Jack Seale, The Guardian:
“Get up, after a restless sleep. Shower, using products that contain plastic and are in plastic containers. Fix your hair and deodorise your body using sprays smoothed by plastics, before putting on clothes woven from synthetic (plastic) fibres, picking up your plastic phone and heading out, sipping water from a plastic bottle. Chew plastic gum. Buy a snack wrapped in plastic and receive a receipt printed on plastic-covered paper. Come home, take food out of its plastic packaging, cook it with plastic utensils, then store the leftovers in plastic tubs and clean up with detergents that contain plastics and come in plastic bottles. Clean your teeth with a plastic toothbrush and plastic-infused toothpaste. Go to bed.
The list of ways in which humanity is committing species suicide may be long and growing, but The Plastic Detox is here to suggest that room should be found for the overwhelmingly widespread use of petrochemical-derived plastics.
That’s the main concern of this documentary’s protagonist, epidemiologist Shanna Swan, whose 2021 book Count Down claimed that chemicals in plastic are a factor in falling sperm counts. Swan, a vibrantly bustling grandmother of six and great-grandmother of a precious one, hooks us in with an experiment flavoured by reality TV. Visiting Florida, California, and Idaho, she finds six couples who are struggling to conceive, and challenges them to live for three months with their exposure to plastics dramatically reduced.”
After all this doom, Swan’s final visits to the six couples reward us with happy tears: her admittedly small-sample experiment has produced startling results, including some that go beyond being pregnant or not.