Sludge Watch ==> Buy the film: Garbage!: The Revolution Starts at Home

[Maureen Reilly]

Monday’s release of Garbage!: The Revolution Starts at Home

Monday’s release of Garbage!: The Revolution Starts at Home, a film by 
Andrew Nisker, was feted at a Roots-hosted pre-release film party mingling 
film crew from Toronto, LA and Chicago with über-ecotypes, corporate reps 
from The Refreshment Council, and the MacDonald family.

Garbage: The Revolution Starts at home, follows the some times poignant, 
some times funny couple and family dynamics of the MacDonald’s, an average 
Toronto family of four that reluctantly takes up Director Andrew Nisker’s 
challenge to retain all of their garbage for three months – October to 
December. Interspersed between environmental commentators posing 
“inconvenient-truth-style questions” and the family dynamics is a dramatic 
lesson about the ecosystem footprint of daily consumption. Garbage!: The 
Revolution Starts at Home gets down to business early when daddy Macdonald 
and child Ariel return from a children’s birthday party hoarding their 
“loot” - crumpled plastic plates, forks and napkins (one assumes they ate 
all the cake) - that Daddy smuggled out to keep his promise to collect all 
his garbage.

As the piles of recyclables, wet, and mixed waste, grow in the garage, 
various lessons reflect water, atmospheric, human health, and related 
impacts of the MacDonald’s consumption footprint. By the time Christmas 
rolls around, with all the trimmings eventually piled deep in the garage, 
and the garbage and recyclables are liberated to their eventual demise, 
we’ve been taken on an object lesson tour that every family ought to 
experience.

But save yourself the grief of collecting all the garbage, take the 
consumptive short-cut and purchase Garbage!: The Revolution Starts at Home 
and get started on learning a few more “inconvenient truths” about 
consumption, and our personal footprint. The Al Gore moment one expects at 
the film’s dénouement, when Nisker asks the MacDonald’s what they’ve learned 
form their experience, is muted but sufficiently satisfying after they admit 
to turning over their SUVs for fuel efficient vehicles, and being just far 
more “aware” of their practical, daily habits.

For more information visit: www.garbagerevolution.com or 
www.andrewnisker.com