With a gap in decent telly tonight, I headed back to Amazon Prime again. And the next along on my list was Plastic China. Yep, another environmental film - kind of.
More than just an environmental documentary, this focuses on a couple of families that work in a plastic recycling factory in China. You wouldn't believe it, but this place - a shanty town on the outskirts of Qingdao - has 5,000 of these factories - all, it seems, backyard operations, where plastic waste gets sorted and fed into a kind of mulcher, then ground down to sludge and made into pellets. And we follow the stories of a couple of families involved in this business - wading through waste, living in shit, among piles of plastic, sifting through it for something they can use.
The factory manager has ambitions for his son, wants him to go to school - disapproves mightily of his worker, who never went to school himself, spends his time and money drinking, and having more and more children.. and we focus a lot on this guy's children. He doesn't want to have to pay for them to go to school, says they can wait till they go back to their village in the country, where education is free. But my, the squalor they live in..
It's an education, for sure. We always knew China bought most plastic waste - here it is, in less-than-glorious technicolour. And this is what happens to it. But it's more about the people living amid the waste, who have hopes and dreams like anyone else. And you do have to wonder what's going to happen to these kids.. Completely non-political, this film is probably worth a look. Different perspective, for sure. And do stick with it - some interesting things do happen to them, it isn't all watching them sift through rubbish..
On Saturday, I'm free to be back with London Social Detours again - this time, it's a talk about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - always interesting.
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