60 Minutes - 12/16/2018: Taking Aim at Opioids, Plastic Plague

Episode Date: December 17, 2018

Plastic has become a problem in the Pacific Ocean -- and it is killing wildlife. Sharyn Alfonsi introduces us to the 24-year-old inventor -- who has a controversial plan to clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch. The attorney who orchestrated a multi-billion-dollar settlement against the tobacco industry is back for the drug manufacturers and distributors -- who he says are responsible for the opioid epidemic. Bill Whitaker has his story on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a credit card that can get you unlimited free grocery delivery and the most PC optimum points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. The opioid overdoses have increased in the last, you know, 18 months. They've gone up. Mike Moore helped engineer the historic 1998 settlement under which big tobacco had to pay out billions. Now he's taking on opioid manufacturers and distributors.

If we win a verdict against these manufacturers and distributors, it could bankrupt them. They'd put them out of business. Tonight, you'll hear evidence against the industry, which Moore calls damning. He believes a jury will, too. You know what those jurors are going to do? They're going to go in the back room, they're going to spend about 30 minutes thinking about it, they're going to come in the back room. They're going to spend about 30 minutes thinking about it. Going to come back out and bam. Take a look around.

Odds are you're surrounded by plastic. That water bottle we use once and throw away will be with us for generations. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. There are campaigns to limit this plastic plague with bans on bags and straws. And yet around the world, it continues to pile up, seeping into our rivers and streams and turning our oceans into a vast garbage dump. But one mop-haired young Dutchman has come up with a plan which he says will save our seas. Hi, Boyan. His name is Boyan Slat. He has no formal training and his much-hyped multi-million dollar device has made him something of a sensation. So we decided to see what all the

fuss is about. I'm Steve Proft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered

to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Mike Moore says he's just a country lawyer from Mississippi, but this country lawyer has engineered two of the most lucrative legal settlements in American history. As Mississippi's Attorney General, he engineered the historic 1998 settlement under which Big Tobacco paid billions to address smoking-related health issues. In 2015, he convinced BP to settle multi-billion dollar lawsuits over its huge oil spill in the

Gulf of Mexico. Now, Mike Moore has taken aim at the manufacturers and distributors of opioid painkillers, claiming they should pay for the epidemic of addiction and death that has swept this nation. As you'll hear in a moment, he has powerful new evidence that he says proves that states like Ohio, among the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, should collect billions from all the companies he's suing. If we try the Ohio case, if we win a verdict against these manufacturers and distributors there, it could bankrupt them. They'd put them out of business. These are huge, profitable, wealthy companies.

You know, they can be as profitable as they want to, but Ohio is losing $4 or $5 billion a year from the opioid epidemic, and they're losing 5 or 6,000 people a year from overdose deaths. So when a jury hears the evidence in this case, they're not going to award just a couple hundred million dollars. It may be $100 billion. And whoever amongst these companies thinks they can stand up to that, good luck. We are hurting now in Ohio. We need help now in Ohio. Ohio's Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine, who will be sworn in next month as governor, hired Mike Moore as soon as he decided to file suit against opioid manufacturers

and distributors. They flooded the state of Ohio with these opioid pills that they knew would kill people. They knew would kill people. If they didn't know it the first couple of years, they clearly would have seen it after that. You can't miss it. When one year we had close to a billion, a billion pain meds prescribed in the state of Ohio, you know, 69 per man, woman, and child in the state. And that lies at the feet of the drug companies. They're the ones who did that. Ohio is one of four states Mike Moore formally represents, but he's coordinating with 30 plus states that have filed suit and with many of the local governments, nearly 1,500 cities and counties that also are suing. He is the unofficial commanding officer of the Army that's attacking the opioid industry.

