Transcripts For ALJAZ Reimagining Plastic 20240712

And. The explosion of Plastic Waste across the world threatens the very survival of life on our planet. Every year up to 12000000. 00 metric tons of plastic and saw oceans. From poisoning marine life to littering landscapes and cloaking waterways Plastic Waste in the environment is set to trickle in the next decades the problem is so vast it can seem overwhelming but by reimagining this waste as a result we can begin to redress the balance im dhoni in cameroon where a young entrepreneur is turning the tide on Plastic Waste by building boats out of bottles and Omega Mccubbin in the u. K. Where one company is tackling a really sticky caustic problem also making unique and sustainable products in the process. Here in cameroons economic capital while the scale of the countrys plastic problem is painfully clear Plastic Waste is talking up the streets and rivers of cameroons major cities polluting waterways threatening marine ecosystems and making life especially difficult for local fishermen. Its estimated that across the city of tijuana 1300. 00 tons of Plastic Waste is generated every day. So much of it is thrown into the citys rivers you can see any trace of water. I. Have never seen anything like this before. I dont even know how you begin to fix a problem this big is no doubt this is a major challenge for the city. But one local man has made it his mission to deal with it head on his name is mile is so many issues. I says it to me to most a region that is i mean its quite a place to meet i must say so is this normal here in douala you know its so sad when you have older brasseries that truly whereby people in the east we in the house or and then you have the reverse the water the order with these bridge and you have people. Crushed in the river and you can see the last about the poor among educators who how the money deal with so opportunities number its overwhelming to see this but you dont find it overwhelming why do you see this and think that this is something you want to take on for yourself i realize that all the reaver a form of plastics no one k. No ones what is these and i was shocked to see that so i decided to do something and work. When shooting people. By showing the way. Began an initiative to cure up the waste from all of the one is 10 choked rivers. He calls his company my dubai and nature meaning water and nature in the local sour language. He recruits a team of 30 volunteers and today im giving them a helping hand. But it quickly becomes clear to me what a tough job this is. So were standing on this board because much of this looks like a bit of plastic theres actually a river underneath it so its not very stable. And. Its very hot and very humid here so when you have this amount of waste in the water a host a holes in the feet toes and other kinds of water borne diseases and there are people who live all around here so this is not just an Environmental Crisis its a possible Health Crisis as well kind of serious about. The work youre doing here is amazing that there are so many bottles and it feels like this is just a dent and its really only individuals like you who are taking it on there is no citywide plan or nationwide plan to tackle this enormous problem no days no stark rings to spend here in carmel. Or the problem for the priorities so. No ones care for the environment and this is the morse urgent problem so we need to train for this year in many ways. It doesnt just see all this plastic as waste he sees it as a valuable material and an opportunity to do good. He turns bottles into boats for the regions Fishing Community. And it all happens here inside his workshop. Botolf. Yes i want her prayers in my house here so im here with some of margaret and we travel more. Ishmaels boats built using traditional techniques he taught you how to do. You know im from a Fishing Community and my dad and fisherman oh well so when i was young i was fishing with my dad this technology are just the plastic bottles so is that why this idea came to you yes because im afraid the river and you cannot gush because your ear is full of glasses so i do hold not only to clean. But also. Because this is not easy in the video just for someone to buy a simple board so now we. Board that could be useful so we have part of our seed done whats next you are yeah id love to try to do that. So we tie this up and not tear. Not so bad. It is a little scary to think that. What were putting together someones actually going to be sitting on out in the water so i feel a little bit of responsibility to not mess this up but i proud of my handy way back yard oh you got you it isnt so bad you do it. Once hes built the frame ties it to the base. And then he adds in the seats. It has built 37 boats to date given that it takes 650 bottles to build one thats over 24000 bottles removed from his rivers and put to good use. So how much does it cost to make a boat like this with materials in a row never in u. Simply jugnu bordeauxs the rares is you have done. To both take just a few hours to build. And theyre so in my 20 to be easily transported to the ocean. Its a 3 hour drive to nearby creek. Gives the boats to local fish and. Traditionally made fishing boats can be extremely expensive but even so when 1st started giving away his eco boats it was easier said than done these look very different to all of the local fishing boats that we see what was the reaction from the local community when you brought these here the 1st time 1st i thought they was a joke show it will never go in the world enough but when we went to the water boy universe it is walking and then they start to move to try to understand and try to stick to go fishing when theres one. Of the real proof of course is in the floating lets go test it out its got this is ok you lead the way up. It was a bumpy entry but this feels so much better it feels stable i dont feel unsafe in any way i feel really comfortable fishing and want to be a. Good old would. Just. Talk about. What a great idea and theres so many possibilities of what you can do in the future back in at the same time to be an almost issued a Plastic Waste a camera and doing what an incredible young man said that was really fun. Now we know the bow to see where the were delivering it to the latest happy customer. I was going to test it out on a nearby lake. County was it. Really this is the me the fisherman having a good to meet you what do you think of your new boat that had been given him and. How do you think having this new boat is going to change things for you. Pretty soon here. With few of us with. The saudi money put out of office so maybe the accessibility and affordability of eco boats will be something that convinces people to give them a try where if they do get more preserved. He will. Be. Forced to leave soothingly pools and you also when you all. Do want to try it out you know lets. See how it works. How do you feel about camilles reaction to his very own eco boat harbor to see that i can make someones my so one gets home maybe hes going to show would be better maybe you or her more income to his family. Since he started in 2016 the growing success of his eco boat has inspired ishmael to do more. Its his ambition to clear up cameroon and that begins with the countrys 1st bottle recycling scheme. How. This is the eco brain i cover it is made out of 255. 