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London judge rules BHP Group liable for Brazil’s 2015 Samarco dam collapse

News Feed
Friday, November 14, 2025

A London judge has ruled that global mining company BHP Group is liable in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, when a dam collapse 10 years ago unleashed tons of toxic waste into a major river, killing 19 people and devastating villages downstream.Mrs Justice O’Farrell said at the high court that Australia-based BHP was responsible despite not owning the dam at the time.Anglo-Australian BHP owns 50% of Samarco, the Brazilian company that operates the iron ore mine where the tailings dam ruptured on 5 November 2015, sending as much as 40m cubic metres of mining into the Doce River in south-eastern Brazil.Sludge from the burst dam destroyed the once-bustling village of Bento Rodrigues in Minas Gerais state and badly damaged other towns.The disaster also killed 14 tonnes of freshwater fish and damaged 370 miles (600 miles) of the Doce River, according to a study by the University of Ulster in the UK. The river, which the Krenak Indigenous people revere as a deity, has yet to recover.About 600,000 Brazilians are seeking £36bn ($47bn) in compensation, although the ruling only addressed liability. A second phase of the trial will determine damages.The case was filed in Britain because one of BHP’s two main legal entities was based in London at the time.The trial began in October 2024, just days before Brazil’s federal government reached a multibillion-dollar settlement with the mining companies.Under the agreement, Samarco, which is also half owned by Brazilian mining company Vale, agreed to pay 132 billion reais ($23bn) over 20 years. The payments were meant to compensate for human, environmental and infrastructure damage.BHP had said the UK legal action was unnecessary because it duplicated matters covered by legal proceedings in Brazil.

About 600,000 people seeking compensation a decade on from disaster that killed 19 and devastated villagesA London judge has ruled that the global mining company BHP Group is liable in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, when a dam collapse 10 years ago unleashed tons of toxic waste into a major river, killing 19 people and devastating villages downstream.Mrs Justice O’Farrell said at the high court that Australia-based BHP was responsible despite not owning the dam at the time. Continue reading...

A London judge has ruled that global mining company BHP Group is liable in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, when a dam collapse 10 years ago unleashed tons of toxic waste into a major river, killing 19 people and devastating villages downstream.

Mrs Justice O’Farrell said at the high court that Australia-based BHP was responsible despite not owning the dam at the time.

Anglo-Australian BHP owns 50% of Samarco, the Brazilian company that operates the iron ore mine where the tailings dam ruptured on 5 November 2015, sending as much as 40m cubic metres of mining into the Doce River in south-eastern Brazil.

Sludge from the burst dam destroyed the once-bustling village of Bento Rodrigues in Minas Gerais state and badly damaged other towns.

The disaster also killed 14 tonnes of freshwater fish and damaged 370 miles (600 miles) of the Doce River, according to a study by the University of Ulster in the UK. The river, which the Krenak Indigenous people revere as a deity, has yet to recover.

About 600,000 Brazilians are seeking £36bn ($47bn) in compensation, although the ruling only addressed liability. A second phase of the trial will determine damages.

The case was filed in Britain because one of BHP’s two main legal entities was based in London at the time.

The trial began in October 2024, just days before Brazil’s federal government reached a multibillion-dollar settlement with the mining companies.

Under the agreement, Samarco, which is also half owned by Brazilian mining company Vale, agreed to pay 132 billion reais ($23bn) over 20 years. The payments were meant to compensate for human, environmental and infrastructure damage.

BHP had said the UK legal action was unnecessary because it duplicated matters covered by legal proceedings in Brazil.

Read the full story here.
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MIT senior turns waste from the fishing industry into biodegradable plastic

Jacqueline Prawira’s innovation, featured on CBS’s “The Visioneers,” tackles one of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.