This is where your war room is located. That's right. The unlikely command center for Moore's legal war is the sleepy town of Grayton Beach on Florida's panhandle. You know, in a place like this, you're not limited with a bunch of tall buildings and coats and ties and that kind of thing. You can think outside the box a little bit. When we were in Grayton Beach, about a dozen lawyers from all around the country, some working on state cases, others on local lawsuits, had gathered for all-day strategy sessions

focused on an audacious goal. Success for me would be that we would find funding to provide treatment for all the two and a half million opioid-dependent people in this country. That would take many billions of dollars, of course. But remember, Mike Moore has done it before. Look, when I filed this tobacco case in 1994, there was nobody that thought that we had a chance to win. We showed up for our first hearing. And in our first hearing, there was three of us there. On the courtroom on the other side, they had 68 lawyers. Despite that early mismatch, within four years,

Moore had all 50 states lined up against Big Tobacco. He did it partly by going to court, but mostly by going public. A case in court is a case in court, and that's fine. But there's also the court of public opinion. And the court of public opinion is sometimes the most powerful court. 60 Minutes played an important and controversial role in the public case against Big Tobacco. Moore was interviewed for a segment that at first CBS corporate lawyers refused to allow on the air. We're thinking to ourselves, look, if 60 Minutes seems to be afraid of these guys for whatever reason, then what about us?

60 Minutes finally aired the segment in early 1996 after the Wall Street Journal ran a story featuring the same tobacco industry whistleblower. You said this in that 60 Minutes story. This industry, talking about the tobacco industry, in my opinion, is an industry who has perpetrated the biggest fraud on the American public in history. They have lied to the American public for years and years. They have killed millions and millions of people and made a profit on it. Those are pretty strong words. Well, they were true. Those words were true. And you finally got big Tobacco to cry uncle.

That's right. They ended up paying, what, over $200 billion? $250 billion, yep. So when you look back on what you did, what has been the impact? We reduced smoking rates to a place that nobody ever thought was possible. So the number one cause of death in America has been reduced dramatically. That's pretty powerful. Now, going after the opioid industry, Mike Moore is using the same playbook he used against tobacco and, more recently,

against BP for the Gulf oil spill. Build legal and public pressure until the companies see no choice but to settle and fork over billions. Here's the deal. There's a huge pill spill in this country. It's huge. Pill spill. Pill spill. Huge pill spill. It never should have occurred. Everybody's got some fault. But we have 72,000 people dying every year. Let's figure out a way to resolve this thing. You guys made billions of dollars off of this. Take some of that money and apply it to the problem that you helped cause. He's a long way from convincing the drug industry to do that, of course. That's why all the lawsuits.

The first targets are opioid manufacturers like Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, the pill that fueled the opioid epidemic. Purdue Pharma created an environment so that opioid use was okay. So if you prescribe your patients this drug, there's less than one percent chance they'll get addicted. That was a lie, a big lie. Can you prove that in court? Absolutely. Purdue Pharma declined our request for an interview, but said in a statement that when the FDA approved OxyContin in 1995, it authorized the company to state on the label that addiction to opioids legitimately used is very rare. But as evidence of abuse mounted, the company admitted in federal

court in 2007 that it had misled doctors and consumers about just how addictive OxyContin can be. The Purdue Pharma case is an easy case. I hate to say it, but it's an easy case to prove. You can prove that they told the lies that they told. It has been considered tougher to build a case against Mike Moore's other targets, the huge drug distributors who've made billions delivering opioids from manufacturers to pharmacies. The distributors are saying things like, we're just truck drivers. We didn't know where the pills went. Of course they did. There's a controlled substance act. Controlled substance act. You're supposed to control these pills. And when you don't, you have a responsibility for it. It's real simple. drug distribution because they have much deeper pockets than the manufacturers. Purdue Pharma, for example, had less than $2 billion in revenue last year. Distributor McKesson, by contrast,

had $208 billion in revenue. McKesson, you're the sixth largest company in this country. You're telling the American public you didn't have systems in place to adhere to the Controlled Substance Act? Seriously? Mike Moore and his allies now have what they characterize as devastating evidence proving that distributors knew what they were doing. A huge confidential DEA database called ARCOS tracks all transactions involving controlled substances. This spring, a federal judge in Cleveland, who is hearing many of the local lawsuits, ordered all that data to be handed over to the plaintiff's lawyers. And I can actually tell you which distributor distributed to which particular pharmacy

by year, by volume, and where the pills came from. Wow. Burton LeBlanc is a Louisiana lawyer who regularly huddles with Mike Moore in Greaton Beach. His firm represents hundreds of cities and counties in their opioid lawsuits, and his team has taken the lead in analyzing the ARCOS data. In terms of the wholesale distributor's duty to report suspicious orders, we can immediately look at volume and detect patterns with the data that we currently have. So you can see that for every pharmacy in the country?

