THIS MOVIE WAS MADE DURING QUARANTINE FOLLOWING SAFETY PROTOCOLS. "Waste" is the generic word used to designate something we no longer want, that we throw away. The conscious citizen separates the organic from the recyclable waste in the hope of helping to solve one of the most serious environmental problems of our time.

But no matter what we do, a disposable diaper still takes 600 years to decompose. A UN study shows the direct relationship between waste and household income. The higher the socio-economic status is, the higher the consumer figures and waste generation are.

Can we break with the culture of waste and start a pattern of sustainable behavior? I believe so. That is why I went after people who turn this challenge into action.

This search gave birth to Discard*. The concept of waste is cultural, it is something that is produced. Our waste generation starts on our minds.

We say that waste was invented by man, there is no waste in nature. It is associated with something bad, something that we avoid getting in touch with, that we want to stay away from and put in front of our houses to disappear. I take things from nature, process and then dispose of them.

This is the unsustainable design of our society today. You know the address of the place where you bought your smartphone, but what if I ask you where does your trash go? We don't know.

Working with trash itself is not a problem, it is a solution. Why would I buy a material if it is thrown away all over the world, all time? It's incredible, because crossdressers see, in the trash, its potential.

Then I started to go to Brás to buy fabric and realized I was spending too much there. At 6 pm, in Brás, they throw away several bags full of fabric scraps, like, lots of them. However, the problem was that they were scraps, I couldn't just take them to a seamstress.

So, I had to learn how to sew. Here's what I do: I use three T-shirts, it is super simple, I start by breaking the binary process. Aesthetically, it is no longer a cisgender piece because it breaks with gender binarism.

It is no longer a piece for a slim person, because it fits a larger person. I use three male T-shirts and turn them into another piece of clothing. That also breaks with visual contact and arouses on people a process of.

. . It's a trigger.

It is among the trash, the waste, everything that is disposed of, that is where life is. That is where this potential process is. When it comes to building something here, I want to create a cultural space, an art gallery made by trans people to trans people.

People understand "trash" as something pejorative, which is absolutely connected with colonial processes. For example, social hygienisation, cleanliness and dirtiness, this is colored, this is white. .

. And then, what is left for us is the trash. In reality we don't have money to buy materials.

I don't even want to, today I. . .

Fuck it, I'm not buying anything, I mean it. So, when you have these store-bought pieces that were thrown away, that are seen as trash, and a crossdresser takes them and highlights all the potential from this trash and her body, seen so many times as trash, it is a very futuristic process, very potent, very powerful. We are trying to hack the system, also.

We exist, our body is here. Cisnormativity is an invention. Our bodies break with the norms.

The way we engage with other people, with work, with life, it breaks these norms. Garbage is that mess created when you mix the margarine tub, which is a recyclable waste, a tomato, which is organic and could be composted, the soda cap, the soda bottle. .

. Everything you dispose of in the same bag, that's garbage. It is everything that can't be reused, all materials that can't be recycled, FABRICIO SOLER - LAWYER -repurposed, composted, processed or saved anymore, that is waste, the so-called trash.

Waste is a design error. If you look at nature, the Brazilian indigenous people did not generate waste. They had no wrappers, they only had peels that decomposed themselves.

We use mainly plastic, profusely. Plastic lasts for 400 years, it does not decompose, it does not disintegrate, and it hasn't been recycled. So, there is plastic everywhere.

One of the main byproducts of crude oil is plastic, and the world is drowning in plastic nowadays. FERNANDO ROSSETTI - CONSULTANT -It is mostly an unsustainable product in our society, in environmental terms. Before the disposal, we have the consumption issue.

Right? Your choices and the things you consume. I highly value manual work.

I believe that handmade things, the work of craftspeople, carpentry, the carpenter's work, you know? I think it's beautiful the carpenter's assistant, someone who wants to learn how to be a woodworker. I started noticing that there was a large amount of waste that came from lumberyards as well as small carpenter shops, small stumps most people considered trash.

They were simply disposed of. And I started to get interested in this disposed wood that no one wants to turn into toys. When you buy a toy mass-produced by a factory, with lots of machines that melt the plastic into molds and release the products in series, before someone puts stickers and packs them for sale, there is no contemplation.

