210 million tons

210 Million Tons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1z1cdJZjfQ

210 Million Tons is about the excessive garbage being produced by the United States and ways how reduce, reuse, and recycle can be applied to the issue. This documentary features interviews with a director of solid waste at a landfill, dumpster divers, local authorities, a microbiologist, and several others on this issue.

The title, 210 Million Tons, is how much United States produces solid waste per year, which makes it the number one trash producing country in the world at 1,609 lbs. per person per year but about 30% of the things that get thrown in the dump can be recycled. This encourages people to be dumpster divers to find useful stuff in the dumpster. What dumpster divers do is they go in the dumpster and look for items that are still usable; items include clothing, furniture, stuffed animals, even food, basically anything that gets thrown in the dumpster. Because of this, the trash that goes to the landfill is reduced somewhat.

Local authorities consider dumpster diving as trespassing because they are going to a place where they are not supposed to be but it is highly unlikely that they will be sent to jail to avoid overcrowding, unless there is a compelling reason for it. They try to warn people from diving because of the dangers associated with it. There was a case where a lady was almost put in a trash truck when she was looking for aluminum cans while inside the dumpster and the driver only known that she was inside when she started screaming. Most people that they encounter are dumpster diving for their personal use.

Gleaning refers to the collecting of farmer’s crops after they had been harvested and it is associated to poverty. It is like dumpster diving because people collect things that others consider useless. The son of one of the dumpster divers was harassed in his school because of the activity that they do and his mom was compelled to make a book about the experiences that they have and a lot of people has opened up to her that they wanted to dumpster dive as well.

Some things that you can get from eating foods from the dumpster includes diarrhea, vomiting, and fever, they can also be infected by e-coli, shigella, and salmonella. A test was conducted to compare the volume of bacteria of bread from the store and from the dumpster, and the result shown that even if the bread came from the dumpster, there is little to no contamination of it. The table, the floor, and your hands have more bacteria build up than the bread that came from the dumpster.

America wastes ¼ of the food that they produce. An owner of a market shared on the documentary how they deal with the food waste. They collect about 240 pounds of food waste per week and instead of sending it away to a landfill, they give it away to people that uses it as a feed for worms to make quality soils to sell to gardeners.

I like this film because it gives me a new perspective that not everything that goes to the trash is useless. A lot of things that the divers collected looks new and you will not know that it came from the trash unless they told that it is and we shouldn’t judge someone just because they are looking for usable

materials from the dumpster and think that they are in poverty, when some of the divers have finished their Ph.D.

The thing that I dislike about the film is that some companies purposely destroy their products before throwing it to the dumpster to make it absolutely useless. It also shows how people are wasteful of the things that they send to the dumpster. They take no consideration of instead of throwing it away they could have donated it to a charity or some facility that needs their products. It will not only help other people but the environment as well because there would be less waste to manage.