Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

“Archaeologists long ago figured out that the real nature of human life isn’t that we are what we eat. They know we are best understood by what we throw away.”

Our trash creates a valuable record of our civilization. More than any other aspect of our society, trash informs researchers of our living conditions. Archaeologists study the trash of ancient civilizations when they can, but our modern landfilling practices will almost perfectly preserve a dated record of the most important details of our civilization.

“Demand for dump space began mounting then, not only in Los Angeles, but also nationwide. Bans on incinerator and back-yard burn piles were only part of the reason. Another trash multiplier had arrived right around the same time: the rise of America’s new consumer culture and the disposable economy ushered in with it. A new tidal wave of trash began to crest then, combining the old refuse that once had been burned with a new flow of disposable trash, containers and short-lived products never before seen. Consumption and garbage became more firmly linked than at any other time in history, with the disposal of products and their packaging displacing other categories of household waste for the first time in our trash history. That trend hasn’t changed since 1960. The age of the plastic bag was upon us.”

America’s trash problem is the consequence of several large societal changes occurring at once. Post World War II breakthroughs in plastics technology by brilliant chemists and advancements in machinery created cheap new disposable alternatives to traditional product packaging, the post-war economic boom created a demand for all the new products being manufactured, and scientists began discovering environmental and public health problems created by incinerators and open-air dumps. This spurred a real estate boom for landfills. The three factors worked in concert to drive production and waste, then hide it below ground.

“The truly thought-provoking part of the business as he sees it is the endless tide of ordinary, everyday stuff streaming into the place, items that are not really trash at all: the boxes of perfectly new plastic bags, still on the roll, tossed because the logo on them was outdated. Or the truckloads of food that turn up daily, a good deal of it spoiled but much of it perfectly edible, some of it still packaged and brand-new, yet discarded as if it had no use. Clothes of all types, some worn and torn but others seemingly pristine, are common. There are whole cans of paint […], trashed because someone didn’t like the custom color that, once mixed, could not be returned to the paint store. And there is the furniture—tons of it, much of it ratty and too far gone, but a surprising amount of it perfectly serviceable […]”

Business interests are to blame for much of our disposable economy and the environmental ramifications of it, but blame for the large amounts of perfectly good and usable waste discarded and landfilled is on individuals who purchase unnecessary items, never use them, then throw them away.

“The irony is that Big Mike’s domain, with its unrivaled ability to hide seamlessly all that waste, empowers even more wasting. The landfill solution to garbage took away the slimy stench of the old throw-it-in-the-streets disposal, the smoking pall of the old incinerators, the noisome piggeries, the noxious reduction plants spewing out garbage grease, the ugly seeping open dumps. It took away the obvious consequences of waste and eliminated the best incentives to be less wasteful. The rise of places like Puente Hills turned garbage from an ugly canker staring everyone in the face into a nearly invisible tumor, so easy to forget even as it swelled beneath the surface.”

Our vast system of waste disposal hides from us the reality of our wasteful consumer economy. We deny our waste because we don’t walk or swim in it, as have past generations. We bury our waste underground, recycle it into new materials, or pollute far-away oceans with it, so we can pretend it doesn’t exist.

“The golden age of television and mass media marketing has been alternately celebrated and condemned for the last half a century for its unprecedented impact on society and culture. Yet one of its most enduring effects—helping bring about an American trash tsunami—

is rarely put on the list of mass media goods and evils. Not that the connection is disputed: Leaders of the industry during its earliest days admitted as much, describing their mission in life as persuading American men, women and children to throw away perfectly good things in order to buy replacements promoted as bigger, bolder and better.”

The post-war American mission was to produce more, consume more, and drive the economy upward at all costs. Economic production became the linchpin of the American dream: It spawned wars, was at the forefront of government policy, and inspired an economic mindset that would become ever-more environmentally disastrous as the decades progressed. This consumerism was achieved through advertising propaganda campaigns that manipulated the American public into believing consumerism and patriotism were one and the same.

