The Planeteers realize how long garbage lasts and how harmful wasting material can be.

It is discovered that Sly Sludge has been using the active volcano of an Island inhabited by people as a natural trash incinerator. The volcano begins erupting and trash that the volcano didn't erupted with it, scattering. Captain Planet tries to enter the volcano, but the fumes from the trash made the air inside the volcano too polluted for him to tolerate.

The Planeteers are called by Gaia to stop a new villain, Sly Sludge from polluting the Earth with another one of his trash dumping schemes. When the Planeteers confront Sludge, he tells them that he no longer dumps trash and has found the answer to the problem of waste management forever. He "demonstrates" by having a machine that shoots intense beams of light supposedly shrink the trash, but unbeknownst to the planeteers, it's all smoke and mirrors.

The Planeteers show what can happen to the environment if we continue to produce a lot of trash and waste without thinking about the long term effects of it. They show what happens if people don't follow the Three R's or don't put in a concerted effort to reduce trash.

Kwame decides that helping the people of the town isn't worth it and loses hope. Gaia tells him that his power is connected to hope, but Kwame cannot help but to see the situation in a pessimistic light... that is, until he sees the house of Katie - the young girl from the town they met earlier - cleaned up. Kwame goes to speak to Katie and she tells him that if a kid could do it, then so could anyone else but also informs him that the Planeteers were kidnapped. His hope renewed, he goes off to save his friends and stop Sludge's scheme.