People don't take time to admire and contemplate anymore. It provides the genuine pleasure of transforming nature. Are you consuming a toy because it is something really nice that will provide a nice experience to you and your kid, or are you buying a brand because it is famous and its marketing strategy convinced you that if you buy it, your kid will be happier?

It won't be a character toy that when my child gets over that character he won't like it anymore and I will dispose of it. It's something that will always be pretty and I can pass it over to a friend's daughter. And she will consider start shopping at her neighborhood businesses, prioritizing small producers and maternal enterprises.

I believe this consciousness is closely related with motherhood. I believe we start to think about the world we will leave and to try to protect it so my kid can experience the things I did. I remember I used to sit on the sidewalk and play with sticks, we used to make slingshots, we used to play with things from nature.

Since we are all part of nature, this energy also passes to the wood and when the child gets in touch with it, this child also feels it. So, to me, this is. .

. the cherry on top of the cake, you know? 85% of the population lives in the cities, and cities are the center of the problems, TARCÍSIO PAULA PINTO - URBANOLOGIST -where inequality is striking, where privileges are also very striking.

If I am a person that only sees the city as a passing scenery PATRÍCIA MARIA DE JESUS - UFABC PROFESSOR -through the bus window and speed, on expressways or tunnels, my relationship with the city can't be good. São Paulo, today, and this is the national average, the city recycles around 2%, 3% of its waste. LÍVIA HUMAIRE - GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS -But the outskirts don’t generate as much waste as central areas, since that 1% consumes much more than the people on the outskirts.

Those people are not responsible for our waste problems. When you go to a museum, when you go to a natural history museum, for example, you study ancient civilizations based on the "trash" they produced. Therefore, that is the cultural heritage generated by that civilization.

But we created the myth of sustainability and we'll mislead everybody for the next years. AILTON KRENAK - ENVIRONMENTALIST -Until everything disintegrates in our own hands. We can't talk about sustainability.

Sustain what? The way things are? Our role is to restore the ecosystems.

Each Brazilian generates one kilo of trash per day. Only less than 1% of this volume is composted. And less than 2% is effectively recycled.

The landfill is still the final destination of most of our waste, contaminating the soil, the air and people who make a living from it. We must think about the 800 thousand waste collectors in the country and make this profession more dignified and valued. Without them, it is even harder to find the solution for a planet already drowned in plastic.

We also must talk about industries and their production processes, which originate containers and packaging that accumulate in our habitat. What would be their responsibility regarding this environmental imbalance? What are the bases for creating a waste management system a little more focused on sustainability?

We chose this area to prove that with the right amount of project planning and execution, it would be possible to implement the selective waste collection. The Jericoacoara village, for being an isolated place, urbanistically speaking, when this former fishing village underwent the process of becoming an international tourist destination it faced several challenges, and waste management was one of the first ones. Jericoacoara means "lair of turtles" in the indigenous language Tupi.

Unfortunately, we have found many dead turtles, and birds too, that ended up ingesting plastic bags. Everything consumed by the 3,500 inhabitants of the village, and also the 3,900, 4,500 tourists, depending on the time of the year, that consume three times more on average than a villager, or generate three times more garbage. .

. We call it garbage because it ends up in the landfill. And to think that it is all channeled to the same place!

The city regular collection would mix everything and take it to the landfill. And then we found out that there was and there is still an entire community buried deep under the trash, which is called Baixio, the Baixio community. The wind is the main factor.

Because everything thrown out at Preá beach ends up in Jeri. JESSICKA ALBUQUERQUE - ENVIRONMENTAL GUIDE -The wind brings the trash on its way. Paper, plastic, cups, everything.

It will bring everything that is light. We need an ecosystem to implement a project like this. It's not a project we can carry out by ourselves, it requires effective public agencies.

The city hall and other departments must get involved. The civil society participation is also very important, whether it is by the people, the citizens themselves that take action and are involved with the causes, or by entrepreneurs. And at that time everybody got very excited because we could see it was feasible, and all the businesspeople took part, they helped voluntarily in the sorting, we organized several taskforces.

