Trashed

Trashed Synopsis

Everyday, each American throws away an average of 4.5 pounds of garbage. But where exactly is "away"? Trashed, a 20-minute documentary, dives headlong into the world of garbage and surfaces in some unlikely places.

An existential road trip through the quixotic American waste stream, Trashed asked the question, "What does our trash say about us?"For some, like veteran garbage truck driver Eddie Scott, "trash is a way of living." For others, like expert Eugene Tseng, deemed "The World's Most Over-Educated Garbage Man," trash is a mindset.

Eugene has personally dug through local garbage cans to analyze their contents. His findings? Everything from non-biodegradable medical waste to 50-year-old newspapers, still intact. He reminds us that we use many products for a fraction of the time that they spend at a landfill./The film draws us into the unusual worlds of people whose lives revolve around strangers' waste.

They represent the enormous invisible network that is dedicated to putting garbage as far out of sight as possible, resulting in a system that is largely taken for granted. Sam Pedroza, an environmental engineer at the largest operating US landfill, wonders whether our trash-collectors may be doing "too good of a job." obscuring questions liike, "Where will our trash go when out largest landfills run out of space in the next decade?"

As the film dives deeper, however, we find that the system itself is comprised of a Byzantine network of private industries whose interests are not always aligned. By the time the film arrives in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, researchers Captain Charles Moore and Dr. Marcus Erksen have discovered garbage patches in the Pacific that are twice the size of Texas and growing.

These massive collections of trash are having a dramatic effect on the entire Earth's good chain, filtering all the way up to us./Trashed brings you in the world of garbage and ultimately forces us to confront our distant relationship with our trash. For better or worse, it will change the way you think about your garbage.