The film follows photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose signature subject is the massive detritus created by the modern world. In enormous, high-resolution photographs, Burtynsky finds the beauty in a house-sized pile of discarded plastic goods or rotary-dial telephones, documents rivers with more chemical runoff in them than water, and witnesses entire vistas that have been transformed by mining or garbage disposal. Though his work emphasizes the aesthetic qualities of such locations, it also naturally prods the viewer to consider how his lifestyle on one side of the world is leaving a moonscape of waste in hidden parts of the globe where a village's main source of income may be, for instance, tearing apart discarded PCs and sifting recyclable metals from toxic substances.

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