We called up people from the community and we all did the sorting together. ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATOR -A partnership among the community, businessmen and the city hall restored this building. And a recycling plant was set up.

We all chipped in to buy a press machine. The press machine that is still used at the plant actually belongs to the Eu Amo Jeri association, a business association. We receive a full press truck load of recyclables per day to be processed and sold.

It is worth mentioning that 60% of the country's cities take these materials to other places, for example, to dumps and landfills other than sanitary landfills, which are legally contemplated by the public policies that we have. A landfill is an area, a plot, where all waste and garbage are simply dumped, which creates an ever-growing mountain of trash. Some people live there, some people work there, and it contaminates the water table MARIANA RICO - ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATOR -with the highly toxic leachate it releases, it releases several greenhouse gases, like methane, and it's considered an environmental crime.

But the answer that our public policies and also our engineers have given over the last years is to fight it by burying waste. It is all hidden the same way it is quickly removed from the front of your home. Regardless of which one it is, you are wasting natural resources, damaging the environment and rendering useless an area of the city.

The reality is that there are more than 3. 000 active dumps in Brazil today, and the craziest thing is that in Brazil we bury, every year, about R$ 14 billion in raw material. So, we are burying the income of thousands, millions of people.

If you discard a material, a recyclable material, like cardboard or an aluminum can, and it goes to a landfill, it's fine, it's over. You paid for someone to bury it. But if you want to send it back to the market, if you want to recycle it, you must pay taxes.

This year we sent to space three space missions. It seems like we are trying to find a way to get out of planet Earth. It is as if we were planning a future in which whoever stays on Earth will live in a dump.

What people dispose of as trash, the food can be composted and the recyclables we send back to the market, so, our job is very important, because, for us, everything can be reused. In 1998, I lost my job and I lived on the streets for a short period of time. During this period I met some recyclable collectors under an overpass in Moema, and they collected cardboard.

In the same year, Lúcia showed up here at the cooperative, Lúcia Rosa, founder of Dulcineia. And she invited me to paint a cover. So, the first process is to sort the ones that are good, the cardboard boxes.

Then we bring them to this little room. Then we have the process of cutting the cover, painting it, and folding it to assemble the book. We have several books on display in London libraries, but our focus are the fairs we are part of, like the Miolo fair, we display our books at the fair, the Plana fair.

People invite us to go to companies and some public offices where we talk about our work and its importance. I really like to work with kids, because they mostly educate their parents based on what you teach them. Like, if the mother wants to throw away a bottle, her son says, "no, let's donate it to the recycling co-op.

" For us, workers of the co-op, for example, recycling is our only source of income. So, we are solely and exclusively dependent on recycling. If the recycling ends, it will leave 28 families unemployed on the market.

For instance, I am 55 years old, I have no other profession. If I stopped working with recycling, where would I work? There are people who are illiterate.

Nowadays, you must have completed at least the 8th grade to get a job. So, those are the people who depend the most on our work, which is recycling. I've seen in other countries, I have been to London and they are very proud of us.

"Wow, you are recyclable collectors! " But I would love if that happened here, in Brazil. I dream of a place where people have the common sense of throwing less trash into nature, of living in a beautiful place, in a paradise.

This is the dream of every collector. The story of the Bag Man, for instance. Mothers would tell kids, "if you misbehave, I will tell the Bag Man to take you away.

" Who was the Bag Man? They were the first waste collectors. So, that highlights the level of our prejudice.

Where there is unemployment, social inequality, waste and State negligence, there are collectors. In Brazil, today, it is estimated that there may be around 1 million recyclable collectors. 90% of our waste that is recycled ALINE MATULJA - ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER -is handled by the collectors, and most of them are in this situation because it is what was left for them in terms of economic activity.

Now, the industry that is recovering 95% of these materials. . .

Could it value the part on the chain that is doing the recycling? If you take the billionaire figures it has shown and divide them by the millions of collectors, the result is R$ 500 per person. If recycling preserves the environment and by doing that you are saving the planet, and if who saves the planet are superheroes, then collectors are superheroes.

