ANTHROPOCENE: DANDORA
Director: Nicholas de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky
Producer(s): Nicholas de Pencier, Nadia Tavazzani
6 min | Kenya
The Dandora Landfill is the largest of its kind in Kenya. It receives industrial, agricultural, commercial and medical waste, amounting to about 2,000 tonnes per day. It is estimated that more than a million people live in the vicinity of the landfill. Residents work informally, sorting scrap by hand and selling it to recycling plants on site. The plastic hills and canyons of Dandora represent not only an entirely human landscape but also an emerging microeconomy. Prolific and easy to obtain, waste plastic has become a resource on its own, to be mined and sold as source material. But so much of it cannot be re-used and will be left to congeal in landfills, spilling into our waterways and oceans, eventually forming a significant sediment layer in the strata of the planet, and marking the Anthropocene in geological time.
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
Finalist, Virtual Reality/360 Category, SIMA 2020