Abstract
Films and documentaries can be highly useful pedagogic and research tools. They take complex topics that are theoretically and empirically rich and distill them into vehicles having the potential to deeply affect the way we look at marketing, consumer behavior, and the natural environment. They illuminate how our current consumption patterns are fundamentally problematic in ways that we rarely register because they are far removed from our sight. Using the work of Zygmunt Bauman on moral distance as well as two recent documentary films that bring the subject of waste to the fore, we explore these and related issues. Trashed (Brady 2012) highlights our planet’s finite resources and the hazards stemming from various waste disposal practices. Waste Land (Walker 2010) draws our attention to excess by profiling an example of how waste can be transformed into art. We make a case that these accounts can contribute to the “estrangement effect” articulated and praised by Herbert Marcuse and concomitantly provide us with examples of Transformative Consumer Research outside of the academy.
Keywords
Introduction
In a number of recent papers, some of the most preeminent consumer researchers and macromarketing scholars have made a compelling case for the use of films in teaching and research (e.g. Belk 2002, 2011; McDonagh and Brereton 2010). As Belk (2002, p. 124) puts it, “many researchers have discovered how parts of feature films and other visual and oral media can covey ‘truths’ about human behavior.” In our teaching we have both used such forms of knowledge transfer to encourage students to think differently about the topics that are being explored. We have found them to be extremely valuable sources of material.
Films have the ability to convey very important, yet sometimes theoretically complicated ideas in a more accessible fashion, resulting in what Marcuse (1964/1972) calls an “estrangement effect,” whereby our understanding of a given topic is shattered, when alternative understandings displace previously taken-for-granted ideas. This is particularly useful when dealing with issues that are far removed from the immediate consciousness of the people we teach and indeed our own experiences as busy people, working in an increasingly hectic world. Hectic lives lead to a delimited focus on those aspects of our social existence that are most salient to us. We displace things not essential to our day-to-day activities and so many aspects of our lives, such as the impact of our consumption habits, which are effectively very distant from our vision, merit little attention (De Coverly et al. 2008; Tadajewski and Saren 2008).
Despite the arguments offered by many within our discipline about the sophistication of consumers, their ability to process fairly complex information (cf. Belk 1987; Ozanne and Murray 1995), and their understanding of the role of marketing within society, we are still bounded in our sense-making activities. It is fair to say that marketing, advertising and salesmanship, all combine to encourage us to not reflect on the production origins of the goods we consume – this is the phenomenon known as commodity fetishism – never mind the ultimate end-point for those we divest. This end-point, the rubbish heap, the incinerator, the mid-Atlantic, is most likely cognitively and spatially far distant from where we currently reside. This will, naturally enough, make it difficult to encourage people to think differently about what and how much they consume, for the simple reason that our individual contributions to the world’s garbage is small, and we rarely see the combined effects of waste with our own eyes.
Like many others in macromarketing, critical marketing, and Transformative Consumer Research (e.g. Dholakia 2012; Ellis et al. 2011; Mick 2006; Varey 2010, 2012, 2013), we think realistic appraisals of our own consumption habits and their impact on the world are greatly needed. After all, our present consumption patterns are fundamentally problematic. While our personal opinion is that the expectation of market and individual consumer self-correction is unlikely to happen without government and macro-institutional restructuring and oversight (see Van Dam and Appldoorn 1996) and, after watching the two documentaries discussed below, we fully appreciate that government action is not necessarily as effective as we would like, something clearly has to change about the way we view our relationship with the natural environment. If we required evidence on this front, the figures that Burroughs (2010, p. 127) recently recounted in the pages of this Journal make for troubling reading: While the United States and Western Europe only represent 12 percent of the world’s population, these countries account for 60 percent of the world’s consumer spending…the United States consumes more than five times its rightful proportion of the world’s energy (i.e., the United States is 5 percent of the world’s population but consumes 26 percent of its oil, 25 percent of its coal, and 27 percent of its natural gas). Moreover, consumer culture appears to be one of America and the West’s best exports. Countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China are poised to join the global consumer economy and in many ways this transition has already begun (e.g., China adds another 11,000 automobiles to the roads every day…That is another three billion individuals joining the ranks of the consumer class, who will naturally expect to participate as fully in the global economy as their Western counterparts.
Two recent films bring the subject of waste to the fore. Trashed (Brady 2012) highlights our planet’s finite resources and the hazards stemming from various waste disposal practices. Waste Land (Walker 2010) draws our attention to excess by profiling an example of how waste can be transformed into art. The subjects of the two films are remarkably different. In Trashed, a range of professors, campaigners, scientists, doctors and researchers articulately inform us about the impacts of our consumption and waste. Their testimony about our consumption patterns is passionate and scientifically well informed.