Sometimes the answers to seemingly intractable environmental problems are found in nature itself. Take the growing challenge of plastic waste. Jacqueline Prawira, an MIT senior in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), has developed biodegradable, plastic-like materials from fish offal, as featured in a recent segment on the CBS show “The Visioneers with Zay Harding.” “We basically made plastics to be too good at their job. That also means the environment doesn’t know what to do with this, because they simply won’t degrade,” Prawira told Harding. “And now we’re literally drowning in plastic. By 2050, plastics are expected to outweigh fish in the ocean.” “The Visioneers” regularly highlights environmental innovators. The episode featuring Prawira premiered during a special screening at Climate Week NYC on Sept. 24.Her inspiration came from the Asian fish market her family visits. Once the fish they buy are butchered, the scales are typically discarded. “But I also started noticing they’re actually fairly strong. They’re thin, somewhat flexible, and pretty lightweight, too, for their strength,” Prawira says. “And that got me thinking: Well, what other material has these properties? Plastics.” She transformed this waste product into a transparent, thin-film material that can be used for disposable products such as grocery bags, packaging, and utensils. Both her fish-scale material and a composite she developed don’t just mimic plastic — they address one of its biggest flaws. “If you put them in composting environments, [they] will degrade on their own naturally without needing much, if any, external help,” Prawira says. This isn’t Prawira’s first environmental innovation. Working in DMSE Professor Yet-Ming Chiang’s lab, she helped develop a low-carbon process for making cement — the world’s most widely used construction material, and a major emitter of carbon dioxide. The process, called silicate subtraction, enables compounds to form at lower temperatures, cutting fossil fuel use. Prawira and her co-inventors in the Chiang lab are also using the method to extract valuable lithium with zero waste. The process is patented and is being commercialized through the startup Rock Zero. For her achievements, Prawira recently received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, awarded to undergraduates pursuing careers in science, mathematics, or engineering. In her “Visioneers” interview, she shared her hope for more sustainable ways of living. “I’m hoping that we can have daily lives that can be more in sync with the environment,” Prawira said. “So you don’t always have to choose between the convenience of daily life and having to help protect the environment.”

Waste
Climate
Nature

What should countries do with their nuclear waste?

A new study by MIT researchers analyzes different nuclear waste management strategies, with a focus on the radionuclide iodine-129.

