Plastic Diamond illuminates the inconvenient truth of the global plastics crisis and dissects the false hope of a magic bullet solution to mankind's consumption habits.

Our Mission

The plastics crisis is both an urgent environmental crisis and an object lesson, demonstrating how the incentives globalized capitalism work against the galvanization collective action necessary to address the problem.

The awareness of plastic’s environmental challenges peaked in the 80s and 90s; the first generation of landfills had filled with Styrofoam and disposable diapers, PSAs showed seabirds entangled in the plastic tops of six-packs. Unfortunately, while public attention moved on, the problem only became more significant. By 2050, the ocean will contain more pieces of plastic than fish. The ubiquity of plastics has lulled us into a false sense of security; plastics have become a staple component in products from foods to medicines with data about their long-term health effects available only to the corporations that sell them.

The plastic crisis is also a powerful allegory about choices and their consequences, the wishful instinct to believe that what is unseen is unharmed. There is a direct line between the bottle of Diet Coke thrown out in the US, the corporate lobbying and resulting weak public policy that creates a grey market for illegal recycling, and the Indonesian working the trash fields for pennies an hour. There is a direct connection between the marketing of a “miracle material” - durable! light! flexible! cheap! - and a reticence to see its attendant risks.

Plastic Diamond follows in the footsteps of didactic entertainment like Silent Spring and an Inconvenient Truth, a film that elucidates because knowledge motivates change. Nothing did more to reduce smoking than the dissemination of scientific research on the harm of second-hand smoke; it is one thing to nihilistically put ourselves at risk - it’s another to risk the health of others. The developed world’s addiction to plastics has put the global environment in peril. The time for action is now.

As a European living in the United States, Charles bring an outsider’s perspective on the American laissez faire attitude towards consumption that powers so much of the globe’s addiction to plastic. As an artist, adventurer, and entrepreneur who has traveled widely, he has seen first-hand the interconnectivity of the globe and the influence both cultural and economic that the US has on even the remotest-seeming country. No one wants to be lectured; audiences want to be surprised by an investigation, inspired to make a change, and convinced that change is still possible. By framing the plastics crisis not as the unfortunate collateral damage of industrialization but as the result of a deliberate conspiracy between corporate interests, indifferent government regulators, pay-for-play science, and an incurious media, Plastic Diamond sensationalizes an under discussed crisis even as it demystifies it.