Sustainability History Project

[This post was written by Megan Rice, Jamie Price, and Angelina Peters in response to viewing the documentary Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home]

Yuck! Stinky!
Honey, take out the garbage!
Honey, let’s keep our garbage in the garage for 3 months! Huh?

Retaining the family’s garbage in the garage is not generally an option couples discuss during dinner or when getting ready for the day. However, one couple did in fact take on this task. Asked by a friend who wanted to ask a question about how much garbage do we create and where does the garbage go after it leaves the curb. All great questions, but really keeping garbage and recycling for 3 months—some might call this a little crazy but this family did just that. They even brought garbage home from work, school, and parties—either really dedicated to the project or crazy. Perhaps a little of both.

Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home tackles this issue. A bold and respectable documentary that asks a family of five to keep all of their garbage and recycling. They weighed and put their wet garbage on the curb to avoid health department calls but everything else they kept in their garage. The primary purpose of the film is to make people aware of the impact each individual has on our environment in regards to our consumption (especially in North America).

Some things that stood out in our mind when watching this film were not only the large amounts of garbage produced on a daily basis by even a small family but also what happens to our environment—for example, what happens to our water supply by doing simple things like running our dishwasher, flushing our toilet, and using the washing machine.

This documentary also discusses the effects on communities near our landfills, the communities near our energy sources, and the pollution that is produced from regular families. In many ways this was very eye opening.

There were things in this documentary that we found very interesting, one being that during their tour of the compost facility they had to run some very heavy equipment in order to remove the plastic bags. We know that here in the Portland area our compost bins are required to contain compost only material. That means plastic bags are not accepted. People are allowed to use brown paper bags because these bags can break down with the compost, unlike plastic. We wonder why they do not do this in the Toronto area?

Another noteworthy part of this film is when the director turns-in his old Jeep in to be recycled. The interesting thing about this is they smash the Jeep and reuse the metal the rest of the parts go into a landfill. We would have thought that donating this vehicle to a charitable cause or sending it to an auto yard where they sell it off part by part would be a much more sustainable thing to do.

One of the three of us has children. The oldest child recently rescued from the landfill items that can either be reused or recycled, and he even called local auto stores to see if they will take and recycle the antifreeze he found. This brings up a compelling point: We consider Portland, Oregon, to be a leader in green/sustainable programs, but we still seem to throw a lot of stuff in the trash. Also, we are not able to recycle our diapers—we understand that recyclable diapers are available in Canada, but they don’t seem to be in the U.S. Why not?

P.S., one of us in particular enjoyed watching this documentary with the exception of the maggots.

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