But they have the worst superpower of all, which is invisibility. It works pretty fine where things are well-organized. In cities where there are recycling centers, where they have at least some support from an organization for sorting and collecting materials, where they have at least some backing, things work very well.

Some clients call me to say they have things that might be interesting for me, when they are disposing of some stuff. Nice, I go there to check and sometimes nothing interests me but, in a corner, there is something wonderful. I ask, "what about that?

" "Oh, I don't know about that, does it interest you? " "Yes, it is exactly what I want. " Then your eyes light up and you start imagining that thing finished, but not as business, as something enjoyable to create and transform into something that will be useful in the future.

Well, here, this is our supermarket, our storage yard, where we keep the pieces that we find in junkyards, when clients call and tell us that they are disposing of things, we collect all these materials and bring them here. And here is the actual workshop, where we have the machinery that we use to make the transformations. Upcycle are pieces that I make using several objects, let's say, I take an old fan, the stand of and old lathe, and a piece of an old wooden weaving machine.

I take parts of these three things, assemble them into one thing and turn them into a small table, a lamp base, or a counter. This is what upcycling is about, you take parts of that piece, but you don't deconstruct it completely. Trash is money.

Trash, or waste, whatever you call it, it's gold for me. 10, 15, 20, 30 years from now people will still use that table to eat or put things on, this is gold. Everything can be repurposed.

You can give a new life to the "trash". If we, as human beings, deserve a second chance, our trash also deserves a second chance. Let's reinvent ourselves, let's recreate ourselves.

I think my life is recycling. Generating waste is evolution, the human being just needs to figure out how to handle it. Our problem today is not having any public policy, not having studies being developed on how to deal with waste, how to process it.

The concept of "let's figure out during the production process how this product will be used in the long run. " Man, in the world's largest companies, in the mega industries, the mega electronic factories, this does not exist. It's all about money, they want to lower costs and sell more.

Is it wrong? Not, it is not. It is the concrete jungle we live in.

What we need today is a technology, guidelines that are able to foresee that we will produce millions of cellphones and millions of TVs, and that every year they will be disposed of, so what can we do? This is what we need. Reverse logistics is a principle of Law that says that every product released on the market needs to return to be used as industrial raw material.

In Brazil, after the national solid waste policy spend 20 years in development, it was finally implemented, but a very important detail in it is the reason why it is able to do so little for Brazil's waste, which is sharing the responsibility of producers, distributors and suppliers with the consumer. The issue is not this or that person's fault, MARCUS NAKAGAWA - ESPM PROFESSOR -it is actually the fault, the culture, and the bad manners of everybody. When I compare it with the European legislation, reverse logistics is not a shared responsibility over there, it is an extended producer responsibility.

That is, if you are part of the industry that brought to the world a non-recyclable pink plastic bottle, you are responsible for it. There is a very perverse narrative of holding the consumers accountable for it, as if we had a sustainable alternative to cellphones. I think the State is the only thing that could make companies give up some of its profits, through some serious inspection.

I've always had an intense relationship with music and art at home. My father is a musician and my mother has always been an artisan, and my sister, when I was about 15 years old, she started a movement with my family, she started singing and she encouraged me to play. She started a movement that led to the creation of a program with the government to support young people who had some artistic ability to share that ability with the community.

So, I had the idea to start making instruments due to a pedagogical, economic necessity. People didn't have instruments and could not afford them, and I could not offer them either. I wasn't going to bring them up here because it's too messy, but they said, "that's what we want"!

That's what we like! To me, trash is a raw material, it is rich, it is a source of inspiration. Sometimes I'm not even planning to make an instrument, I go out for a walk and I find stuff.

Most of these instruments were made in the workshops. So, there was some planning, we asked people to bring instruments if they could. Any vacant lot here in Realengo, on the outskirts of Rio, becomes a dump.

There are several of them in any neighborhood. The generation of waste in the 21st century, in a big city, it is unbelievable. We see things that went through highly complex processes, that took years, centuries to be developed, and we consume and throw them away.

