How discarded plastic pollutes our seas and mountain countries try to preserve the Alps – we discuss with leading MEPs.

7 days: Plastic waste and Alpine conservation

https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/16052423/m004-0042-en_mf.srt

Most us now are more careful about  what we throw away and what we recycle.

some 500 billion plastic carrier bags,  and as a result of careless disposal

thousands of marine animals  and more than a million birds die.

A lot of plastic waste  also collects in the Pacific Ocean,

forming a raft of rubbish  over hundreds of square kilometres.

All our seas are polluted, also the Baltic,  the world's largest body of brackish water.

In other words,  not quite as salty as most sea water.

My guest today knows about that,  Green Group MEP, Carl Schlyter.

He's from Sweden, one of the nine  countries around the Baltic Sea.

In a moment we have a report on the  Great Pacific Garbage Vortex, as it's called.

But first our Yes-No sequence  when I ask a series of questions

to which you must answer yes or no.  -For a politician!

Were you surprised at  the lack of commitments from Rio+20?

you could say it did environmental damage.  -It did.

Has the world lost interest in climate  change over the last two decades?

Has the economic crisis impacted  on people's willingness to act on it?

Is there any point in holding  more Earth Summits of that type?

Are you worried that  in the US election campaign

Republican candidates  are playing down climate change

and pretending it's not happening?  -Yes, but I'm not surprised.

The boss of Exxon recently accused  climate change campaigners

of being scaremongers.  Does he have a point?

We do recycle more these days,  but do we recycle enough?

Will the EU hit its energy-saving targets  for 2020?

of the Energy Efficiency Directive?  -Yes.

Before we discuss plastic pollution  of our oceans,

let's watch this report on the so-called  Great Pacific Garbage Vortex.

This soup of waste  is in the Mediterranean.

It's nothing compared to the trash vortex  found in the North Pacific in the 1990s,

a swirl of waste over an area  of 700,000 to 2 million square kilometres,

or three to six times the size of France.

Although comparable to a continent  in size it's invisible to the naked eye.

The microparticles float near the surface.

Thilo, a marine biologist, saw it  for himself on a Greenpeace expedition.

You can't really explore it  from space, for example.

But if you are there  and you dive in the area

and you are, say, five metres under  the surface and you look up in the sunlight,

then you see all the colourful sprinkles  of the plastic.

Bruno set up Expédition MED  a few years ago.

With his crew he sails the Mediterranean  to analyse its microplastic pollution.

We met him before his next trip  this summer.

This is an insidious and invisible pollution

because you can't really see it  with the naked eye.

When you sail in the Mediterranean  you think it's still beautiful, blue and clean.

Unfortunately we are facing  a very major source of pollution.

Philippe heads an association that cleans  the beaches in the Morbihan, Brittany.

There are sweet wrappers -  that's everyone.

That's from boating.  This glove is used in oyster-farming.

The expedition leader then shows us  the samples collected and analysed

Here we have some polystyrene,  fragments of plastic,

we also have some flakes of paint  from boats. We often find that.

In certain places that have been sampled  you find more microplastics than plankton.

Plastics are doubly dangerous at sea.  Microparticles can be ingested by fish

and large pieces can injure animals  before they decompose.

because about 1 million seabirds  and 100,000 sea mammals

die from this waste every year.  We've seen terrible examples,

with sea mammals, seabirds,  as well as fish or whales.

This summer Bruno  will go to the Mediterranean

to map the sea's microdebris,  to assess the level of pollution,

and thus alert the authorities as he believes  the problem must be sorted out early on.

We've used the oceans as a rubbish dump  for years, since mankind has been around.

and there are 7 billion of us.  What do we do about it?

We use long-lasting materials for stupid  things that we only use for a few minutes.

If you buy a six-pack of beer they're  linked together by small plastic ribbons.

Why use a thing lasting thousands of years  for something you will throw away at once?

We should think more about using  biodegradable materials in general.

The good thing is they can also  be used by renewable resources.

So you can make them  from starch or other things.

You mentioned biodegradable. We'll go  back and listen to another comment

from Bruno Dumontet  who we heard in that short report

on whether or not the biodegradable  plastic bags, for instance, really are.

Hang on a second. Let's look at this.  -Let's see what he says.

The bags called oxo-biodegradable  are a real disaster,

because these bags,  said to be 100% biodegradable,

are unfortunately  only about 10% degradable.

The rest is still plastic and breaks up  much more quickly in the environment

and it's a disaster  because it can't be collected.

This is very scary stuff. Only 10%  of a biodegradable bag is biodegradable.

If you use plastic, yes, but I'm talking  about paper which is biodegradable.

So you don't always need to use plastic  or what is called biodegradable plastic.