'Scrap': Canadian documentary looks at what happens to old airplanes, streetcars, phone booths

A Canadian documentary is aiming to put the spotlight on the things we create and leave behind as waste, and those who come up with new ways to reuse them.

The trailer for “Scrap” pans over weathered cars lined up in a forest with foliage growing over them, the ghostly image of hundreds of peeling red phone booths standing empty and dilapidated in a field, and children playing on the wings of broken airplanes.

“We consume and discard, but we don’t think about what happens with all the waste we’re producing,” a voice states over these visuals.

The documentary, which was first screened at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival last spring and came to a select few theatres in Canada this October, explores the idea of what happens to discarded objects, and how reusing may be more environmentally sound than recycling.

“Basically I wanted to find out where stuff goes,” Stacey Tenenbaum, creative producer and director of Scrap, told CTV News Channel.

We rarely think about what happens to large objects when they are no longer in use, such as planes, ships, streetcars, phone booths, she said.

“This film kind of looks for these places where things end up, and it also follows people who are repurposing these things. A lot of them ended up being artists. That wasn’t intentional, but I think it’s kind of interesting because art is bringing new perspective to environmental problems.”

The documentary tells the story of scrap by focusing on a few key people and how they are reusing discarded objects.

“So in the case of the ships, I was following an architect who was repurposing an old ship and turning it into a church,” Tenenbaum said.

Tchely Hyung-Chul Shin, a professor at the Grenoble School of Architecture in France, has been designing architectural projects with his wife and fellow architect Claire Shin since 2007.

The church is their second project repurposing a ship. The first was an art installation created from a “discarded ocean liner,” according to the Scrap website, and was called Temp’L. It has since been converted into a cafe in South Korea.

“All of the people I was following kind of had creative solutions to the problems of massive amounts of waste that are created by these huge objects at their end of life,” Tenenbaum said.

Some of those people featured include a sculptor who creates metal artwork out of discarded farm equipment, a man who restores old phone booths and another man who restores old streetcars.

The documentary also looks at a car museum that used to be a junkyard, where people can come and photograph more than 4,400 historic cars that are half-consumed by the growth of nature around them.

Some people are even upcycling abandoned airplanes into living spaces.

“Inside Bangkok there’s an airplane graveyard where a lot of tourists go and they take photos and stuff like that, but what they didn’t know is there’s a family that lives there in this kind of airplane graveyard,” Tenenbaum said.

“They live inside a repurposed airplane, so they’ve turned an airplane into their home, and basically this woman supports her family by charging tourists to come in and take photos.”

In another part of the documentary, they look at recycling taking place in India, where cell phones are taken apart to extract the precious metals within.

But what the documentary showed her overall, Tenenbaum said, is that “recycling isn’t really a long-term solution.”

Canada creates three million tonnes of plastic waste every year, only nine per cent of which is actually recycled, according to a report by the federal government in 2019. Most of what we put in our recycling bins simply ends up in landfills, with the recycling process expensive and highly selective. For example, items contaminated with the slightest amount of food waste can’t be recycled.

We need to be looking for other solutions to recycling, Tenenbaum said, and directly repurposing items instead of trying to take them apart to completely remake them is one of those solutions.

“Instead of throwing things away, I think we need to change our impulse and really think about that thing, [how] we can extend its life, or reuse it in a different way or give it away so that other people can use it.”

She noted that for the theatrical release of the documentary, they allowed viewers to turn in old cellphones so they could redistribute them to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

“They take your old cellphones, they’ll give you a tax receipt for the donation, and they wipe the cellphones and load them with apps to help people with sight impairment navigate the world,” she explained.

The film isn’t only about being environmentally conscious, but about our connection with the things that humanity creates, she added.

“That’s something I was looking at in the film, is just our fascination with these things, and our attachment to them, and sort of what we lose when things are just scrapped and not having repurposing as a goal. We do lose parts of our history and our cultural memory and all kinds of stuff. So that’s something I wanted to show in the film.”