My relationship with the so-called trash is a relationship of indignation, it is a relationship of enchantment. I visit junkyards, I also make a lot of things that are not music-related because creating music instruments made me examine the recycling issue in my daily life as a whole. The waste issue has a lot to do with the way we deal with life as a whole.

We are disposable. We are worth nothing. I think the waste issue is connected to the consumer society issue, to mass production, to a consumption incitement that is way bigger than our needs and the planet's capacity to deal with receiving it, decomposing it, reinserting it into the system that is not aggressive to nature.

It's scary to think that we live in a world where there are things like programmed obsolescence, where things are not made to last long. In the beginning of the pandemic, we thought the economic model would be reviewed, but almost nobody still talks about it, everybody believes that the capital is rearranging itself, that neoliberalism will not be knocked down. Poor people and black people die more, work more, and pay more for the crisis damages.

I believe that it is not possible to find a solution to the waste issue without reviewing the economic model in its essence. If there is a way out, it will come from the popular movements. ELISABETH GRIMBERG - POLIS INSTITUTE -Industries should be at society's disposal, it is not us, the planet, that should be working for the profits.

The psychological effects of capitalism are very powerful. Our lifestyle is pervaded with the notion that to have is to be, so instead of being a person, you are a consumer. We live nowadays in the consumer society and, consequently, in the waste society.

The economic model should be reviewed, it is mostly focused on producing waste, in wasting material. The writer Carlos Drmmond de Andrade warned us about this predatory logic of the planet that eats away the mountains, that devours rivers and everything else. He revealed that this kind of mindset was eventually going to devour us all.

A waste-free future is now being built by a small and increasingly relevant number of people who rethink their habits, reduce the consumption of industrialized products and refuse plastic packaging, for example. Besides not generating more waste, we need to recycle the 10 billion tons of waste discarded each year on our planet, a problem to be solved by international organizations, governments and industries, but you and me can start solving it right now. People born in the 1950s probably had never drank water from a plastic bottle.

Thereafter, plastic invaded the planet. We already accepted breathing industrial discharges as if they were our environment. I am talking to you about 500 meters from a river channel, which was invaded by mining mud five years ago.

I've been to the Amazon rainforest, to several places, several territories, and I was ashamed when I had to discard the soap packaging. When I finished brushing my teeth and the toothpaste was over, I wondered what should I do with the tube, if I should put it in my pocket to take back to my trash habitat, because there was no waste there. A guy who travels from New York or São Paulo to anywhere in the world would have to take his trash back home.

But he leaves a trail of trash in the world wherever he goes. We have a diagnosis about our planet that suggests that we should stop consuming everything. Everything.

Stop consuming. We already have too many things in the world. We should stop manufacturing them.

Especially by the end of the 20th century, science and technology seemed to be working together. That is a mistake. Science and technology have been working separately for a long time.

Technology seizes upon knowledge processes produced by science. Technology is arrogant, it seizes upon social processes that were built over thousands of years, patents its products and puts them on the market. A utopia is not ignoring the climatic, ecological, and social evidence of the planet.

A utopia should include all the problems. Then I realized that a placebo hopefulness fits perfectly this fake humankind with which we are coexisting. It pretends everything will work out.

So, let's not mistake utopia for placebo hopefulness. The recycling chains will be, in the very near future, a new market niche, a new business. The circular economy seeks to make it fluid, to make the waste go back to the chain.

And for that I must either generate less waste or create a waste that is compostable. The problem today with the circular economy is that it sustains an economy model that is very concentrated, with big corporations and super-rich people. It is unsustainable, it won't solve humankind's problem.

When they suggest we will achieve that by reusing already processed materials, they are omitting that nature is the permanent source of it. The economic and environmental issue must not be focused only on damage management or waste management at the end of the process. We must design things, we must plan things out considering the next cycles.

You can rule out the concept of trash if you design things for it, if you intentionally consider what will happen next. When we think of a building for the circular economy, we are talking about a more modular design, where we know what things are made of. Everything we brought here, to the house, we tried to understand where it came from, how it was made, who made it, and what it could become afterwards.

We built the house in five days and there was no dumpster. So, it is a house built with no waste. Its entire facade was built with concrete forms waste from another construction.

