Plastic Detox Movie Review – A Movie So Scary You’ll Want to Change Your Life Immediately | television

gHe woke up after a restless sleep. Bathing using products containing plastic in plastic containers. Fix your hair and deodorize your body with plastic smoothing sprays, before putting on synthetic fiber (plastic) clothing, picking up your plastic phone and going outside, sipping water from a plastic bottle. Plastic chewing gum. Buy a plastic-wrapped snack and get a receipt printed on plastic-covered paper. Come home, take food out of its plastic packaging, cook it with plastic utensils, store leftovers in plastic tubs and clean with detergents that contain plastic and come in plastic bottles. Brush your teeth with a plastic toothbrush and plastic-filled toothpaste. go to bed.

The list of ways humanity is committing species suicide may be long and growing, but Plastic Detox is here to suggest there must be room for widespread use of petrochemical-derived plastics. It focuses on one of the ways we’re affected by microplastics (the tiny particles that enter our bodies, after breaking off from the surface of the plastic), which is called endocrine disruption: these little invaders mess with the body’s hormones and contribute to all sorts of health problems, including infertility. That’s the main concern of this documentary’s hero, epidemiologist Shanna Swan, whose 2021 book Countdown claimed that chemicals in plastic are a factor in low sperm counts. (The program does not enter into the debate about the difficulties of accurately measuring our exposure to microplastics: some studies have produced improbable numbers.)

Swan, a free-spirited grandmother of six and great-grandmother of a precious baby boy, engages us in a reality TV-flavored experience. While visiting Florida, California and Idaho, she finds six couples struggling to conceive, and challenges them to live for three months while dramatically reducing their exposure to plastics. Like one Queer Eye woman who offers bottles instead of well-fitting jeans, or Marie Kondo who brings joy by replacing plastic spoons with wooden ones, or Supernanny who arrives several years early to help you have the baby in the first place, Swan steps in to turn ingrained routines upside down. The safes are raided. Supermarket visits become warnings about the amount of bad plastic on the shelves.

Couples who have tried and failed for periods ranging from 22 months to 10 years talk emotionally about the sadness of being childless. Partners feel unable to make the person they love truly happy, as Father’s Day and Mother’s Day pass uncelebrated, and gatherings of family or friends become reminders of the unattainable joys of fatherhood.

Those little ironies and struggles have an impact, but couples are just the plastic detox on this topic. He regularly leaves lifestyle experience behind and veers into mundane documentary territory, outlining the mechanics of a problem that is as terrifying as it is infuriating: its scale seems insurmountable.

We get a quick history of how plastics became more problematic when it turned out they could be made cheaply from fossil fuels, how ubiquitous these plastics are now, and how the pollution from making and disposing of them is making the material an environmental disaster before microplastics are even considered. We hear how petrochemical companies have spun public myths about how easy it is to recycle plastics, while using their power and wealth to compromise the ability of governments to keep citizens safe: There is extraordinary archival footage of a 2011 Senate committee hearing, in which John Kerry forced a man from the federal regulatory agency, the Food and Drug Administration, to admit that its data on the toxicity of plastics came from the manufacturers themselves. In terms of the harms that have been identified and largely overcome, comparisons are made with leaded gasoline and tobacco, the difference being that the harms have not been sufficiently reduced.

Not all of this can be translated directly to the UK, because the US has particularly weak safeguards – although what is interesting is that the superior European regulation praised in this film is a benefit of EU membership. But the call to eliminate plastic toxins is universally applicable. She is an outspoken advocate for independent producers who make organic, plastic-free products in the fashion, beauty, and housewares sectors, and for the Louisiana activists who stopped the construction of a multibillion-dollar chemical plant on their doorstep. It is clear in his diagnosis that the rot in the system is the pursuit of endless profit.

After all that doom, Swan’s final visits to the six couples reward us with happy tears: her small-sample trial yielded startling results, including some that go beyond whether or not she’s pregnant. Do viewers of documentaries like this one change their lifestyle after watching it? The Plastic Detox book states it clearly: we should, and most of us have a lot of work to do.