Credit: Netflix

The newest documentary on Netflix, Teenage Wasteland, takes you back to the year 1991 with something that sounds about as innocent as you could imagine: a school video class in Middletown, New York, where teenagers were given camcorders and told to make television about their community. Sounds interesting, right? Except… somehow, these kids ended up investigating toxic waste and asking questions that certain adults did not want asked.

Their teacher, Fred Isseks, created a class called Electronic English after the school got video equipment, and the idea was simple: let students make television. Sounds fun, right? Then rumours about local dumping sites surfaced, and these curious kids turned their attention that way. Woosh, there goes the whole school assignment.

They began asking what had been buried in the landfills and whether any of it could reach nearby water, only to hear claims that hazardous material had been dumped where it had no business being. At that point, you can imagine what’s going on inside their head, because this was no longer some abstract story they could film and forget about… this could affect people they knew!

But it seems like destiny was written in their favour because things just kept getting worked out. Adults underestimated them, so people sometimes spoke to them in ways they might not have spoken to professional journalists, and the students just kept following whatever lead appeared, probably without realising how deep into this they were getting.

Teenage Wasteland then takes you near a public golf course, where they found a hidden dumping area where chemical drums had been buried underground. And it keeps getting crazier as eventually they get hold of a landfill logbook that officials had reportedly said did not exist. Hang on… the logbook that did not exist?! The records appeared to point towards prohibited loads and raised links to waste-hauling businesses associated with organised crime. Bloody hell… this was still a school assignment!

And after that, things stopped feeling dangerous. Former students have recalled being followed after filming, while one remembered receiving a death threat warning them to leave the landfill alone.

Their work became Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed, a homemade documentary that drew national attention, but then came another surprise… Isseks kept around 500 hours of raw footage in his basement for decades. So when filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine came back to the story, they had an extraordinary record of what those students had captured while they were still trying to understand what was happening around them.

That footage now forms the backbone of Teenage Wasteland, with the former students looking back at what they walked into before they understood how serious it was. And that is what makes the story so important. What began as a school video turned into something much bigger, because the students kept digging until they discovered what the adults around them had missed.