Bag It -- A Documentary on Plastic

Star Date 1.22.11: The community room at Princeton Public Library was packed again, last night, for a showing of Bag It, a comprehensive and entertaining expose on the cumulative consequences of our use of plastics. That legacy can be found in the widening gyres of plastic debris in the oceans and in chemicals like bisphenol A and phthalates in our bodies.

The film's devastating critique is made palatable by a sense of humor. Lest the plastic-filled guts of dead marine birds and whales prove too wrenching, other scenes offer a fluffy and frolicking abominable snowman made of white plastic bags, and tragicomic encounters with plastic overload in the aisles of the local supermarket.

What does Princeton have to do with all this? Consider the destiny of a plastic bottle tossed onto Harrison Street. It disappears down a storm drain, gets washed through a pipe into Harry's Brook, flows to Carnegie Lake, where it may float about until storm waters push it over the dam and down the Millstone and Raritan Rivers to the ocean. The Atlantic, like the Pacific, has two gyres of accumulating plastic--one in the north and one in the south. Over a period of years, the plastic bottle and billions of other bits of plastic eventually find their way out to the gyre, slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller bits that fish, sea turtles and whales can mistake for food. The plastic bits also absorb toxic chemicals in the water, which would be a good thing if the fish weren't eating the plastic, absorbing the toxics, and passing the toxics up a food chain that can include humans.

Documentaries are meant to change your mind, or at least convey reality so vividly that one can no longer ignore what one already knew. The mind is admirably and exasperatingly well armored against all these attempts--understandable given the potential grief involved in letting go of a belief one has invested years or decades adhering to and defending.

Despite this, the film forced me to abandon one long-held skepticism: the notion that stream cleanups are merely a feel-good activity that serve our aesthetics but do little for the watershed. Paper litter may break down, and wildlife may find cover in a stray rusty pipe, but the plastics are likely as not to be swept downstream and out into the ocean, where they provide one more hazard for marine life already on the edge.

Of all the wonderfully presented scenes, interviews, and graphics in the movie, one that lingers is the man who is storing all his family's trash in his basement for a year. He's apparently able to avoid a huge mess by composting food waste, reusing containers, and avoiding products with throwaway packaging.

The positive message of the movie is that taking steps to withdraw from the culture of consumption can lead to a richer life that focuses more on human interactions and resourcefulness. Sharon Roe, who spoke afterwards about her company, which makes reuseable ecobags, spoke of the environmental journey of discovery and understanding that we all are on.

In many ways, it seems to be a journey both forwards into new, less harmful technologies and backwards to forgotten pleasures and values, to extract ourselves from the seductively convenient yet terribly warped and destructive world cheap fossil fuel energy has led us into.