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Landscapes of Waste: What’s in a Name?: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Landfills and Dumps

Trash and the Impovrished

Furtado explains how waste and landfills affect the poorest members of society. He illustrates this point by showing how often times animals (in this instance, pigs) are treated more humanely than people.

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Emerging Nations: Complicated Relationships As explained in the previous sections, because of the progress of the modern sanitation system, the preoccupation with sterility in the U.S., and the ability of wealthy countries to export their trash to developing countries, we can infer that developing nations have a complicated relationship with dumps and waste. By looking at four documentaries that arise from South America [Ilha das flores (1980), Estamira (2004), Waste Land (2010), and the Landfill Harmonic (2013)], we will observe how these societies have a different relationship with dumpsites than those in the United States. Specifically, we will see how discarded waste at dumpsites becomes a source of income or pride and is often used as a vehicle of agency for some of the poorest members of these societies.

Ilha das flores (1980) or The Isle of Flowers is the name of a dump in Belém Novo, Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil and is the subject of a 1989 Brazilian short film by Jorge Furtado. With the help of an omniscient narrator and a collection of bizarre images, Furtado traces the path of a tomato from garden, to supermarket, to home, to trashcan, to dump. By employing a satiric storytelling mode, Furtado explains how waste and landfills affect the poorest members of society. He illustrates this point by showing how often times animals (in this instance, pigs) are treated more humanely than people. Because these impoverished people are “free” and have no owners (as opposed to the pigs in the film), no one advocates for their rights. Their voices are lost and they are relegated to sift through trash deemed unfit for animal consumption.

Furtado directly points to the shortcomings in a system that ignores the needs of its poorest members. The reason Furtado gives for the inhuman treatment of women and children is poverty. Watching women and children sort through mounds of filth at the dump in order to find sustenance in Furtado’s film is a stark contrast from the technicians and engineers we see interacting with trash at U.S. landfills.