My second Hot Docs experience began Saturday with an appropriate screening considering the proximity to Earth Day. Lately, environmental themes have been ripe for documentary, and this is beyond movies about power-point presentations on global warming by former US Vice-Presidents.

Working off the famed words of Greenpeace co-founder and renowned Toronto broadcaster Bob Hunter, Garbage! looks at change for the better on the local level. This film by Andrew Nisker, which received its world premiere at Hot Docs, is a treat that uses humour and the family dynamic to tell some rather startling truths.

Nisker begins with a simple premise: find someone who’s willing to collect all their garbage over a three month period in order to see how much we throw away every day. After trying for three days without much success to find a willing volunteer at random, Nisker approaches some good friends to be his guinea pigs. The McDonalds are typical of your suburban Canadian family: mom, dad and three kids.

The wife, Michele, is the one that agrees to Nisker’s bold experiment, much to the chagrin of husband Glen, who kind of takes every opportunity to point out that he was more than a little opposed to this endeavour to begin with. The McDonalds three children: Ariel, 7; Thomas, 4 and Esther, 10 months are also accounted for in the scheme. In reality though only Ariel has an idea of what’s going on even if all she knows is that her friends are laughing at her for having to pocket her

garbage.

That’s right, it’s not enough for the McDonalds to pile up their home garbage and recycling in the garage for three months (wet garbage, for reasons of health and safety, was exempt though weighed), they had to bring home the garbage they used outside the home; be it juice boxes or fast food wrappers. And the three months that Nisker chose to do this over are October, November and December, which predominately feature the two most wasteful holidays: Halloween and Christmas.

But more than following the follies of the McDonalds, Nisker also travels outside the family’s Toronto home to see the wider impact of pollution and the means by which people around Canada and the US are fighting for a greener planet.

Places like Huron Township in Michigan and Sylvester/Whitesville West Virginia are profiled. The name may not be familiar, but Huron Township is an important place to Torontonians because that’s where the entire city’s garbage has gone since the mid-90s. More than that, Huron Township is literally surrounded by three different landfills, one of the surprising side effects of which is that the town is covered by a layer of something called “dump dust”.

Meanwhile the aforementioned municipalities in West Virginia sit right in the middle of coal county USA. This is a place were mountain tops are blown off in incredible explosions in order to reach the rich veins of coal below them. A man named Larry Gibson lives here even though he could sell his land for hundreds of millions to the coal company. The ground on his property is actually cracked open in places as a result of blasts happening miles away. On camera, Gibson asks the audience to think of it this way: when you turn on a light switch, that’s the sound of an exploding mountain top he hears.

The rather dire effects of our collective wastefulness make a powerful statement that overlaps with the lighter, main narrative of the McDonalds. At one point near Christmas, Glen goes “on strike” in some kind of protest, while Michele carries on with exuberance. When it’s all said and done, three months worth of trash comes to 320 lbs of wet, compost and 83 combined bags of garbage and recyclables.

Nisker also makes an interesting choice in bringing the McDonalds along on some of his fact finding. Michele visits a compost processing plant, while experts in the areas of recycling and household chemicals come into the family’s home and talk about how damaging the dishwashing detergent is to the ecosystem and how the carton of juice with the plastic spout is actually not recyclable because of the spout. A lot of time is spent talking about packaging, and industry’s proclivity for over-packing their products and what we as consumers can do to encourage them to go the other way.

The end product though is a film that can laugh at itself while being thoroughly serious in its intent. If there’s a criticism to An Inconvenient Truth it’s that it focuses very broadly on climate change and only brings it down to a personal level near the end in the form of helpful hints. Garbage! takes the opposite approach; out tradition of waste graphically illustrated by a garage full of garbage.

Fun, little animated bits help keep the tone light, but Nisker’s theme is very serious: what kind of world are we leaving for the next generation? The film manages an impressive balancing act, thanks in no small part to a courageous family of eco-adventurers and some very sympathetic, everyday folk who could almost be labelled victims of eco-neglect. Amongst the recent trend of eco-friendly docs, Garbage! is a unique treasure.

For more information on the film, to buy a copy or look to see if there’s a screening near you visit: www.garbagerevolution.com