“The Global Tumbleweed” is an informative documentary coming from one individual’s perspective, Elena Buenrostro, who engages sculpture and performance art in her quest to learn and understand the continued use of plastic bags in grocery stores in her city: San Diego, California. Elena's plastic bag dress creation, constructed from 400 recycled plastic bags (about the amount one person uses per year) collected from bins outside of grocery stores, is used as a tool to visually create awareness about the use of plastic bags in her city. The documentary also touches upon how convenient plastic items like plastic bags are ultimately contributing to a larger environmental issue: the North Pacific Gyre, also know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Elena's journey to learn and understand the harmful effects that plastics have on the environment and the ocean is revealed in a series of interviews with San Diego community members, grocery store managers, employees, environmental organizations, found footage as well as visual documentations of various public spaces where plastic bag pollution occurs. Elena uses the plastic bag dress as a mode to spread awareness about the plastic bag ban (AB1998) in the state of California by obtaining signed postcards and business letters in order to send to the senator in her district. Although the ban did not pass, the efforts of one community member are stressed in this 21-minute short film documentary recalling, “how one person can do something, and it will always be better than doing nothing.”