00 practical. And 1000 bucks or so this. The place where people can come and bring their Plastic Waste this is the starving for and offer to try to deal with the stories stories system of Plastic Waste in water so the idea of this eco been what youre trying to do here where do you think you can grow that we won our city be very example in that regard we just apply in areas of all the corner in front of all to show the supermarket this school so he wont be easy to carry pick up with the side of all this so thats division where we want to go there but how to reach there its not easy. Despite the challenges it has even bigger plans for the future by producing bottle made furniture and by educating the next generation. Issues i really think. Was the cause of the jungle. You got it your. Its a legacy to take care of environment to cure for our planet and to clean our cities. Its an inspiration to me that even in this global sea of plastic one person really can make a difference. For environmental campaigners the global issue of Plastic Waste is now so serious it has risen to the top of the agenda. They believe we must rethink our whole approach to the material the scale of the plastic problem is huge when its over 300000000. 00 tonnes a year Plastic Packaging itself is 78000000. 00 tonnes a year 32 percent of that leaks out an environment some of the biggest producers of Plastic Packaging in the world produce 3000000. 00 tonnes a year so with that one producer changes the way they make plastic that is a massive change globally butt. Even the biggest producer of Plastic Packaging in the world cant fix this on their own this is about everyone competitors alike organizing around a system that can be regenerative and restored if you look at our current economy its predominantly linear we take the material out of the ground we make something out of it and then the majority that material gets thrown away we have a growing World Population we have more and more pressure on resources the system we have today cannot run in the long term we need to shift that economy to be one that uses materials rather than using them up. Within a circular economy right from the beginning you build economy so you design out waste and pollution you keep products cycling within the economy for as long as possible and then you look at regenerating Natural Systems through the biological materials to feed into that economy so effectively the Straight Line turns into a circle. To build that circular economy for plastics you need to go right to the beginning of the system we need to redesign the way we think about plastics the way we design plastics and the way we use plastics so we need to eliminate the plastic that we dont need we need to innovate for different forms of plastic which are 100 percent recyclable and we need to look at how we circulate plastics designing a system whereby that material is collected has value and feeds back into the system the thing that motivates me the most about the future is there is a massive opportunity to redesign Global Economy if we redesign the economy so its circular not only will we build an economy that can run in the long term but it will unlock trillions of u. S. Dollars of Economic Opportunity and it will effectively decouple Economic Growth from resource constraints. Plastic pollution is the hot topic in the World Environmental issues and the damage that it causes is long lasting and wide ranging but whilst there is a growing consciousness of the problems that plastic caused and you might even be doing things yourself to solve it there is one problem that is so. The hiding in plain sight. Every year week you always get your 374 trillion pieces of. What you might not know is that chewing gum is usage to be chewing this piece of plastic. Bottles chewing gums and bubble comes from oil. In fact gum is a very similar material to latex bicycle in achieves. And every year we chalk away 100000. 00 tons of that globally much of it straight on to the federal. Government is 2nd only to cigarettes as the worlds most lifted item. Across the globe we spend 25000000000. 00 every year. And demand is predicted to rise to 48000000000. 00 in 2025. It is estimated that 92 percent of pavements in london have chilling gum stuck on with 300000. 00 pieces estimated to be on Oxford Street and. Its up to a small army of workers to clear the one. Im 70 miles southwest of london in winchester to find out what damage can do. And how you councillor john warneke is in charge of keeping the city streets clean. How much of a problem is common with just they estimate that every Year Councils in britain are spending more than 60000000. 00 pounds a year just clearing up go bust and say take me back over actually thats a huge figure and a war that could be put to well than just being spanked collecting all the waste off the full. Of course is really only one way to get a true flavor of the gum problem on our streets. Thanks very much Council Operations manager darren know it is often. Show me the right lets get back yeah im going to wrangle me right i see that were right that way yeah we really want to yeah yeah its very much like. Theyre coming out to. Be quite satisfying job to be honest but. Children such tough loss of respect for the guys doing so its hard to. Know. What its come is for me it usually ends up in a landfill. As a plastic isnt fire degradable i would never decompose. But ive heard about an ingenious new initiative thats not only keeping the sticky stuff off the pavements but turning it into something useful. Coffee cups i think the most impressive thing about them theyre actually made out the recycled chewing gum never knew you could resettle that one but here you have it. Its quite impressive business yeah i think and seriously doesnt want it so when they 1st came out