I have it for every transaction in the United States. What's the most important thing that it has shown you? That the stories that you've heard from some of the DEA investigative agents concerning the large volumes of pills going into certain parts of our country are absolutely true. One of those stories concerned Kermit, West Virginia, a town of just 400 people where nine million opioid pills were delivered in just two years to a single pharmacy. Did the companies have access to this information? It was their data. That data has now been shared with state attorneys general, including Ohio's Mike DeWine.

I'm not allowed to talk about the specifics, but I will simply tell you it's shocking. Anyone who is looking at those numbers, as those middlemen were, as these distributors were, clearly, clearly should have seen that something was dramatically wrong. Like Purdue, drug distributors declined our request for an interview. But in a statement from their trade association said, it defies common sense to single out distributors for the opioid crisis. Distributors deliver medicines prescribed by a licensed physician and ordered by a licensed pharmacy. But Mike Moore insists that does not let the companies off the legal hook.

If you got walking around since and you care, you're going to check before you send nine million pills to a little bitty county in West Virginia or Mississippi or Louisiana or Ohio. You're going to check if you care. You think they don't care? I don't think they cared enough. And if they cared enough, maybe we would not have lost 500,000 lives from this problem. It appalls me. Trial dates have been set for next year in a few of the state and local cases. But rather than go to trial, and just as he did with tobacco, Mike Moore hopes to force a mega settlement to fund drug treatment, prevention, and education.

You had to have thought about how much money you would need to do the projects that you foresee. Oh, I've seen all the models. To be effective, we need at least $100 billion to start off with. And I know you've heard the criticism that with all these lawyers involved, that this is just a bunch of trial lawyers looking for a great big payday. I don't care one whit about any money in this case, not one whit whatsoever about it. And nobody's going to believe that the attorneys are not going to make any money. No, no, no, no, no. And I'm not saying that. I was talking about all I can speak for is me. You made money off tobacco. Nope, not a penny. That's because for all the years of the tobacco

litigation and many years after, Moore was working for a modest state salary as Mississippi Attorney General. He made money off of BP Spokes. I made some money on helping resolve the case, yeah. Moore has made enough money to be comfortable. At age 66, this may be his last big case, and he believes the Arcos data gives him the ammunition he needs to demolish the opioid industry's argument that it should not be blamed. Nobody in the world is going to believe that. And don't go try to tell that to 12 jurors in Mississippi or Ohio who've lost people from this. You know what those jurors are going to do? They're going to go in the back room, they're going to spend about 30 minutes thinking about it, going to come back out and bam. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup.

Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into

the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Take a look around. Odds are you're surrounded by plastic. It's in our kitchens and in our bedrooms. It keeps our food fresh and our medicine safe. It is, in many ways, a miracle product, cheap to produce and virtually indestructible. Yet plastic's blessings are also a curse. That water bottle we use once and throw away will be with us for generations. There are campaigns to limit this plastic plague with bans on bags and

straws, and yet around the world it continues to pile up, seeping into our rivers and streams and turning our oceans into a vast garbage dump. But one mop-haired young Dutchman has come up with a plan which he says will save our seas. His name is Boyan Slat. He has no formal training, and his much-hyped multi-million dollar device has made him something of a sensation. So we decided to see what all the fuss is about. and his much-hyped, multi-million-dollar device has made him something of a sensation. So we decided to see what all the fuss is about. In an old naval base just outside San Francisco, engineers have spent months assembling a curious contraption.

