use on an industrial scale. Using this particle accelerator in Oxfordshire, U.K., begin along with his colleagues in Brazil and the U.S. examined the enzyme right down to the atomic level. They found that by tweaking it slightly, it could break down plastic at an even faster rate.</s>MCGEEHAN: The bacteria can break this down in a matter of days or weeks. But what we're hoping to do with the enzyme is just in the same way years, an enzyme and a biological washing detergent breaking down grass stains. These enzymes we hope can break down PET, ideally in a matter of hours. That's our goal.</s>CURNOW: McGeehan says it was the scientific community that developed plastics. And now that same community must use all the technology at their disposal --</s>CURNOW: -- to find solutions to problems plastics have caused.</s>ALLEN: Let's talk about this issue with an expert on plastic. Dr. Marcus Eriksen is an ocean pollution expert and executive director and co-founder of the Five Gyres Institute. Marcus, thanks for joining us. It's good to see you.</s>DR. MARCUS ERIKSEN, FIVE GYRES INSTITUTE: Thanks for having me.</s>ALLEN: We just saw a story about technology that may help break down plastic, sounds like a hopeful step. There's a lot of innovation in this area. Will that help?</s>ERIKSEN: You know, it's interesting technology and might have a place inside the middle of a landfill where it's already buried. But PET, there are already systems to get back PET bottles, redemption programs where bottles are a nickel or 10 cents a bottle are very effective to get those bottles back and keep them within a circular economy. That's what we are after. I have one hesitation for GMO organisms is that if you lose those out into the environment in the oceans, we have got boats and buoys and fishing nets and safety equipment and life jackets, all these things already made of plastics. I don't want those getting eaten by some organism that we invent.</s>ALLEN: Yes, even whales are getting stuck in fishing apparatus and being killed. We see a lot of those videos on YouTube. Marcus, I know that years ago you built a boat made of plastic, called it Junk and sailed it from California to Hawaii to bring attention to the issue of plastic in our oceans. How many years ago was that? And are we getting the message in a significant way in this world?</s>ERIKSEN: That was one thing that we did about 10 years ago. And that's when I saw that there wasn't a lot of attention to all of the other gyres in the world where plastic accumulates. South of the equator, the South Pacific, South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, the West Pacific, East Atlantic, are all unknown ocean regions. I've sailed through all of those five gyres since then and I'm finding all kinds of impacts from plastics. Like we typically find bottles in the middle of the ocean bitten by sea turtles or by trigger fish. Once</s>ALLEN: That's unbelievable, by the way. Go ahead.</s>ERIKSEN: Yes, it was so shocking to me. And he showed me five of these skeletons. Each one had a wad of plastic bags in its gut. And plastic bags are one of several single-use plastic items. What I'm seeing that's encouraging are more and more communities and states across the U.S. that are saying the single-use plastic, the concept of using material designed to last forever for a product we throw away is kind of nonsensical. So we're seeing more communities replacing those, like plastic straws with paper straws, plastic bags with reusables, plastic bottles with reusable stainless steel mugs. So we are seeing that cultural shift, where like cigarettes became taboo to smoke in public, we are seeing the same thing with single-use plastics, the straw, the bag, the foam polystyrene cup are becoming a bit taboo to have around because of their ability to pollute so easily.</s>ALLEN: Is there one place that people begin to wrap here that can go on the Internet? What are the keywords they should put in so they can understand how to pull back on their use of plastic?</s>ERIKSEN: I think if they go to 5gyres.org, that's the number 5-G-Y-R- E-S, there's a whole list of things that you can do in your home, your office, your school to get to a zero-waste culture. And that's what we're after.</s>ALLEN: All right, Dr. Marcus Eriksen, thank you so much. We really appreciate your help on this one.</s>ERIKSEN: Thank you. My pleasure.</s>ALLEN: So Happy Earth Day, everyone, and good luck with that mission on plastic. Actress Allison Mack is known for playing Superman's friend on an American TV show. Now she is facing charges of sex trafficking for a mysterious organization. We'll have that story ahead here. Plus a record number of women are running for office in the U.S. this year and many of them say that one person is the reason for that.