One of the highest-risk components of nuclear waste is iodine-129 (I-129), which stays radioactive for millions of years and accumulates in human thyroids when ingested. In the U.S., nuclear waste containing I-129 is scheduled to be disposed of in deep underground repositories, which scientists say will sufficiently isolate it.Meanwhile, across the globe, France routinely releases low-level radioactive effluents containing iodine-129 and other radionuclides into the ocean. France recycles its spent nuclear fuel, and the reprocessing plant discharges about 153 kilograms of iodine-129 each year, under the French regulatory limit.Is dilution a good solution? What’s the best way to handle spent nuclear fuel? A new study by MIT researchers and their collaborators at national laboratories quantifies I-129 release under three different scenarios: the U.S. approach of disposing spent fuel directly in deep underground repositories, the French approach of dilution and release, and an approach that uses filters to capture I-129 and disposes of them in shallow underground waste repositories.The researchers found France’s current practice of reprocessing releases about 90 percent of the waste’s I-129 into the biosphere. They found low levels of I-129 in ocean water around France and the U.K.’s former reprocessing sites, including the English Channel and North Sea. Although the low level of I-129 in the water in Europe is not considered to pose health risks, the U.S. approach of deep underground disposal leads to far less I-129 being released, the researchers found.The researchers also investigated the effect of environmental regulations and technologies related to I-129 management, to illuminate the tradeoffs associated with different approaches around the world.“Putting these pieces together to provide a comprehensive view of Iodine-129 is important,” says MIT Assistant Professor Haruko Wainwright, a first author on the paper who holds a joint appointment in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “There are scientists that spend their lives trying to clean up iodine-129 at contaminated sites. These scientists are sometimes shocked to learn some countries are releasing so much iodine-129. This work also provides a life-cycle perspective. We’re not just looking at final disposal and solid waste, but also when and where release is happening. It puts all the pieces together.”MIT graduate student Kate Whiteaker SM ’24 led many of the analyses with Wainwright. Their co-authors are Hansell Gonzalez-Raymat, Miles Denham, Ian Pegg, Daniel Kaplan, Nikolla Qafoku, David Wilson, Shelly Wilson, and Carol Eddy-Dilek. The study appears today in Nature Sustainability.Managing wasteIodine-129 is often a key focus for scientists and engineers as they conduct safety assessments of nuclear waste disposal sites around the world. It has a half-life of 15.7 million years, high environmental mobility, and could potentially cause cancers if ingested. The U.S. sets a strict limit on how much I-129 can be released and how much I-129 can be in drinking water — 5.66 nanograms per liter, the lowest such level of any radionuclides.“Iodine-129 is very mobile, so it is usually the highest-dose contributor in safety assessments,” Wainwright says.For the study, the researchers calculated the release of I-129 across three different waste management strategies by combining data from current and former reprocessing sites as well as repository assessment models and simulations.The authors defined the environmental impact as the release of I-129 into the biosphere that humans could be exposed to, as well as its concentrations in surface water. They measured I-129 release per the total electrical energy generated by a 1-gigawatt power plant over one year, denoted as kg/GWe.y.Under the U.S. approach of deep underground disposal with barrier systems, assuming the barrier canisters fail at 1,000 years (a conservative estimate), the researchers found 2.14 x 10–8 kg/GWe.y of I-129 would be released between 1,000 and 1 million years from today.They estimate that 4.51 kg/GWe.y of I-129, or 91 percent of the total, would be released into the biosphere in the scenario where fuel is reprocessed and the effluents are diluted and released. About 3.3 percent of I-129 is captured by gas filters, which are then disposed of in shallow subsurfaces as low-level radioactive waste. A further 5.2 percent remains in the waste stream of the reprocessing plant, which is then disposed of as high-level radioactive waste.If the waste is recycled with gas filters to directly capture I-129, 0.05 kg/GWe.y of the I-129 is released, while 94 percent is disposed of in the low-level disposal sites. For shallow disposal, some kind of human disruption and intrusion is assumed to occur after government or institutional control expires (typically 100-1,000 years). That results in a potential release of the disposed amount to the environment after the control period.Overall, the current practice of recycling spent nuclear fuel releases the majority of I-129 into the environment today, while the direct disposal of spent fuel releases around 1/100,000,000 that amount over 1 million years. When the gas filters are used to capture I-129, the majority of I-129 goes to shallow underground repositories, which could be accidentally released through human intrusion down the line.The researchers also quantified the concentration of I-129 in different surface waters near current and former fuel reprocessing facilities, including the English Channel and the North Sea near reprocessing plants in France and U.K. They also analyzed the U.S. Columbia River downstream of a site in Washington state where material for nuclear weapons was produced during the Cold War, and they studied a similar site in South Carolina. The researchers found far higher concentrations of I-129 within the South Carolina site, where the low-level radioactive effluents were released far from major rivers and hence resulted in less dilution in the environment.“We wanted to quantify the environmental factors and the impact of dilution, which in this case affected concentrations more than discharge amounts,” Wainwright says. “Someone might take our results to say dilution still works: It’s reducing the contaminant concentration and spreading it over a large area. On the other hand, in the U.S., imperfect disposal has led to locally higher surface water concentrations. This provides a cautionary tale that disposal could concentrate contaminants, and should be carefully designed to protect local communities.”Fuel cycles and policyWainwright doesn’t want her findings to dissuade countries from recycling nuclear fuel. She says countries like Japan plan to use increased filtration to capture I-129 when they reprocess spent fuel. Filters with I-129 can be disposed of as low-level waste under U.S. regulations.“Since I-129 is an internal carcinogen without strong penetrating radiation, shallow underground disposal would be appropriate in line with other hazardous waste,” Wainwright says. “The history of environmental protection since the 1960s is shifting from waste dumping and release to isolation. But there are still industries that release waste into the air and water. We have seen that they often end up causing issues in our daily life — such as CO2, mercury, PFAS and others — especially when there are many sources or when bioaccumulation happens. The nuclear community has been leading in waste isolation strategies and technologies since the 1950s. These efforts should be further enhanced and accelerated. But at the same time, if someone does not choose nuclear energy because of waste issues, it would encourage other industries with much lower environmental standards.”The work was supported by MIT’s Climate Fast Forward Faculty Fund and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Waste
Climate
Government

