99% of the plastic that should be floating in the oceans is missing. Even accounting for the plastic that washes up on beaches or is trapped in arctic ice, millions of tonnes has simply disappeared. As most plastic never deteriorates, it simply breaks down into smaller and smaller particles that are invisible to the human eye, what happens to this missing ocean plastic is a mystery. In this investigation, scientists embark in search of the micro-plastics. Small, mostly invisible, toxic, they are home to the new ecosystem: the plastisphere. But where are they? Ingested by organisms? Buried under the ocean floor? Degraded by bacteria? And what is the impact of them entering the food chain?
Cinematography
Haunting deep-sea imagery that makes the invisible terrifyingly visible.
Writing
Tight mystery structure: where's the plastic? The answer is worse than expected.
Director
Vincent Pérazio
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Released when 'microplastics' was barely in public vocabulary; helped mainstream a now-inescapable term. Pérazio essentially made horror from laboratory data.
The 99% figure comes from a 2015 Science paper by Andrés Cózar—this film accompanied the research's media cycle, rare documentary-science symbiosis.
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