Ninety Days of Trash

Yesterday was garbage day in Concord, New Hampshire. People gathered their purple pay-as-you-throw bags filled with food wrappers, kitty litter, and paper towels and set them on the curb. By the time they got home from work, a garbage truck had whisked those bags away and trucked them to one of the nearly three thousand landfills in North America.

I recycle, I have a compost pile, and I’m admittedly a little neurotic about minimizing trash, so most weeks i don’t give my garbage a second thought. But if Canadian filmmaker Andrew Nisker saw my weekly output, he might put me up to a challenge: to collect and store all of my garbage for three months.

Nisker found a family who was willing to pile up ninety days worth of waste in their garage. He filmed the entire pungent ordeal in order to illustrate just how much trash one family can produce. Then he connected the dots between that mound of garbage and the pollution that clogs landfills and waterways around the world.

Andrew Nisker joins us for our Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home at the Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, Vermont.

(Photo by Charley Lhasa via Flickr/Creative Commons)