The brainchild of a driven 24-year-old Dutchman named Boyan Slat, who dropped out of college to take center stage in a grand new venture. So how many of those clamps do we have? 200 clamps. It's just 2,000 feet of plastic piping affixed to a 10-foot nylon screen. But Slat's lofty promise? That he can clean up the world's oceans. His idea, as he lays out in this animation, is to tow his device out to an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,

the largest of five ocean whirlpools where much of the world's plastic accumulates. Despite what you may have heard, the garbage patch isn't an island, and it's even difficult to see with the naked eye. It's a vast soup of floating debris, much of it tiny and below the surface. If all goes according to plan, it's designed to use the wind, waves, and water currents to skim the plastic and corral it into an area where it can be removed. The first phase of an ambitious goal. I hope to deploy, say, around 60 of these cleanup systems in the next two to three years. 60? Yeah, which if we are successful with that, we should be able to remove half this Great Pacific Garbage Patch every five years. And what

about the other half? So, of course, we don't Patch every five years. And what about the other half? So, of course, we don't stop after five years. The eventual goal of this cleanup is to get to a 90% reduction by the year 2040. That's pretty aggressive. Yeah. We first joined Slad in early September, just before he was due to take his system out to sea. It's fitted with an array of gadgets to alert ships to its presence and to allow Slatt and his team to monitor its progress in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Critics were already calling Slatt's multi-million dollar

moonshot misguided. There are a lot of people, as you know, who said, oh, this can't work, it won't work, it's a waste of time. Is there a part of you that is waiting for that I told you so moment? I try not to lower myself to that level. How's that going? Yeah, it's going all right. Slatt came up with the idea as a teenager eight years ago on a diving trip off the coast of Greece. He was horrified by how much plastic he saw in the water and began collecting and analyzing it and thinking of ways to clean it up. Once there was a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and now we are in the middle of the Plastic Age. He laid out his vision to clean up the ocean at a TEDx talk when he was 18.

It went viral, and a self-styled savior of the seas was born. We can now actually clean up 50% of the patch in just five years' time. A slick Silicon Valley-style roadshow followed, and Slatt raised more than $30 million for his ocean cleanup, money he used to market his message and carry out research, including an aerial survey to map the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. For the past five years, a team of engineers and scientists

have been feverishly modeling, testing, and revising Slat's idea. But can technology solve a complicated problem like this? I think it's pretty much the only thing that ever has. Thanks to human ingenuity and the human ability to work together, we do have a good shot at solving it. Ingenuity? Well, maybe. But for many researchers, it's downright fanciful, given that 8 million tons of new plastic flows into the ocean every year,

mostly from places that have no way of dealing with their trash. This is a fetid river in Manila. These are the shores of the Dominican Republic. But the problem is everywhere. This is Los Angeles last month. Over time, that plastic disperses, disintegrates into smaller pieces, and often gets eaten by fish, making its way up the food chain. Scientists still aren't sure what all that means for human health,

but it's tightening its grip on marine animals and their habitat. On the most remote, most pristine beach, in the middle of the ocean, on a little tiny island, you will find trash there too. Denise Hardesty is a research scientist for the Australian government and a leading authority on ocean plastics, who studies the problem around the world. I was even just in Antarctica a couple years ago, and even there we're finding the refuse of human society. And what does that tell you? The ubiquity of plastics has really made its mark. You know, humans are really good at creating things and we're really good at making things that last

forever, clearly, with plastics and they are everywhere. Plastics take the stage at an international exhibit. And that's been the case ever since plastic filled our homes in the 1950s. The women folk washing dishes made of plastic. Dishes that bounce when they drop to the floor. It was revolutionary. When the rain comes down on tomorrow's brave new world, you'll put on your plastic raincoat, put up your plastic hood. Television commercials billed it as the material of the future.

See these two portable radios? Well, watch this. Let her go, Betsy. I think the flood of plastic products in the years after World War II helped make the sort of American dream possible for people. Susan Frankel is a San Francisco-based science writer whose book, Plastic, A Toxic Love Story, chronicles its history. It's kind of a technological miracle. I mean, we've created this family of materials

and figured out how to make them do pretty much anything that we want them to do. You know, you want it to be bendy, you want it to be transparent, you want it to be squishy, you want it to keep lettuce fresh for two weeks. Listen to the sounds of freshness. There are a lot of things that are made of plastic that we don't really think of as plastic. Where is plastic in our lives? How long have you got? I mean, I did a thought experiment at the start of my book where I said, I'm going to go a day without touching anything plastic. I thought it was a great idea until I walked into the bathroom and looked down at the plastic toilet seat and my plastic toothbrush. And so I said, okay,