Under Trump, E.P.A. Explored if Abortion Pills Could Be Detected in Wastewater

Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency found that they could develop methods to identify traces of the medication if necessary — a practice long sought by the anti-abortion movement.

Senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency directed a team of scientists over the summer to assess whether the government could develop methods for detecting traces of abortion pills in wastewater — a practice sought by some anti-abortion activists seeking to restrict the medication now used in over 50 percent of abortions.The highly unusual request appears to have originated from a letter sent from 25 Republican members of Congress to Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, asking the agency to investigate how the abortion drug mifepristone might be contaminating the water supply.“Are there existing E.P.A.-approved methods for detecting mifepristone and its active metabolites in water supplies?” the lawmakers asked at the end of the public letter, sent on June 18, an effort led by Senator James Lankford and Representative Josh Brecheen, both of Oklahoma. “If not, what resources are needed to develop these testing methods?”Scientists who specialize in chemical detection told the senior officials that there are currently no E.P.A.-approved methods for identifying mifepristone in wastewater — but that new methods could be developed, according to two people familiar with the events, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.Abortion pills have emerged as a major focus for the anti-abortion movement since the fall of Roe v. Wade, as growing numbers of women in states with abortion bans have turned to websites and underground networks that send the pills through the mail, allowing them to circumvent the laws.The widespread availability of abortion pills — which women usually take at home in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy — has inspired many anti-abortion activists to push for new approaches to curtail their use. That has included a campaign by one prominent group to raise awareness about environmental harms they say are caused when the medication and fetal remains enter the sewage system.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Waste
Water
Chemicals

Britain missing out on potential £2bn recycling industry by exporting plastic waste

Exclusive: Government failure to close loophole allows 600,000 tonnes to be shipped abroad each yearA plastic recycling industry potentially worth £2bn and 5,000 jobs is dying in the UK because of government failure to close a loophole that allows 600,000 tonnes of plastic waste to be exported each year.The Guardian can reveal that in the past two years 21 plastic recycling and processing factories across the UK have shut down due to the scale of exports, the cheap price of virgin plastic and an influx of cheap plastic from Asia, according to data gathered by industry insiders. Continue reading...