Also the way we will collect water, how we will use it. We collect rainwater for washing clothes and it is treated by a circle of banana trees we have in the back. So, the water comes back to the system in a healthier way.

It is completely removable from the ground and it was made with several modules that can be detached from one another. She can remove it from here and build somewhere else if she wants to. The house was designed considering what is the inside and the outside, so we can connect both.

When we talk about a city, there's the so-called urban metabolism. The city has entrances and it has exits. Nowadays we talk about something called linear urban metabolism.

Resources come in, like water, electricity, manufactured products and so on, we consume them in the city and we dispose of them. It creates a straight line. There is a whole flow of food entering the city today and also a whole flow of organic waste that is not recycled.

Civilization was built on bases that are erroneous, these bases are actually pointing to the opposite direction. And it is up to us, the creators of it all, to undo it, to deconstruct the trash. This is an ethical perspective because you have already extracted raw materials, spent natural resources, you have already used electricity, water, human labor.

All these resources present an energy that should be honored. It should be reused, but we don't do it. There are several cities that are waste-free in the world.

It doesn't mean there are no waste, it means people found solutions to the waste issue. When you adopt the waste-free concept, which I think is more feasible, you also start to ponder, "what am I wasting? " It doesn't matter if you believe in waste-free, what matters is the message it conveys about rethinking our habits, reducing waste generation and improving consumerism.

On plastics, I think it is just like the legend of the sky fall. They come from the waste of oil exploitation, which is underground, and the Yanomami tribe tells us that this is the prophecy. When mankind releases.

. . When it exhausts the underground and releases these forces, the sky will fall.

It'll be the end of everything. This is what we are seeing now. So, the things we dispose of are the keys to discover our own history.

Observe the things you set aside, the things you keep in the dark room of your feelings, the things piled up in the corners of your house, there is a narrative hidden among them. And it needs to be told with love, with light, with kindness. So, my waste becomes not only pieces, but confluence spots.

Life after death. I am joining these concepts. When an object dies at the curbside, it is reborn here.

So, my job is to revive these pieces and maximize their identity. Upcycling, right? What is sentenced to death gains another life.

As part of this puzzle that I'm solving I reproduce the atmosphere of the studio in the institutions that I visit and create a universe, a bridge with the space architecture. These waste materials are alive, they are capable of doing a lot for you. In other words, take off your capes, your shoes, your habits, and allow yourself to be reborn, just like this piece of old wood that was thrown away and now became a piece of art.

If you look around, there are sofas, we have parts of old sofas here and there with the foam coming out and gathering organic material to create a place for life. And we have this space for energy recovery, a closed space, with no windows or backyard where you can have this portal. It is the inside and the outside.

Like Pythagoras said. The inner garden, self-knowledge. The Umbanda also talks about it.

Cultivate your inner garden. So, waste has an identity. Your trash says a lot about you.

What you consume, your habits, your relationship with the planet. Human relationships have a lot to do with the environment. The environment depredation has a lot to do with humanity depredation.

Every piece of wood on the street has a giant story to tell. Imagine the fauna and flora involved in the germination of this seed, the time it took the seed to become a tree just to be cut and turned into furniture. So, this support tells a story.

And also our story. We are human beings, animals. We have metals, minerals, water and everything else in our body, like a miniature of the planet itself.

We are Gaia, we are the Earth. And, patriarchy has pulled us away, isolated us, cooled down our hearts. This concept of land domain comes from colonization, the idea that by controlling a territory and everything in it, it is all mine to be explored, until death.

Humanity may as well disappear, but nature will find other possibilities to crack the concrete and impose itself. As a kid, my dad used to say, "you are the generation of the future, you will change things. " I always think about the future because I believe that processes must be focused on well-being.

We will need to change the way we live in the world. Many solutions will have to come up locally. Collectors must be the protagonists.

It's a type of environmental education that makes people think, reflect, that also seeks to meet our human needs of belonging, connecting, being listened and nurtured. We have to design buildings as if they were trees and cities as forests. To me, the process of well-being must start now, we must live well now.

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