I'm going to spend the day writing down everything that's plastic. And by the day's end, I had this, you know, enormous list. You look back at some of those old commercials and it's really, you know, plastic is sort of something that is life changing. Yes. I mean, one of the things you see in those early ads is it will last forever. Yes, yes, it will last forever. And unfortunately, nobody really thought about what that meant. There are really only three things you can do with plastic. Put it in the landfill, burn it, or recycle it. For decades, we thought recycling was the best answer, and we were told

to throw our plastic, our paper, and our aluminum cans into those familiar bins to be picked up and carted away. But according to Roland Geyer, an environmental scientist at the University of California, 90% of the plastic we used never made it into one of those bins at all. The other 10% ended up in places like Recology, a recycling facility in Northern California. Here are lots of milk bottles. But you'll be surprised to hear what they, and many other plants across the country, have been doing with that plastic.

Until recently in California and probably much of the rest of the U.S., two-thirds of the plastic went straight to China. China. Why China? China was accepting it, and it appears that China found a way to recycle it economically, which the U.S. has trouble with. But last year, all that changed when China decided it didn't want to be the world's trash dump and shut the door to our plastic. Leaving plants like fricology scrambling. Where is all that recycling going now? A lot of the plastic has been diverted to other countries

like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Thailand. And of those countries, do we know that what we're sending to them is ultimately being recycled? We hope it gets recycled. We hope,, do we know that what we're sending to them is ultimately being recycled? We hope it gets recycled. We hope, but do we think? We don't know. There's no real audit trail or anything like that, so it's very difficult. And we know that a lot of plastic in Southeast Asia and other countries ends up in open dumps. This is discouraging, I I think to most people.

Is the idea of recycling a myth? I wouldn't call it a myth. But it's not working. For plastic it's currently not working so we need we need to change it. We need to try different things. By 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. There are campaigns across the country to ban straws and bags and try to reduce the amount of plastic we consume in the first place. But Susan Frankel says it's simply not enough. I know all the problems about plastic and if you open my kitchen, you know, cabinets, I've got a box of Ziploc baggies there because it's easier. So, you know, we have to really wrestle ourselves with what conveniences are we willing to give up? What kind of consumption are we willing to sort of

pull back on in order to change? Plastics. Plastics. Yeah, plastics everywhere. It is a big ask that would require a major overhaul in the way we live our lives. Boyan. Boyan, here. Which may be why Boyan Slat and his big idea have been getting breathless coverage from the world's media. We start with one system because we've proved the technology and learn as

much as possible. Nearly all of whom seem to turn up for the spectacle this September as his system was towed under the Golden Gate Bridge 1,400 miles out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Well, it's five years of work and planning coming together in one nice shot. It's overwhelming, exciting to see. It's going through the Golden Gate Bridge right now. It's a beautiful sight. But since its deployment, its performance has been less enchanting. The plastic it has managed to corral ends up floating right back into the Pacific, a major design flaw SLAT's trying to fix. But even if he does get the device working, scientists we spoke to have serious doubts about just how effective it can be. For one thing, its 10-foot screen can only skim the ocean's surface,

missing plastic that's much deeper. It could also end up trapping marine animals. But their biggest criticism is that it's pointless to spend millions of dollars trying to clean the middle of the ocean when more and more plastic is flowing into it from the coastlines. For researcher Denise Hardesty, SLAT's device is certainly no silver bullet. You're skeptical. I would love to be wrong. What I'm suggesting is that we use our resources wisely and focus on the items close to source

where we can clean them up. Get it earlier. Get it early. Get it closer to the shore. Get it close to shore. And if you really want to focus it, be smart. Have these big trash booms near the city centers because that's where we lose much more of it as well.