A plastic recycling industry potentially worth £2bn and 5,000 jobs is dying in the UK because of government failure to close a loophole which allows 600,000 tonnes of plastic waste to be exported each year.The Guardian can reveal that in the past two years 21 plastic recycling and processing factories across the UK have shut down due to the scale of our exports, the cheap price of virgin plastic and an influx of cheap plastic from Asia, according to data gathered by industry insiders.Britain’s exports of plastic waste to developing countries increased by 84% in the first half of this year, in what critics say is unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism.In particular, UK exports soared to Indonesia – a country struggling with an environmental crisis from plastic pollution – amounting to more than 24,000 tonnes. The total plastic waste exports in the first half of the year came to 317,747 tonnes.Used packaging is sorted at a Lampton recycling centre in London. Across the country 21 such factories have closed in the past two years. Photograph: Peter Dazeley/Getty ImagesExporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste to countries without the capability to process it properly increases the chance of serious environmental pollution as well as putting the lives of waste workers at risk.James Mcleary, managing director of Biffa polymers, said the industry was facing challenges and units were closing across the country.Plastic recycling facilities that have closed in the past two years include Biffa’s Sunderland factory, which had capacity to process 39,000 tonnes each year of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) plastic – used in packaging – and three Viridor facilities. Vanden Recycling is also closing its plastics processing site in Whittlesey, Peterborough.Keeping the waste material collected from households within the UK to be cleaned, sorted, processed and turned into recycled products, is better environmentally, captures the carbon within the plastic, and creates jobs and growth, experts say.But policymakers have not made the key changes needed to stop incentivising plastic waste exports.I don’t want to wonder if there is a boy whose life has been wasted somewhere because of me throwing something in a binMcleary said the continued export of waste plastic should be an affront to our civilised society. He cited the deaths of 200 young people in Turkey that were exposed earlier this year by ISIG Meclisi, which carried out the first ever analysis of workplace deaths in the country’s recycling industry. The UK was the largest exporter of plastic waste to Turkey in 2023.The investigation, called Boy Wasted, revealed that two people are crushed, ripped, or burned to death in the sector every month, and that this has been the case non-stop for the past 10 years.Mcleary said there was a need for a level playing field for the UK plastic recycling industry. “I don’t like closing plants, it’s jobs and it’s people lives,” he said.“Fundamentally I believe you need to take responsibility for our waste ourselves. It is just common sense as a human being. I don’t want my rubbish to end up in Malaysia. I don’t want to wonder if there is a boy whose life has been wasted somewhere because of me throwing something in a bin outside my house.A waste worker at a landfill site near Istanbul. The UK is the biggest exporter of plastic waste to Turkey. Photograph: Sedat Suna/EPA“There are lines as a civilised society we should not cross – it is not acceptable.”Mcleary said the loophole that made it cheaper for companies to export plastic rather than keep it in the UK needed to be closed. “We are asking for a level playing field. We don’t want the market tilted towards us.”“This has been pointed out over a number of years by ourselves and others. Yet today we are in a perfect storm and factories are closing.”skip past newsletter promotionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionHe welcomed the UK’s plastic packaging tax, which is imposed on producers who fail to include at least 30% of recycled plastic in their products, as a way of driving demand to use our own stock of plastic waste in the UK. But he wants it to be more ambitious by raising the requirement for products to have a minimum recycled content to 50% by 2030 to encourage manufacturers incorporate more of it into their products and reduce the use of virgin plastic.Building a UK plastic recycling industry to keep the plastic waste thrown out by householders within the country had the potential to become a £2bn industry, hiring 2,000 people directly and 3,000 indirectly and would also restore public confidence in recycling, Mcleary said.“People in the UK should care where their plastic goes,” he added. “If they think they are recycling they should know it is being recycled, and know that it is being recycled in a responsible fashion.”Viridor has closed three plastic recycling factories in the past three years; in Avonmouth, Skelmersdale and this year its Rochester sorting plant.A UK recycling plant sorts plastic waste into bales, ready to be processed. Photograph: Teamjackson/Getty ImagesAn industry source said it was important that policymakers started seeing waste as critical infrastructure.“If we were to stop exporting plastic waste, and we were to meet our increased recycling target of a 65% recycling rate for municipal waste by 2035, we would need to build 400 new factories across the UK – 20 of them would be sorting facilities and 20 would be processing facilities turning the material back into products,” the source said.“This is a key growth area and has a carbon benefit because it stops the plastic being incinerated and used in energy for waste.“But the risk is now that we are exporting material and the investment and the jobs to other countries.”The government said it was committed to cleaning up the nation and cracking down on plastic waste.“For too long plastic waste has littered our streets, polluted Britain’s waterways, and threatened our wildlife,” a spokesperson said. “Our packaging reforms will collectively underpin £10bn worth of investment in new sorting and processing facilities, while delivering the deposit return scheme will ensure more plastic is recycled and not chucked away as litter or left to rot in landfill.”

