Trashed

Trashed This documentary was made at the University of Southern California, and directed in Derek Boonstra in 2007. Although it’s only a twenty minute video, it does dive into some interesting facts about the interesting facts about trash, and our cultural perception of its disposal. It’s estimated that the average person generates approximately four and a half pounds of trash a day. All this trash has to go somewhere. Curbside pickup of trash has lead to an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality with the way we deal with the garbage we generate. Landfills are the current solution to this problem, but they are not a permanent solution to this problem. Landfills are overflowing, we generate more trash than we can process, therefore compacting is necessary. Compacting and the high concentration of waste lead to leaching of chemicals into the water, and even the loss of trash into the environment.

The reason for the extensive use of landfills for waste disposal has a lot to do with the economics of the business. “We can send trash to the sun, but your garbage bill would be $5,000.” Basically, people don’t want to throw money to what they do not have to think about or have to deal with. People need to change their mentality about how they deal with trash. Education about the environmental effects that trash has, as well as ways to reduce their trash generation by using multi-use packaging, and composting food scraps. Landfills are anaerobic environment, meaning that they don’t have oxygen which means that organic material, like food and newspapers will not degrade. Composting can reduce the amount of waste heading to landfills (Mitchell, 2007).

This film was low budget, so it wasn’t very fancy but still highly educational. Most likely this movie was made for high school or college students. This video has very key points, but was made mostly to raise awareness of this growing problem with our throw away culture. In order to reduce the amount of garbage we all produce we need to make more conscious decisions about the products we buy, and how we get rid of that trash. Again reduce, reuse, recycle (EPA, 2009). =Bibliography=

Boonstra, Derek (Director). Trashed [Motion Picture] http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/trashed/

EPA. (2009, November 17). //EPA//. Retrieved November 3, 2010, from Practice composting: http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/rrr/composting/index.htm

Mitchell, D. (2007). //Compost to Reduce landfills//. Retrieved November 3, 2010, from charity Guide: http://charityguide.org/volunteer/fewhours/compost.htm