And if you want to be even smarter, stop it before it gets to the coast. You know, have some rubbish traps at rivers that feed out into the mouth of the ocean or further upstream even. You know, I think the analogy that you hear often is if you've got a flood in the bathtub, you're not going to go just get a bunch of towels and try to keep cleaning it up because it's still flooding over. You really need to turn off the tap, right? People that we spoke to said this is like trying to mop up

a flooded bathroom but leaving the tap on. I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time. And, you know, if your bathroom is over flooding, I'm still pretty happy that a mop exists. Eventually we need to mop it up, right? Plastic is everywhere. It's not unusual to see water bottles or grocery bags wash up on our beaches. But surely if you traveled far enough away from people and cities, you might be able to find a pristine beach untouched by the plague of plastic, right? Well, we decided to find out.

This summer, we traveled to Midway Atoll, a small group of islands midway between the U.S. and Asia. It's an American territory best known as the site of one of the most important battles of World War II. Today, the islands are closed to the public and home to a host of exotic animals, including a charismatic seabird called the Laysan albatross. It's not easy to get to Midway. Visiting involves a long permitting process and a chartered plane from Honolulu to the middle of the ocean. We're almost midway to Midway right now from Oahu. After three hours, tiny slivers of light appear,

a postage stamp in the vast Pacific. As soon as we landed, it felt like we'd tumbled down the rabbit hole into a curious wonderland. There are so many birds on the atoll, we could only get here after dark, once they'd settled down for the night. As we made our way inland, the albatross chicks were oblivious to our caravan. But by daybreak, it seemed like we'd found paradise, a tiny atoll surrounded by turquoise waters. Spinner dolphins patrol the coastline. Endangered monk seals and giant sea turtles bask on its white beaches. And of course, the birds. So many birds.

Over a million flapping, snapping, chattering. Laysan albatross, the largest colony anywhere in the world. They just don't get out of the way. Some are friendlier than others, just like people. Amanda Boyd works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees Midway. Every day, its beaches are the scene of small acts of courage and clumsy crash and burns. Once they're off, the albatross can spend months at sea venturing thousands of miles, but returning to the same spot and the same partner. A relationship that begins with more preening and chest pumping than a Miami nightclub.

Oh my gosh, to watch them dance and as they're courtshipping. When you find a pair that has actually been together and they're in sync, it's mesmerizing. They know each other's cues and it's just, it's like art. It's beautiful. It's inspiring to watch that. Inspiring and loud. Honking lovers who are mostly ignored by their neighbors. If any place should be unspoiled, it's Midway.

The atoll is blissfully isolated, off limits to the public, and protected as part of one of the largest marine reserves in the world. So it was disturbing to see this. What are those orange and yellow things? Harbor booms. Kevin O'Brien oversees marine debris removal in the region for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Hundreds of tons of plastic have been retrieved from Midway in the last two decades. He showed us this year's pile, a veritable department store of discarded debris. Here, an intact CRTV screen. A whole screen. Yeah. Oh, look at this. So you've got enough things you can sort it, I guess. Toothbrushes. We find an incredible amount of toothbrushes. Tires. Tires. These can be dangerous because the young monk seals often will get curious and stick their snout into these

eel cones. Sometimes we'll find jugs full of chemicals with the lid still on, which we have to treat pretty carefully because we're never sure what's in it. You know, the label's gone. We found car bumpers, motorcycle helmets, fireman's helmets, golf clubs, bowling balls. All this trash ends up here because Midway sits at the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast ocean whirlpool that draws in plastic from coastlines around the world. Kevin O'Brien has been coming to Midway for a decade to survey and retrieve the debris.

This is some of what he hauled away last month. These nets are almost always made of some sort of plastic. Once they've been weathered in the environment, they can become very brittle. Whoa. And can easily break down into microplastics. So this looks like it's breaking apart and going away. Right. But it's not.

But it's not. Long before plastics invaded Midway, U.S. forces repelled a Japanese assault in the Second World War. The Japanese had hoped to use the islands as a bridge to the mainland. The American victory there in 1942 was a turning point. Today, there's a monument to the Americans who died in the Battle of Midway. And if you tour the islands, you find relics everywhere. Decaying artillery, derelict hangars, and beneath the water, the rusting skeletons of old warships. And of course, evidence of the new battle underway here. We've been cleaning it up for years.