Waste
Government
Energy

UK plastic waste exports to developing countries rose 84% in a year, data shows

Campaigners say increase in exports mostly to Malaysia and Indonesia is ‘unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism’Britain’s exports of plastic waste to developing countries have soared by 84% in the first half of this year compared with last year, according to an analysis of trade data carried out for the Guardian.Campaigners described the rise in exports, mostly to Malaysia and Indonesia, as “unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism”. Continue reading...

Britain’s exports of plastic waste to developing countries have soared by 84% in the first half of this year compared with last year, according to an analysis of trade data carried out for the Guardian.Campaigners described the rise in exports, mostly to Malaysia and Indonesia, as “unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism”.In 2023, the EU agreed to ban exports of waste to poorer nations outside a group of mainly rich countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The ban comes into force in November 2026 for two and a half years and can be extended. The UK does not have a similar ban in place.Data analysed by the The Last Beach Cleanup, a US group campaigning to halt plastic pollution, showed that the increase in UK exports in the first half of 2025 was mainly to Indonesia (24,006 tonnes in 2025, up from 525 tonnes in 2024) and Malaysia (28,667 tonnes, up from 18,872 tonnes in 2024).Total plastic waste exports remained relatively high in the first half of 2024 and 2025, at 319,407 and 317,647 tonnes respectively. The percentage of UK plastic waste going directly to non-OECD countries was 20% of total plastic waste exports in 2025, up from 11% in 2024.The Last Beach Cleanup analysed data from the UN Comtrade database to reach its findings. Jan Dell, who works for the group, accused UK ministers of “hypocrisy” by failing to ban exports to poorer nations.“The UK is hypocritically saying, ‘we’re part of the high ambition coalition’, at the plastics talks. But behind the scenes, it is refusing to set a date to stop exporting to poorer countries,” she said. “We see it is increasing exports of its own plastic waste to places like Malaysia and Indonesia.”She added: “It is unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism.”After the collapse of the UN plastic treaty talks in August, Emma Hardy, under-secretary of state at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said she was “hugely disappointed” an agreement had not been reached but was proud of the UK’s work towards an ambitious treaty.Britain was part of a “high ambition” coalition of nations calling for the treaty to include binding obligations on reducing plastic production and consumption, she said.Campaigners are calling for the UK, one of the top three countries exporting plastic waste, at about 600,000 tonnes a year, to follow the EU and ban exports to non-OECD countries. They also want to close a loophole that makes it cheaper to export plastic waste rather than recycle it in the UK.Plastic products, such as these found in Klang, Selangor in June, are often fly-tipped from factories processing imported plastic waste in Malaysia. Photograph: Basel Action NetworkThe Conservative government said in 2023 that it intended to ban plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries – but it never happened.Wong Pui Yi, a Malaysia-based consultant for Basel Action Network, a group championing global environmental health and justice, said there were “good guys and bad guys” in the waste trade.“A lot of waste traders are looking to reduce costs,” she said. “If waste falls into the hands of the bad actors, one of the easiest ways to reduce costs is to avoid environmental controls. In developing countries, it is easier to avoid environmental controls due to weaker laws and lower enforcement capacity.”In July, the UK’s exports of plastic waste to Malaysia dropped to 2.8% (1,500 tonnes), most likely due to the country’s new import restrictions. But as one country bans or tightens imports, as happened with China in 2018, the trade shifts elsewhere.The rise in UK plastic exports to Asia is likely to be an underestimate, experts say, because a lot goes to the Netherlands and other European countries where it can be shipped on. The UK also exports plastic to Turkey.James McLeary, the managing director of Biffa Polymers, a UK recycling firm, said the UK should take responsibility for its plastic waste.“It is just common sense as a human being” he said. “I don’t want my rubbish to end up in Malaysia. I don’t want to wonder if there is a boy whose life is wasted somewhere because of me throwing something in a bin outside my house.”Earlier this month, an investigation called Boy Wasted revealed that, for the last decade, two people were crushed, ripped, or burned to death in the recycling sector in Turkey every month.Adnan Khan, a Canadian journalist whose work on refugee labour in Turkey sparked the investigation, said that while Turkey had a licence system for recycling plastic waste, “my research shows that it is pretty easy to get a licence and the oversight is low. It’s a broken system.”All EU plastic waste exports should be banned to anywhere outside the EU, he said. “I would go further and say every country should take care of its own trash.”Defra did not respond to a request for comment.