and what were your cool i thought it was a bit of a joke to be honest i just couldnt believe that this could be made out of peoples material just makes you think oh thats so on which i mean its disgusting but that when you realise its been through the heating crisis its completely sanitary its just really inspiring what can be done with chewing. The cups and made from a gum based material. Here at Winchester University the room terry was for the cops are collected all of the campus and distinctive bright pink bins. That cooled gum drops and inspiring idea from design and the benefits. I you must be on a high enough for me hi nice to so these must be your pens tell me a bit about them yet these are the gumdrop bins that they all been specifically for the despise. And the idea is that somebody can come along they use chewing gum and then once its full whole thing comes back to us and we recycle it and we can actually recycle 3 new gum drops out of one. Its based on a closed Loop Recycling process ok so why go all the solutions out there at the moment all address communists once its already been dropped there is nothing out there that is actually addressing it from the front and so i saw a gaffe in the market for a product like this and also way of talking behavioral change when it comes to the governator and giving people as opposed to place to spaces that change so how does gum end up in a coffee cup. And it has offered to show me the prices in action at the gumdrop factory in worcester. So once we get the full gumdrop bins that goes through the 1st part of the process which actually sized reduces it ok so you can actually see the comfort when its been crushed up you see all the other letters that are in there along with chewed chewing gum chewing gum cupcakes. And then goes through the 2nd stage which separates the gum drop in the chewed gum and the other ways we then take this away yeah leave and mix it with Recycled Materials which get heated in compound and. These pellets which go on forever she may bend when you come to bed early i will start again. Become tech material can be molded into a whole range of products. Not just cups that station key rings. And shes. Proud to call them into some of the products that we have at the moment ok. To the gum she sassed this is actually really from project we had it was done in collaboration with the council. In answer i want to highlight the amount of the minister of such on the streets and abstract so youll see the so here is actually a map of the story that we looked at. The gumdrop story continues to grow. There now some 650 come drop locations across the u. K. From train stations and city centers to airports and schools and with new interest in europe and the usa and has global ambitions for the company and its ethos. Working more publicly is definitely something that we want to do because that will say broaden the the awareness and the message around behavioral change and but we can actually do with with the recycle change. At the university of winchester where the gumdrop charles began were they employed a scheme designed to do more than just keep going off our streets. As well as installing the gum drops they also gave away the 10000 reusable gum based. Scheme inspired a paradigm shift to waste and later. Environment. It was behind introducing gumdrop to the campus. So how much of an effect have these cultures hard on the sale of plastic and general kind of Coffee Companies today we have saved 85000 disposable cups from being used there are now 10000 of these cups in circulation and we have just committed to eliminating single use plastic spike 2022 so the cops are really good stuff in the right direction and i think it has really captured peoples imaginations because its quite nice that we could link it to the chewing gum recycling and by having your coffee or helping to close the way. These gumdrop bins have started a chewing gum recycling craze but its much more than that its about changing peoples behavior. And people like anna are inspiring people to think about the way they use single use products which is so critical if were going to be able to reverse any of the current worrying environmental trends. Entrepreneurs across the globe tunning their attention to the plastic menace. In september 201824 year old dutch inventor boy and slots launched an ambitious operation to use a giant boom on the oceans natural currents to clean up the pacifics giant island of Plastic Waste known as the Great Pacific garbage patch. 2 months later a crack in the system forced the prototype back to pool but the team was still able to collect terabytes of data and over 2 tons of ocean Plastic Waste. They report theyll soon be ready to relaunch. What can we do with all the waste plastic we collect. In the u. K. One in france has found a clever way to plug holes with a new road material made in part from waste plastic. And in the philippines a 15 year old schoolboy undertook to tackle the countrys plastic bag problem with a biodegradable variety made from coconuts. With clever ideas like these we may just be able to stand the plastic toy. After years of overgrazing the damage caused to the precious grasslands of chile is being revised with one of the worlds biggest ever comes the basin project. Theyre pretty emblematic of the patagonians that if theyre plentiful and theyre calm like the sun is then you know that the system is coming back and that they feel no threats towards and thats why youre on your rewilding patagonia on aljazeera. Stories of life. And inspiration. A series of documentaries from around the world. That celebrate the human spirit. Against the odds. Out a 0 sum acts palestinians. Islams of men. To an Extraordinary Community men who risk their lives telling garbage into cash so that their families can survive. Even in the face of ongoing obstacles riki she takes pretty never given. Aljazeera follows the remarkable people. And run the salon. On aljazeera the usa is always of in fact the people all right the world people Pay Attention to walk on here and i do see it as very good at bringing the news to the world from here. Comatose russian opposition politician alexina belly is given the all clear to be flown to germany for treatment. Hello and welcome im peter w. Watching al jazeera live from our World Headquarters here in also coming up libyas u. N. Backed government announced a cease fire and its rival power in the east is also appealing for a halt to the fighting. Turkey confirms its found a large natural gas reserve in the black sea and expect similar discoveries in the eastern med plus