And it keeps coming. And it keeps coming. On a walk along one of the beaches, we found a shoreline strewn with bottles and buoys, crates and canisters. Is this a problem that's unique to these islands? It's really not. There are beaches like this all over the world. What is unique about Midway is that none of this plastic you see on the beaches here originates here. It's a problem that doesn't know borders. I think a lot

of people see this on their beaches and it kind of looks like sea glass at first. Yeah it looks like a mosaic. It's really colorful actually kind kind of beautiful. Yeah, but what is it really? A lot of this is really plastic, you know, and we can sift it here and see what we come up with. Look at that. Little pieces. Sure. This is a bottle cap you can see. And what's the harm with this? Are fish eating this? Yeah, the smaller the piece of plastic, the smaller the animal that can consume it. Do we know that they definitely have effects on fish? We don't know that for certain. These

plastics become a magnet, essentially, for toxic chemicals that are found in the environment. PCBs, pesticides, fire retardant chemicals. And so the longer a piece of plastic stays in the environment, the more toxic it becomes. Studies have found these microplastics in everything from supermarket seafood to drinking water. But scientists don't yet know what all that means for our health. When an adult comes in, they'll make a couple of noises saying, hey, I'm back. But the effects on birds are easier to see. Kelly Goodale, a U.S. fish and wildlife biologist, took us on a ride around Midway to show us the impact all this plastic is having on them.

So the adults have been coming back every few days to a couple of weeks to feed them. What's happening right now? It's regurgitating up more food. Dinner time here might make you lose your appetite. Whoa! Did you see that squid? That was a whole squid! That ought to keep you happy for a while. For all the fish and squid they catch, the albatross bring back plastic, too,

from that great Pacific garbage patch. Goodale showed us their nesting grounds. So here we do have a chick that did die. And as you can see, if you want to take a look at it. Oh my goodness. In here, you see there's so many pieces of plastic. Oh, plastic bag. And they eat the plastic bags.

Why? You know, these can look like food sources. It could look like a squid to them. Yeah. So they think this is food? They do think it's food. And you know, flying fish, they can lay eggs on floating debris. And so they will absolutely lay eggs on pieces of floating plastic. So if the adults are out there foraging, they pick up those eggs as well as pieces of plastic in there. It's the serving dish for the egg. Yes. And of the birds that you end up looking at, dissecting, what percentage of them have plastics in them? Every single bird has plastic in it. Every bird? Yes. U.S. fish and wildlife scientists estimate the birds carry five tons of plastic back to Midway in their stomach every year.

Some of it, Kelly Goodale collects and catalogs. A comb. This one is probably one of the most disturbing ones. This was... Oh, my goodness. You have bottle caps in here. This looks like trash from a drugstore. It pretty much is.

Okay, all of this was inside one bird. Parts of this atoll can look like the site of a disaster. And while Goodale says it's impossible to pinpoint the cause of death in every case, there's no question plastic can be fatal to these birds. Either by filling up their stomachs and leaving little room for food, or by tearing up their insides. As these photos from Fish and Wildlife show, that plastic, which scientists say can take hundreds of years to decompose, is often the only thing left after the birds have gone. Everyone, no matter where you live, has a role in this problem.

Even someone in South Dakota, for instance, who has a river near their home and doesn't dispose of their plastic bottle appropriately might be contributing to this problem. All the way out here. All waterways lead to the ocean, and once this stuff gets into the ocean, the ocean currents can take it anywhere. Anywhere and everywhere. It's hard to find a place not plagued by plastic. Just then, we got a reminder of what else is at stake as an endangered monk seal paddled by. What's this guy doing, you think? Is he coming in to eat? He's

coming in, he's checking it out. These are the locals. And whether or not you care about all these incredible species that live up here in this very remote place, it doesn't necessarily matter because there are so many other things that rely on the ocean. People rely on the ocean for their livelihood, fishermen. People rely on the ocean for recreation, tourism. And right here, we have an indicator of the health of our ocean. You say this is an indicator. What does it tell you? It tells us that the scale of the problem is massive and it's global.