“Water is the ultimate dumping ground for our waste! As Earth Day approaches, host Frédéric Choinière doesn’t mince words when he talks about this subject he loves and which led him to the documentary series produced by Émilie Ricard-Harvey, Arnaud Bouquet and Ariane Moisan, garbage species. He and his team have thus traveled the planet to take an interest in what happens to the contents of our garbage cans. According to him, the episode devoted to Rio de Janeiro is undoubtedly one of the most impactful. “We often think, wrongly, that the water will bring it elsewhere, but it stays, it goes and it comes back,” he says.
Frédéric Choinière particularly remembers the shooting ofgarbage species on São Conrado beach at the bottom of Rocinha, one of the largest favelas in Rio, with children from a school of bodysurfing for a cleaning operation. “In a few minutes, they filled about twenty bags. That day, the waves were just waves of trash coming from the favela,” he explains. According to him, the failure of infrastructures, or even their absence, is in question. “Inadvertently or voluntarily, because there is little waste collection, people are taking the easy way out. Most of the time, the trash goes into an open sewer and then into the ocean, which brings it back to the beach,” he also notes.
The fate of our waste captivates Frédéric Choinière for both environmental and societal reasons. “Waste is a great entry point to do a little sociology, or even anthropology, and come to understand our society or other cultures. It’s very revealing,” he says. Thanks to garbage species, the facilitator quickly realized that understanding cities, which are often touristic, through the prism of garbage cans and sanitation allows a very intimate knowledge of the place and its population. “That’s what makes the subject completely fascinating,” he says.
He even dares to speak of archaeological learning. “For the episode which takes place in London, we found historical waste in the clay of the Thames: crockery from the Victorian era, ship’s nails, whale bones, Roman coins, etc. Rio, London or even Singapore… Frédéric Choinière therefore believes that a parallel seems obvious to establish. “Our waste always ends up ending up in the water,” he insists.
New York versus Venice
Closer to home, New York is the clearest manifestation of our way of life based on overconsumption, believes Frédéric Choinière, who was on the move in the American megalopolis during the interview. “Today, I still see things that technically don’t make sense to me,” he says. The host refers in particular to the ban on single-use plastics that we continue to see in the food markets of the Big Apple, unlike Montreal. “These reflexes are still not rooted in habits, as much among traders as among citizens and tourists, who are very numerous,” he notes.
With regard to mass tourism, Frédéric Choinière cites as a counter-example that of Venice. “The Italian city is literally drowned in tourists, but it remains super clean. It surprised us to see how much she was, ”he recalls. Although he admits that waste management efforts should not stop there, the presenter ofgarbage species notes a major cultural difference with North America that could explain why less garbage is generated there than here. “When you visit Venice, your coffee, just like your meal, you don’t take it to take away, but on the spot. It’s quite striking,” he says.
A myth to deconstruct
While Quebec is still producing more and more waste, Frédéric Choinière finally thinks that the “myth of the recycling bin” is an illusion that makes us believe that the problem of garbage treatment was solved locally. “We have massively adopted this behavior, but, in fact, we now learn that recyclable materials are collected on the other side of the world,” he regrets. With the documentary series, the host also realizes – and more than ever – account “of the astronomical quantity of stuff that we send to landfill, incineration, recycling, composting…” And therefore, that a large number of them inevitably end up in our waters.
“We have to make real changes upstream, refuse certain things, reduce waste directly at the source, review our habits. Here we are,” he observes. To do this, profound changes are necessary, for example the way of designing everyday consumer products. But Frédéric Choinière is convinced: if the most difficult part is yet to come, there is always hope for a better future for the oceans and the inhabitants of the planet.
Earth Day on television is also…