Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home
- 3000 toxic landfills in North America
- 1.3 trillion gallons of raw sewage waste in US per year – equal to 99 days of continuous flow over Niagara Falls
- One year’s worth of ‘road runoff’ in North America – petroleum mixed with precipitation – equals 2.5 times the volume of Exxon Valdez spill
In North America, we are the ultimate consumer society. And consumers make waste. Tonnes and tonnes of it.
Toronto was lucky home to the November 19, 2007, World Premiere of Andrew Nisker’s labour of love, ‘Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home’. It was an eye-popping experience and a very cool community event. The premiere brought together a large and eclectic group – prominent members of the Toronto film community, the Recycling Council of Ontario, Roots, Steamwhistle Brewery (I really liked this corporate sponsor) and many more.
I was particularly interested because ‘Garbage!’ is one of a growing group of films using social media and viral marketing to get the message out. The producers are encouraging concerned citizens to host viewing parties in their homes and will follow up this film with ‘Garbage! 2’, a mash-up of user-generated inspirational videos on what ordinary people are doing to cut down on waste and contaminants in their daily lives.
In ‘Garbage!’, Nisker follows the McDonalds, a typical suburban Toronto family, as they accumulate trash in their garage for three months. It provides a great centrepiece to the film – as the heart-warming and funny family of five comes to grips with just how much needless waste they are bringing into their home.
But as the filmmaker explained to Fox News, he’s no radical trying to make people abandon their modern lifestyle. Instead, he just wants people to reflect on where they can cut down.
Some of the most poignant segments of the film come on the journey to document the life cycle of consumption and waste.
West Virginia is coal country and the setting for some damning stories.
During times of ‘peak load’ in Toronto – after work when people return home, for example – more energy is needed, and this is when the coal plants get fired up. The coal we’re burning is coming from the blasted-out mountain tops of West Virginia.
One girl talks about getting sick all the time at her elementary school, just like most of her classmates. Right behind the school, we see a huge coal processing plant. And above that is a slurry pond with 2.8 billion tonnes of mine sludge.
The film leaves us with some open-ended questions. Why are we buying products with so much excess packaging? What little steps can we take to cut down on energy use? Why is there so much focus on mega-energy generation projects when we could be taking the soft path of smaller decentralized green power?
The cool and exciting next step with the ‘Garbage! 2’ project is already making me plan my home video. And I’ll tell ya, the lights in my house in Toronto are going to be dark for peak load times because it’s just too much to bear thinking of my indulgent lifestyle dirtying up that little girl’s town in West Virginia.
