All too often, the rubbish people produce is out of sight and out of mind, yet in the new movie TRASHED, director and writer Candida Brady puts the spotlight on the impact our wasteful lives are having on our environment, and on our health.

The film follows actor (and executive producer of the film) Jeremy Irons on a worldwide tour as he highlights the pressing need to manage waste in a more sustainable way.

Having started film company Blenheim Films in 1996, Brady has produced and directed documentaries on a variety of subjects, from ballet to breakthrough treatments for HIV and AIDS. But TRASHED, written, directed and produced by Brady (and co-produced with Titus Ogilvy), not only marks her first solo documentary feature film but also her first foray into the world of waste.

Speaking of why she chose this subject, Brady says it’s the sheer lack of knowledge on the shocking consequences of waste that pushed her into action: “It was reading the work of Captain Charles Moore [who features in the film] that really inspired me into action – specifically, his work on the amount of rubbish that there is in the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ in the North Pacific Gyre.

“About four years ago, I woke up one morning thinking: I have to make a film about waste, whatever happens. It really was one of those moments where you go: this is it – I have to do this.”

Originally pitched as piece of work for TV, Brady had to switch tack to making the documentary into a film, due to a lack of perceived interest from the television studios: “Even with a big name attached to it, it wasn’t of any interest at that time… but then, everything is timing in life.

“Happily, however, that’s opened up the avenue of people being able to make documentaries and see them become successful. We’re having a resurgence in the cinema, so it’s had a happy turnaround.”

When I ask how the collaboration with Jeremy Irons came about, Brady tells me that he was keen to work on a documentary: “I’d worked with Jeremy Irons before – he’d narrated something for me about 10 years ago, and I had a general awareness of the fact that he doesn’t like to waste things. But I have to say I was quite surprised that he embraced it in the way that he did; I wasn’t really expecting him to feel so passionately about it.”

Touching on some truly shocking topics, from the deep oceans now holding more rubbish than life, to the impact plastics (and more specifically, burning plastics) can have on health, it is hard not to feel a strong sense of outrage at the amount of damage our litter and waste are having on the planet. But despite being full of research, science and figures, Brady wanted to ensure the film was accessible – so that people of all walks of life could watch it and feel inspired to action.

“Part of my research consisted of testing it on friends and seeing when they started falling asleep, so I’d know when I was barking up the wrong tree! It was helpful, because during the research process you become very involved in the subject, almost at an anorak level.

“So, I ended up just going back to the fact that I wanted to look at how waste is affecting our environment – the land, the air and the water and seas. I thought I’d keep it simple and look at waste on a global scale. Though the specific stories featured may be localised, I found that they could be transposed around the world.”

When I ask Brady what problems really stood out to her as critical, she acknowledges that it was a lack of awareness of the extent of the waste problem.

Brady refers to a landfill site she visited in Lebanon (pictured, bottom right) where a “massive, uncontrolled landfill falls straight into the Mediterranean” and says that one of the worst parts was speaking to an official there who didn’t seem to understand the impacts of the chemicals produced by runoff.

Actor Jeremy Irons on a landfill site in Lebanon

“Lots of people are doing wonderful work managing waste, but it’s easy to get a sort of tunnel vision and not see the whole picture. It’s actually by seeing waste as a holistic problem that I think that then we can start to understand how serious it is and to deal with it altogether, because it’s going to take everybody to be engaged on this”, she tells me.

“Waste is impacting us and our environment – fish are eating plastics and we eat the fish – the problem literally carries up the food chain. So I was hoping that by highlighting the fact that what you use – be it the takeaway coffee cup or plastic bag – is going to end up in your food, perhaps people would start thinking, and, more importantly, acting differently.”

Speaking of the film viewing at Parliament’s Portcullis House in February, Brady says that getting the message to ministers was crucial: “I think a lot of the problem is that the dots have not been joined up enough on these issues. Lots of scientists are aware of their one area and issues surrounding that, be that landfill or incineration, but that information is not really being fed into a full picture.

“Take Cheshire’s new 850,000-tonne incinerator [to be built by Peel Environmental and Covanta Energy, though it has had its PFI funding withdrawn since this interview]. The council doesn’t want it, the community doesn’t want it, but it’s being overruled by the government. The issues behind the impacts of burning waste and its repercussions need to be understood as quickly as possible.

“I find it surprising that although there is opposition, it’s being forced upon the people. It will be the biggest in the country and it will have big impacts.”

Brady’s opposition to incinerators is relatively new, she tells me: “I used to think incineration was wonderful, turning waste into energy, which we don’t seem to have enough of. Now, I have to say I’ve revised my thinking on this.

“The fact that there are around 91 new incinerators [with planning consent] in the UK – some four times as big as the ones that we’ve had in the past – is very worrying. I know that the technology has progressed tremendously, and I’m not against the technology per se, but when we’re putting the things that we are into these machines it’s not a happy picture. We used to burn simple things, wood and wool (as Professor Howard says in the film), but now, unfortunately, plastic is a huge problem.

“What is produced by the incineration process is something that doesn’t occur in nature: the toxins, the dioxins, the furans, the PCBs, all of these things – these are real issues. Nature has a cycle of creation and decomposition – yet we’re adding things to the environment that don’t break down.

“Though I’m not in the industry, on a personal level, I think the very least we should be doing is monitoring incinerator emissions full time. Vyvyan Howard, a much more learned person than me on this topic, thinks that we should monitoring them 24/7 – which we don’t.”

When I ask her what she thinks needs to be done to fight the problem of waste, Brady acknowledges that it is a huge challenge: “Unfortunately, we didn’t really find a perfect example. We all know that we should be aiming for a closed-loop economy and that it’s unsustainable for us to carry on the unchanged trajectory that we’re on… but getting rid of plastic bags would certainly be up there, as it would have a dramatic effect on the ocean.

“For me, I changed my thinking through realising the health angle. I met a lot of environmental doctors and they opened my eyes to the fact that your body is affected by how you’re living.

“I found talking to Ana Soto, who was the scientist that discovered the effects of BPA [Bisphenol A] on the body, was a big eye opener. A full understanding of plastic and how it influences us (it mimics oestrogen in the body) was very shocking. I was also shocked to find that despite the wealth of scientific information out there, it has never really been seriously taken into consideration.

“We’ve got 81 peer-reviewed published scientific papers which are unequivocal about the effects of waste in varying degrees, and to me it seems that it’s a no-brainer that this should be included in official reports and research. What are we doing by allowing these chemicals to be openly used? It’s nuts!”

It’s not all doom and gloom, however – the documentary does touch on solutions to problems, with Brady looking at San Francisco as one example of what we can achieve: “San Francisco has been heading towards 80 per cent waste diversion, and actually reached it last year. Their willingness to get everybody on board – from businesses to the public – is very forward thinking. They deal with waste practically and in an utterly brilliant way – if you go to a hotel or on the street, it’s really clearly signposted what to do with your waste. You don’t have to think about it, which is still a problem in this country, not knowing which plastics you can recycle. There, it is brilliantly simple.

“It’s vitally important that everybody has a full idea of waste and its impacts, and that’s what we hope to do with the film. We want to make people realise the impacts that their waste is having and put pressure on their governments to make a difference.”

TRASHED will be available to purchase on DVD from 22 April.