In Waste Land we are invited into the lives of a group of “catadores” or pickers who, although they have less formal education than those offering testimony in Trashed, are perhaps more inspiring as they tell us about their work at the largest landfill site in the world. Despite their different perspectives, both films are important in drawing attention to a subject that is often neglected. De Coverly et al (2008, p. 290) critique the “social avoidance of waste” and argue that waste is not only physically hidden from sight but also removed from our sense of responsibility. This is similar to Douglas’ (1966) belief that provided dirt/waste is kept invisible, it causes us no concern. Thus, although waste is often considered as post-consumer (Smart 2010), these films remind us of the need for us all to take some responsibility.
Appreciating our responsibility is, however, more difficult than we might think and here recalling the comments of Bauman about adiaphorization – the rendering of an act as morally and ethically un-troubling – are useful when he describes how the structural organization of society works against this process of ethical reflection (see also Desmond 1998). As Bauman (1991, p. 145) explains, To start with the removal of the effects of action beyond the reach of moral limits…once…separated from both the intention-conscious sources and the ultimate effects of action by a chain of mediators, the actors seldom face the moment of choice and gaze at the consequences of their deeds; more importantly, they hardly ever apprehend what they gaze at as the consequences of their deeds…Social organization may be therefore described as a machine that keeps moral responsibility afloat; it belongs to no one in particular, as everybody’s contribution to the final effect is too minute or partial to be sensibly ascribed a causal function.
Trashed: Finite Resources, Major Hazards
The two films we consider redirect our attention to the moral and ethical implications of our consumption choices, highlighting how the effects of choices made at various points in our historical and cultural development, can still haunt us today. In Trashed we follow Jeremy Irons around the world as he showcases evidence to confirm that waste is a global problem that affects our lands and seas. The film is factual in its approach as we learn, amongst other things, about pollution, global warming, landfill regulations, the different mechanisms for disposing of waste (e.g. landfill, incineration) and the financial and environmental costs and benefits associated with each, through to the dangers of dioxins entering the food chain.
From the opening credits we are confronted with a project that would fit comfortably under the designation of “consciousness raising.” The credits scroll through many day-to-day items we find around our houses – pens, plastic cutlery, iPod ear-buds, clothes hangers, children’s toys, and other plastic items – all remind us of the extent to which our consumption patterns are permeated with items that seem relatively innocuous. Yet, they are only innocuous in the singular. When we register the sheer numbers of these items in circulation, the resource intensive nature of our everyday lives and the pressure it exerts on the ecosystem, starts to be truly appreciated.
We are told that simply burying waste – out of sight, out of mind – is not an option in many major locations around the world that have reached their limits to capacity. But it is not simply the amount of things we consume and dispose of that is problematic. The materiality of the items has also changed. Over the last century and a half, we have shifted from disposing of natural items – wool, food waste and so forth – to products that are more and more toxic (e.g. heavy metals, synthetics, radioactive substances). Such facts are troubling in themselves, but the documentary makers have understood that they need to be conveyed in a manner likely to break through the attention barriers of fairly jaded, entertainment economy oriented viewers. They manage this exceedingly well.
The imagery that accompanies the research-based arguments is well selected. It is almost post-apocalyptic in its depiction of human beings existing side-by-side with birds and sheep as they “pick” and scavenge in a terrain constituted by a vast swathe of burning rubbish and billowing smoke. We are compelled to watch a vision of the natural environment scarred by human desire. Trees, hedgerows, and seas are polluted to an almost unbelievable degree with plastics, rendering water so thick with matter that it exhibits the constitution of a thick soup. This documentary transports the viewer to a world far removed from our immediate perception or the sanitized, middle-class viewing of nature documentaries on local television stations. It underscores with a much-needed urgency what Varey (2012, p. 424) calls “the contradiction of modern society’s provisioning system.” Trashed is a thought-provoking confirmation that current levels of consumerism are unsustainable.
From beaches in Lebanon strewn with so much rubbish that actually seeing the sand is a task of interpretive skill, the camera pans to a gigantic dump (“a trash mountain”) that receives around eighty tons of additional garbage each day, releasing chemicals into sea, soil and air, which affect at least six different countries. We move to a landfill site in the UK, a country in which the majority of the population lives in close proximity to some kind of rubbish site. The problem with landfills is their limited ability to control many of the concomitants of waste disposal carried by the wind to populations living locally. At this point in the documentary we are told of the link between waste and birth defects. It is a story that will feature prominently throughout the film, becoming less abstract, and more disturbing as the narrative unfolds.
