Trashed

Trashed sets out to discover the extent and effects of garbage on the natural world. The film travels to beautiful destinations now tainted by pollution, through conversations with scientists, politicians, and people whose health and livelihoods have been fundamentally effected by waste. We see unfettered garbage dumping in Lebanon effecting its own coastline, but also the entire Mediterranean sea; toxic waste mounds set near a school and a future hospital in England; garbage incinerators in Iceland and Japan; the effects of plastic, microplastics, chemical sludge, flame retardants, pesticides, herbicides, dioxins, and other chemicals from waste and their synergistic impacts the world over. The film also looks at the phenomenon of biomagnification, where toxic chemicals such as dioxin from garbage accumulate in nature and pass on in concentration to future generations. Exemplary of the worst case of this is in Vietnam, where severe birth defects, genetic disorders, and neurological disabilities are a direct result of exposure to toxic chemicals by the United States from over four decades ago. Trashed is a call for urgent action to resolve the issue of existing waste, to drastically reduce consumption and output to significantly less harmful levels, while demonstrating how this is already being reached for in many communities around the world.