Team Marine - Young Voices for the Planet

Young Voices for the Planet

This video clip highlights the effort on by a group of young students to ban the use of plastic shopping bags in the city of Santa Monica. The video documents the effort and provides visual testimony of the effects that trash and specifically plastic bags have on the ocean ecosystem.

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Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

This video will be a good introduction to a teaching sequence about solutions and climate change policy.
While the focus of this video is on banning plastics because of their impact on marine ecosystems, the connection is made to the fossil fuels and energy used to manufacture plastic. Comments from expert scientist: it's really about activism, and encouraging youth to make the world a better place. Excellent and laudable goals. plastic trash, and plastic bags in particular, are accurately portrayed as an environmental hazard. The students repeatedly refer to petroleum-based plastic products causing global warming. It would be more accurate to say that the process of creating the bags produces greenhouse gases. Unless they are burned, the bags themselves don't produce carbon emissions. They missed an opportunity to discuss global ocean circulation, the trash island and the long decay time of plastic.
This video, offering an example of young students engaging in policy changes and efforts to raise awareness toward climate change and marine pollution, will likely engage other students and shows ways everyone can make a difference. A good video to show if your school wants to embark in a recycling effort in your community. This video provides instructors with additional information and references on how other communities can stop the use of plastic bags.