From this we move via Iceland to a street in France known as “Cancer Road.” This label is unfortunately apt. The figures are horrifying. One fourth of the residents in the street behind the local incinerator, which was releasing harmful substances, were diagnosed with cancer, and so the appellation stuck. The effects on human beings are only part of the account. Animals, farms, and the natural environment were all harmed. This account is troubling on so many different levels and as if the problems caused were not enough, the case also presses home the limits to deliberative democracy (Ozanne, Corus, and Saatcioglu 2009), when small groups from a community come up against powerful vested interests. In this case the precautionary principle was not mobilized to ensure the safety of the local population.
Numerous examples taken from Argentina, Iceland, and other locations illustrate the problem of dioxins. Dioxins are products already in the natural environment. As with many things, the natural dioxins (for example, compounds released during volcanic irruptions) pale into insignificance when compared to the man-made compounds. As the World Health Organization (2010) explains, Dioxins are unwanted by products of a wide range of manufacturing processes including smelting, chlorine bleaching of paper pulp and the manufacturing of some herbicides and pesticides. In terms of dioxin release into the environment, uncontrolled waste incinerators (solid waste and hospital waste) are often the worst culprits.
Dioxins are poisonous and when they enter the food chain can devastate the health of agricultural workers. They cause cancer and affect the skin. The footage shot in Vietnam is particularly difficult viewing, but effectively highlights the potential long term, toxic and sometimes hidden effects of dioxin. The scientific community has traced horrendous birth defects back to the dioxins in Agent Orange used to remove foliage from forests in Vietnam. Although it has been over 40 years since US forces spread these toxic chemicals in order to disrupt troop movements and supply networks, children are still being born with major physical and mental disabilities.
As the camera pans past the corpses of children stored in formaldehyde to the children living in hospital today – children with no eyes, disfigured skull development, and joints that do not align who are described as “the lucky ones” – the harm people can level on the natural environment and each other is palpably clear. A spokesperson from the hospital discusses how they receive thousands of abandoned and deformed children. Again, the network of influence does not just stop at human beings, the pollution caused by waste – we all have some exposure to dioxins – harms wildlife as well.
For example, our sea life is deleteriously affected, as the ocean becomes “a toxic soup of floating debris” for which the North Pacific gyre or convergence zone (see Figure 1), home to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, serves as an exemplar (GYRE 2013). This very large area contains as much trash as biota (e.g. zooplankton). And in an extremely disconcerting case, we are reminded of the story of the whale found dead on a beach in Seattle with a plethora of items inside its stomach including plastic bags, duct tape, sweat pants, and even a golf ball. This one example effectively conveys the diversity of objects that are left at the end of our consumption process. Even those objects meant to be biodegradable continue to pose a threat to the natural environment. After being removed after a year in the sea, “biodegradable” plastic bags remain strong enough to hold shopping goods. Due to its inherent properties, this plastic waste attracts other chemicals, finds its way into the seafood we consume, affects our immune system, and subsequently influences human reproduction. The circle of consumption returns to poison us.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch convergence zone. Image from Wikimedia Commons, originally from U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Remains of an Albatross chick with ingested plastic, Midway Atoll. Image from Wikimedia Commons, originally from U.S. Geological Survey.
By reporting such stories Trashed reveals that responses to waste problems are needed at individual, company, and public policy levels through, for instance, stricter monitoring of emission levels. That some kind of intervention is necessary by corporate actors and government is echoed by those speaking to the camera, one of whom asks why producers continue to use resource intensive methods of packaging when there are more ecologically friendly alternatives already available. The silence is deafening. In equal measure, gestures are made to customer confusion created by the profusion of symbols on packaging that do not assist them in making informed decisions about the environmental impact of products.
After profiling a rich and varied series of cases, the narrative switches to potential solutions to the problem. The film visits an Organic Store in England that encourages customers to refill their own containers and the city of San Francisco where a zero waste initiative has been implemented. Accounts are provided of grass-roots organizations trying to empower local communities to lobby and influence their governing bodies. These examples show that behavioral and social change is possible, making consumption habits more sustainable than they are at present. We should note, however, that these solutions are given far less airtime than the problems they intend to address.
Waste Land: The Art of Garbage
While Trashed discusses the potential health effects arising from living in close proximity to landfill sites and other waste disposal facilities, Waste Land goes right to the heart of the landfill to tell us about a group of people who often remain absent from these discussions – those who spend their time living and working in these locations. In Waste Land the human dimension is the means to secure audience attention. It does so by focusing on the “catadores” or pickers at the Jardim Gramacho landfill site in Rio de Janeiro – a now defunct site that closed not long after this account concludes (see Figure 3).
