The Phoenix

The Phoenix (1970s, ~20 min) is a Kansas-produced educational film arguing for recycling over burial. It opens with the era's stock alarm — six pounds of waste per American per day — and the claim that we've simply stopped seeing the litter around us, then tours the state's existing recycling infrastructure as proof the alternative already works: aluminum cans a distributor pays cash for, returnable bottles, a Wichita paper dealer, a Hutchinson mill pulping old newsprint into chipboard, and a Kansas City shredder that eats a thousand junk cars a day, feeding an electric-furnace mill that runs on nothing but scrap. Sanitary landfills get a fair hearing (self-supporting, and reclaimable — a hospital sits on one), but anything buried is "forever lost." It also hits overpackaging and, unusually, feedlot waste: runoff lagoons, manure as fertilizer, methane as future fuel. It closes on the title metaphor and a prediction of a "totally recycled society by 1990," pending changed habits and new laws.