by kevin, on February 5th, 2010
Image from Garbage Revolution web site
For some reason, the past two weeks have been filled with garbage. Well, garbage or waste related issues. Last week Aleida and I attended a screening of the movie Garbage Dreams, then another screening for the movie Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home, and my UCLA class focused on waste reduction. My review post for Garbage Dreams was the most visited in that two-week period, and several other blog and web sites have asked to repost it. One is a site I recently discovered called Green Building Pro. I think in the next few weeks they’ll also be doing series of waste related posts.
This past Wednesday, we attended the inaugural Environmental Film Series hosted by the Burbank Green Alliance. Each month the group will host a movie focusing on an environmental issue. This month’s movie was Garbage! The event was co-sponsored by Eco Diva TV and was followed by a lively discussion with Kreigh Hampel, Burbank Recycling Coordinator, and Ferris Kawar, Burbank Recycling Specialist.
The movie was shot in Canada and follows an average family as they agree to hold all their garbage for a three-month period. During that period, the film branches off to cover related issues such as water, transportation, energy, toxins, and others. Although I think they’re valuable ones to cover, they were too tangential and didn’t connect well to the key theme – garbage. As an example, one scene opens with an exterior shot of the family’s home during the holiday season and their house is decorated with lights. The director traces their electricity to a local power plant that gets coal from West Virginia. Quite a bit of time is spent interviewing locals from a small mining town in West Virginia. They talk about the hazards of coal mining, the effects of mountain top removal, the impact on ground water quality, the amount of air pollution in the region, and their efforts to change mining company behavior. It was all good information about a subject that most of us are oblivious to, it was entertaining, and completely compelling, but what did it have to do with the bags of garbage collecting in the garage? I couldn’t figure out the direct link.
Another section of the movie presents issues related to transportation and how pollutants from cars end up in waterways through runoff from roads. In what seemed to be only a symbolic gesture, the director takes his old Jeep to a recycling center. I was excited to see how this would work, but all they did was drain the fluid and crush the car, and stack it among hundreds of others. The recycling center operator said they would eventually shred the vehicle and separate the various materials. And that’s what I wanted to see. It was a serious letdown and terribly anticlimactic. In the end, it didn’t really contribute to the story line and seemed like it was included only to fill air time. There was a little time dedicated to a municipal waste recycling center, but hardly enough to tell a comprehensive story of recycling issues.
One part that was fascinating and horrifying related to tracking Toronto’s export of trash to a landfill in Michigan, one of the largest in the nation. It wasn’t covered in the film, but few know that the largest export from Canada to the U.S. by volume is garbage. Dump fees in Canada tend to be higher making it an easy economic decision for many companies. It’s far less expensive to ship their waste across the border. Toronto, where the film was set, is a city of 4 million. That’s roughly the size of Chicago. The city not only sends its garbage to Michigan, but also its raw human sewage.
Within the U.S., several states are net exporters and others are net importers of garbage. Even though your first reaction might be revulsion that one state may import garbage from others, or other countries, it’s becoming big business. States that import the most waste are Pennsylvania (by a margin of nearly 2 to 1), Illinois, Virginia, Michigan, and Ohio. States that export the most waste are New York (by a margin nearly 3 to 1), New Jersey, Missouri, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Garbage is becoming a valuable commodity.
Where I felt the movie was a real let down was in presentation and style. It seemed like the director was going for a home-made amateur look, but took it too far. It was too rough and difficult to watch. Some of the graphics were appallingly bad. But the real disappointment was how the family involved didn’t seem to learn anything from the experience. And in the end, I’m not sure the audience does either. After three months the family collected 83 bags of dry waste and recycling. They separated dry waste from recycling but didn’t show a count for each individually. They also generated 320 pounds of wet waste. In Toronto that’s food scraps and other compostable material processed as green waste. But no conclusions were drawn and I left with a bit more knowledge but no suggestions for actions to take if I want to reduce my own waste production.
Although flawed, this film does present some important issues to ponder and ones that will likely become more critical in the future if we change nothing in our wasteful behavior. I agree with the tag-line that the revolution begins at home, but this film provides little to consider for what we can do at home to kick start that revolution. Have you seen the film? Let us know what you think.