Waste
Food
Health

Suggested Viewing

Free Pass

While foreign and Indian tourists visit Goa’s beaches and night life, others clean the accumulating garbage and sell the fish that was caught in the sea. Due to its proximity to the ocean, Goa is highly prone to disasters caused by climate change. While the lifestyle of most tourists is accelerating the climate crisis, fishermen and marginalized locals are particularly vulnerable to floods or changes in the biodiversity. This artistic project explores the radically different worlds of Goa that the tourists and those particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis inhabit. Our lives are so connected, but the connection is all too often invisible. How can contact be made and a conversation be initiated? As can be experienced in any of the live jams characterizing Goa’s beaches, music is a universal practice that can create joy and community. But which communities are part of the live jams on the beach and which are not? The video traces an intervention that interrogates a highly unequal status quo. The results are sometimes awkward, sometimes heartwarming.

Waste
Culture
Music

From Trash To Treasure: Turning Negatives into Positives in Lesotho

From erosion to overgrazing to enduring poverty, the people of Lesotho—a highland country surrounded by South Africa—face a variety of difficult challenges. Yet grassroots communities in the country also exhibit tremendous resourcefulness and creativity. In particular, a wealth of artists have mastered a talent for resurrection, developing the skill to creatively turn negatives into positives: Designers who turn discarded trash into beautiful jewelry, clothes, rugs. Filmmakers who turn tragedy into artistic expressions of resilience and compassion. Musicians who write songs to save the environment. In this short, Cultures of Resistance Films profiles a variety of these inventive creators, introducing viewers to a fascinating cast of local residents who are using art as a means of communicating a communal desire for positive change.

Culture
Waste
Solutions

This Film Is Garbage!

Fifteen years after his eye opening examination of the average, everyday waste consumption habits of his fellow Canadians in Garbage! The Revolution Starts At Home, filmmaker Andrew Nisker finds himself more concerned than ever about humanity’s filthy habits. A quick glance outside confirms that the situation is critical. In a world full of performative greenwashing, corporations fueling the fires of mindless consumerism and governments’ futile efforts to clean up the mess, it’s no wonder that the average citizen has fallen out of touch with the waste we each create, everyday. Enlisting the help of your average condo dwelling couple and a typical rural nuclear family, Andrew once again embarks on an adventure through our waste, tracing our garbage from our carefully sorted bins to landfills and beyond, and meeting innovators along the way who are working hard to create sustainable alternatives, turning our expendable trash into repurposed treasures. Even as it wades through our muck, This Film is Garbage is an ultimately hopeful look at the little things we can each do to change our collectively smelly ways!

Waste
Water

Green Waste

What if every person could actually make an impact on the world? “Green Waste” takes an in-depth look at the process of recycling and waste management in the community of Flagstaff. From recycling plastic bags, to re-using glass bottles, from recycling hazardous waste to the efforts of local businesses, the film shows how every contribution, no matter how small, can collectively make the difference for a better tomorrow. Filmed and Produced under the Emerging Filmmakers Program for youth filmmakers.

Waste
Business
Solutions

Paradise Island

Every year, one million tourists arrive in Boracay to get away from reality… but what is the reality for those who live there and cannot escape it? Documentary filmmaker Kat Jayme travels to Boracay, the crown jewel of the Philippines and her family’s favorite vacation spot — but this time she is not on holiday. With the help of the local children of the island, who make sandcastles for money, she discovers what life is really like on Paradise Island.

Youth
Waste
Documentary

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