Paris — With the season of exuberant gift giving, joyful excess and artificial Christmas trees at hand, activists, academics and filmmakers are warning of growing landfills and environmental pollution fed by our unsustainable consumption cycle.
“Waste is very much an unseen problem. Though the waste itself is very visible, people don’t regard waste as a pollution problem,” said Andy Cundy, a professor who researches applied geology and environmental management at the University of Brighton in Britain.
As economies slowly rebound and we rejoice in being able to buy our loved ones (or ourselves) gifts, our garbage dumps continue to grow. And whether our household waste ultimately ends up in landfills or is incinerated (in some cases allowing for energy recapture), it puts a stress on the environment. When trash is exported to developing countries — where rules governing disposal tend to be lax or nonexistent — the environmental impact is especially troubling, as two new documentary films show.
“Trashed” follows host Jeremy Irons on a discovery of the global problem of household waste. Our colleagues at the Green Blog asked Mr. Irons a couple of questions about the film earlier this month. Mr. Irons told Joanna Foster:
“I didn’t realize that all this non-degradable rubbish and consumerism is in large part thanks to World War II and the massive war production apparatus that needed to be developed for peaceful purposes after the days of making weapons had ended. I was born in 1948, so it’s really only in my lifetime that this throwaway society has emerged.”
The trailer for “Trashed”:
The film “Landfill Harmonic” follows a youth orchestra in a Paraguayan slum that plays on instruments built from other people’s trash (to see some photos of the recycled orchestra’s instruments, check out this NBC report).
“Our film shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful-sounding musical instruments; but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of human beings,” the filmmakers write on their website.
The teaser for “Landfill Harmonic” has become a minor Internet sensation, with nearly 1.5 million views since its launch in November:
Here, in the European Union, more than 3 billion tons of waste is thrown out yearly, which comes out to 6 tons per citizen, according to Eurostat. And while there are some signs of progress in waste reduction, recycling and treatment, the Union’s 27 countries are still a long way from meeting their 2020 targets under the waste reduction plan.
The so-called Waste Framework Directive calls for at least half of all paper, metal, plastic and glass waste from households to be recycled by 2020. In the United Kingdom, which is among the Union’s more ambitious recyclers, the total household rate for recycling did not even reach 40 percent in 2010, according to a government-commissioned study.
The most meaningful way of reducing the stream of waste is by reducing consumption, explained Dr. Cundy, who also served as an expert in the film “Trashed.”
Mr. Irons suggests unwrapping products and leaving the packaging in the store. As he put it in his interview with the Green Blog:
“I consider myself quite capable of getting my tomatoes home safely without sitting on them, so why must they come packaged in plastic armor? And I think I can even get a pair of scissors home without chopping off my hand so I really don’t need that damned impenetrable plastic shell.”
Dr. Cundy says composting at home can do much to cut the amount of general waste households produce.
Municipal governments can help the process by reducing services for general garbage (smaller bins, fewer weekly pick-ups) and by enhancing services for recycling and composting.
“It forces people to change their habits about their own lifestyle choices,” Dr. Cundy said in a recent interview. “It’s very simple: reuse, recycle rather than throw it away.”
Do you try to limit the amount of trash you throw out? How? What do you wish you did more religiously, or what do you wish was easier or different when it comes to reusing and recycling?
IHT Rendezvous: What Will You Do With All That Gift Wrap?
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IHT Rendezvous: What Will You Do With All That Gift Wrap?