Jardim Gramacho. Image from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
The film follows New York-based artist Vik Muniz (Figure 4) as he returns to his native Brazil to create his “Pictures of Garbage” series, based on portraits of the pickers (see Muniz 2013). Muniz’ artistic style involves creating pictures from unlikely materials. As Hetherington (2004, p. 159) reminds us, waste does not necessarily involve an “act of closure” and in this case, the rubbish/garbage/trash returns to inspire Muniz’s work. The portraits he creates are another example of the use of art to “inspire people to reflect upon and imagine alternatives to consumption” (Biehl-Missal 2013, p. 245).
Vik Muniz at Crystal Award Ceremony Exploring Arts in Society at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2013. Image from Wikimedia Commons and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.
However Muniz’s aim is not as straightforward as simply encouraging reflection on consumption practices. He had an impoverished childhood himself. What we can call the “conditions of possibility” for his artistic endeavors is revelatory: he stopped a fight, was shot by one of the people involved, and later given a pay-off that enabled him to move from Brazil to America. His life could have been very similar to the subjects of his art, but serendipity and artistic success helped channel his life in financially lucrative directions, thereby leaving him able to focus more of his energies to help others through his artwork.
Reflecting on an earlier project that involved him thinking about how hard labor in sugar plantations influenced the contentment, joy, and satisfaction people experienced in their lives, led him to paint the young children of these workers. The “sugar” was the substance he thought had gradually ebbed from the lives of the elders. Artistic gatekeepers noticed this series of pictures, so a socially oriented exercise inflected Muniz’s career as artist and photographer in an extremely positive direction. As he explains in his current “Pictures of Garbage” project, “What I really want to do is to change the lives of a group of people with the same materials that they deal with every day” (Muniz in Walker 2010).
His reasoning for doing so is commensurate with the type of rationale we have heard articulated recently by those involved with Transformative Consumer Research (TCR). As expressed by David Glen Mick (2006), TCR attempts to undertake social change activities that can potentially affect many people. This places demands on our time and imagination, while requiring emotional and physical labor that only the motivated can provide, but which is sometimes unavoidable if we see ourselves as empathetic and change oriented actors (e.g. Jafari et al. 2013). This axiology is encapsulated in the response to Vik’s question about the demands of the project he has in mind. His gallery director replies that whilst physical and safety issues are involved, they are firmly outweighed by the moral implications of not doing anything to help people who exist on the margins of society.
Highlighting the life-story and experiences of these people is situated within a broader critique of the persistence of class-based judgments that erroneously attribute success for one group with self-directed individualistic endeavors, whilst framing the less desirable circumstances in which others find themselves, solely as a product of their lack of will to succeed. This argument chimes with those working from more critical perspectives in marketing today and especially resonates with debates taking place around intersectionality (Gopaldas 2013), materialist feminism (Catterall, Maclaran, and Stevens 2005), and space/exclusion (Saatcioglu and Ozanne 2013).
While Muniz embraces the idea that art can transform people and their way of relating to their lives and world, as well as enable them to see beyond the boundaries of current experiences, he and those involved with this project – especially his wife – are concerned about the psychological ramifications that such a world changing experience could have when it allows people to see opportunities for alternative paths in life that they cannot achieve or maintain. This ethical dilemma has no easy means of resolution, but in the case of Waste Land appears to have been mitigated by the positive effects on those involved.
Axiologically, then, we see this as an exemplar project in the vein of TCR. However, the method of doing so is not consistent with, for example, participatory action research (e.g. Ozanne and Saatcioglu 2008). That is, it starts without community involvement per se, with the artistic inspiration of Muniz and his immediate circle of collaborators leading the exercise, and then seeks to enroll those who would be both object and subject of the pictures that result. Even so, the input of the participants is paramount. The knowledge and skill of the famous artist frames the artistic project, but also asks for the active participation of those working – directly and indirectly – at the garbage site.
In accenting the transformative nature of art, Muniz believes that his project will afford the pickers, many of whom have been at the landfill since childhood, a sense of escapism as it “takes people away, even just for a few minutes, from where they are and show[s] them another world” (Muniz in Walker 2010). From what we see of the landfill, it is unsurprising that Muniz would assume the pickers are seeking escapism.
The Jardim Gramacho is on the edge of the city, adjacent to a location characterized by an active drug trade. The pickers are both geographically and socially excluded as we are told “this is where everything that’s not good goes, including the people” (Muniz in Walker 2010). The images of the landfill are striking as we see the pickers, who work day and night, securing materials they can sell and recycle, scrambling over the mountains of rubbish with birds swarming overhead, and where the ground wobbles due to the amount of trash shifting under the surface.
