You know, unfortunately, as to PFOS, it's starting to look like all of us. This is all of our problems. You know, all of us have been exposed to some degree to these same chemicals.
It's a very strange experience to be four or five days from the closest point of land, and you see more plastic than life.
Pollution is a problem, and there's the whole problem of the spoiling of the commons, but we've addressed the pollution problem on a variety of different levels in a variety of ways, and it's worked pretty well.
Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue, and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.
While cheap products are exported to western countries, the waste is dumped mostly in China's back yard, contaminating its air, water, soil and seas.
If environmental protection efforts continue to lag behind economic growth, pollution will become even more rampant.
Smog is affecting larger parts of China, and environmental pollution has become a major problem, which is nature's red-light warning against the model of inefficient and blind development.
We have carbon in the atmosphere. That is a material in the wrong place problem. It's just like what I said about the lead. Lead in the biosphere is not good. Carbon in the atmosphere (over natural levels) is a problem.
The greatest pollution problem we face today is negativity. Eliminate the negative attitude and believe you can do anything. Replace 'if I can, I hope, maybe' with 'I can, I will, I must.
The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.
I live in Los Angeles, which is the second most polluted city in the world, and I wake up in the morning to dirt all over my window.
Pollution doesn't respect state boundaries and it is difficult if not impossible to solve these problems on a state by state basis.
We've become a plastic society.
Unmanageable waste has turned into a worldwide crisis. No matter how much local authorities do, no matter the level of public cooperation, no matter how much is recycled, the problem continues to grow.
On the face of it there is a pristine white sandy beach, but within an hour, around 100 of us can collect up to 250-300 kilos of rubbish. It's mostly bits of plastic, fishing line, nylon, bottle caps. We've found everything.
I hope to see an integrated solution created to deal with both the local pollution problem and the global climate change problem.
Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.
The legacy, the waste, is mostly in international waters that are sort of in no man's land and thus considered to be no one nation's problem.
These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.
The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can't breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.
The facts are clear. Our oceans are a mess.
We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.
The greatest polution problem we face today is negativity.
Delhi has a different vibe.
This plastic doesn't go away by itself, and to just let hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic be out there to be fragmented into these small and dangerous microplastics to me seems like an unacceptable scenario.
