The opening titles appear over scenes of farm workers stacking hay.
The film opens in 1900 when Tom Grimwood as a boy leaves his family cottage carrying his trunk to take a job on a farm for a weekly wage of 2/6 plus keep.
Filmed in the director's hometown over the course of a single growing season, the film follows how the price of onions affects the lives of two young villagers who wish to wed, while the father of the would-be bride, Yaro, struggles to make enough from his crop to be able to offer his daughter a fitting marriage.
The director of the film sets out for a journey from the beginning to the end of the Barada river and discovers a number of facts like unplanned urbanization and pollution.
In 2014, a group of miners try to mine as much "smyrigli", or emery, as possible in the mountain of Naxos. They are only able to mine two or three times every year. Apeiranthos, their community on the island, is dwindling due to its dwellers transferring to other more beneficial places in Greece.
Structured as vignetted scenes, the film, narrated by Alec Baldwin, follows no single storyline, but rather assembles a worldwide view from a variety of perspectives considering what the true value of plastic is. Covered topics include re-usable plastics, plastic pollution, plastic industry, controversies of plastic recycling, bioplastics, and plastics in human health. The film includes footage from Chinese recycling facilities, the world's largest plastics convention, the Los Angeles bag ban, heart replacement surgery, the Plasticarium in Brussels, and is interspersed with interviews from scientists, authors, artists, and environmentalists.