In their desperate and determined search for the right materials to sell to wholesalers, pickers rush towards the new material almost before it has been safely deposited by newly arrived delivery trucks. We learn about the gendered nature of picking, the preferences for selecting different materials based on weight and manageability. Numerous figures in the film, both managers of the facility and Muniz himself, emphasize the significant and beneficial role of the pickers. Their recycling efforts help ensure the site can continue to accommodate the massive amount of new trash daily. They are thus central to the continued viability of the consumption patterns of people living in Rio de Janeiro. Accompanying these visuals, we hear the pickers talk about some of the distressing sights, including dead human beings, to which they have been exposed.
However, alongside this narrative of exclusion is one of pride. We meet Valter, a picker for 26 years, who speaks passionately and knowledgeably about the importance of recycling. Despite how we might rush to judgment about the “dirty work” (Tyler 2009), others suggest it is a better choice than the alternatives of prostitution, drug dealing, or other criminal activities. One of the main characters profiled in the film is Tiao, the instigator and president of the Association of Pickers of Jardim Gramacho (ACAMJG) that represents the interests of the 2500-3000 pickers at the landfill. Perhaps the most inspiring expression of this sense of pride is at the end of the film when we see Tiao correct the language used by a chat show host, telling him they are not pickers of garbage, but pickers of recyclable material.
Whilst some of the pickers initially felt ashamed of their job, exasperated by the reactions of others, participation in the project has removed this feeling. The emotion of the pickers who participate is moving to watch. When Tiao is taken to London to attend an auction of his portrait, which is sold for £28,000, his joy is contagious. We witness their excitement as they attend the Museum of Modern Art in Rio to visit an exhibition of their portraits, a place far removed from their normal environment. The self-appointed cook, who feeds the pickers from meat and vegetable waste scavenged from the landfill, sums this up as “sometimes we see ourselves as so small but people out there see us as so big, so beautiful” (Laurentina da Silva in Walker 2010).
The film ends on an uplifting note. Over $250,000 raised from the sale of prints has been given back to the ACAMJG to improve the pickers’ working conditions. For some of the pickers Muniz’ aim of transformation is achieved and many of them do not want to return to the landfill. As one participant suggests, the project has brought her “the will to change.” Unlike Trashed with its emphasis on scientific and rational arguments against waste, Waste Land relies more on the notion of aesthetic knowing, a term used by Biehl-Missal (2013) to describe the potential of the arts “to inspire people’s tacit knowing, feeling, and imagination” (p. 256). So, in the same way that the pickers are encouraged to reimagine what their lives could be, viewers are also reminded, through a process of aesthetic critique, of the need to reimagine a more sustainable approach to consumption.
Discussion
These are enlightening and uplifting films. They stress how we as individuals can make a difference in ensuring that our ecosystems remain vital, healthy and capable of supporting life. In equal measure, they do not shy away from the dark-side of our consumption patterns, or refrain from underlining the unwillingness of practitioners to act responsibly in relation to waste management and disposal, along with the inability of government to challenge vested interests.
When even the “better” managed waste sites are flagged up as problematic and largely avoid censure, the viewer cannot but feel a crisis of faith in governments’ willingness to regulate. But should we be surprised? This is a powerful industry, with large financial resources to deal with legal and community oriented challenges to present practices. Corporate control and pressure may sound a death knell for the ability of communities to take charge of their local environments.
Once again we return to the problems of capital accumulation and the profit motive, and witness the harm this wreaks on people around the world, rich and poor alike (Varey 2013). Together these films reinforce that waste is a problem that does not discriminate; it affects both the affluent and those experiencing poverty. This said, if you fall into the latter camp, the effects are likely to be more detrimental to your health and quality-of-life. The poor of Jakarta, as Trashed reminds us, live by deeply polluted water-flows, which they use to source drinking and bath water. The effects are as predictable as they are disheartening.
Yet, as Foucault said, where there is power, resistance is likely to manifest. Films like the two reviewed here have the potential to move us from a state of indifference and apathy toward outrage and demand for social change (Ozanne and Murray 1995). People can challenge how they understand and act upon issues as complex and power laden as waste disposal (e.g. Böhm and Brei 2008). While it might be a piece-meal form of social change, if we alter our own consumption habits along the lines suggested on the DVD box for Trashed (utilize reusable bags; use reusable bottles and filter water at home; reduce food miles, shop locally, form a cooperative with friends and family), the point is that we can do something. Small changes sometimes make dramatic differences.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.