Crapshoot: The Gamble with Our Wastes

Despite the lighthearted title, this National Film Board of Canada production takes a serious look at the question of what happens when we flush. Director Jeff McKay conducts a video tour of sewage systems throughout history and around the world, beginning with ancient Rome, and including contemporary stops in India, Sweden, and Canada, to weigh the aims and methods of waste disposal. The Romans, of course, built the first municipal sewers, and they're still in use despite a dramatic up-tick in pollutants. India has so fouled the river Ganges with the dumping of raw sewage that it is now a veritable open sewer itself (yet the faithful still come to bathe and even sip its “waters”). In Canada, activists run into an incredible bureaucratic shuck and jive when they question the contents--as well as the practice--of sewage being dumped on farmland. The visuals here are occasionally spectacular in a nauseating way, as the camera focuses on discarded condoms and other tidbits of solid waste dumped as "fertilizer." Technically speaking, the solid stuff resulting from sewage treatment is called "sludge," and in addition to the put-you-off-your-popcorn footage of same, the film features harrowing expert testimony of what sludge contains and what it does to humans when it gets into the food chain. Thought-provoking, scary as all-get-out, and engrossing (despite the multiple close-ups of excrement and so on), Crapshoot is a must for environmental studies collections and highly recommended in general. Aud: H, C, P. (M. Tribby)