“This was the moment in which the Depression-era version of the American Dream—which held that hard work, diligent saving and conserving resources paved the road to the good life—began to fade, surpassed by the notion that the highest expression and measurement of the American Dream lay in material wealth itself, the acquisition of stuff. This was the moment when the perceived power to move nations and economies shifted from the ideal of the American citizen to the reality of the American consumer. The phrase ‘vote with your wallet’ entered the public consciousness in this era, elevating the act of spending money from unfortunate necessity to civic virtue.”

For most of human history, not simply during the Great Depression, humans exercised frugality and valued items that would last over disposable items. The concept of an heirloom, passed between generations, was once prized. That idea is now barely existent. It has been replaced with a notion that old things are unfashionable and with a manufacturing process putting very few high-quality, lasting items into the stream of commerce.

“A less wasteful future in part will require successful, profitable companies such as WMI to cannibalize their own businesses, something few CEOs are willing to contemplate, much less undertake.”

The only real and lasting solution to environmental issues is to consume less. Instituting a system that values frugality over consumption, however, is counter to the interests of those who wield the levers of power over our society. Such a shift would require corporations and Wall Street firms to accept losing money and large companies like Waste Management to go bankrupt. It is logical, then, that they work to combat these measures—they are fighting for survival.

“These globally ubiquitous, finger-sized fish are a critical part of the food chain, with a host of variations and species that together represent an estimated 65 percent of the biomass in the ocean. Larger fish feed on the lantern fish, and bigger fish prey on them, as well as seabirds and marine mammals, and on up the food chain, right up to the fish that people eat, that civilization has harvested and relied on since there’s been something called civilization, and before that as well. That protein, that nourishment, that vast marine ecosystem-all of it depends on many trillions of healthy little lantern fish feeding on even greater numbers of tiny zooplankton.”

Most activists view ocean pollution as the most serious environmental concern, even more than waste production and landfilling. Ocean plastic migrates through the food chain and enters our bodies, where some argue it remains forever. The long-term health effects of this exposure are largely unknown but are worrisome to public health advocates. This is why Crowley argues ridding the ocean of its trash must be a part of any solution.

“An armada of such devices would be substantially less costly than more traditional, fuel-intensive methods of gathering the plastic, but would still be extremely time-consuming and expensive. The Pacific gyre would take about sixteen years and nearly half a billion dollars to clean up in this way, he figures—a daunting prospect at best. And he also makes clear, as does Crowley, that such a massive effort would quickly become a pointless exercise without something else even bigger happening at the same time: a worldwide reduction in disposable plastic garbage, and an end to the constant flow of plastic that goes missing every year, and ends up as marine chowder.”

Many argue ridding the ocean gyres of trash is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, ridding the ocean of trash must be combined with efforts to prevent additional waste from entering our waterways.

“And what happens if those tiny crabs, barnacles and other opportunistic hitchhikers cling to a hunk of plastic and get swept by the gyre to a place where they don’t belong? Nature’s fragile balance, its chains of prey, predator and symbiont, could be altered by the plastic taxi service.”

An invasive species is one that travels to and inhabits a foreign ecosystem, and whose presence is harmful to the new ecosystem. Invasive species can destroy natural ecosystems and drive organisms to extinction. Other foreign species may not harm their new ecosystem but may be harmed by it. Ocean trash is carrying organisms away from their natural habitat and depositing them in foreign ecosystems. The presence of foreign organisms in an ecosystem can be disastrous for the ecosystem, the organisms, and the global food chain.

“Dirty plastic is just too hard to recycle, too costly. Failing at the birth of the age of plastic to think this through, to consider the life cycle of substances that do not occur in nature and that are, for all intents and purposes, immortal, is like failing to think through what to do with nuclear waste at the birth of nuclear power…which is exactly what we did.”

While recognizing that the inventors of consumer plastics were geniuses and also that industry interests resulted in the deliberate manipulation the consumer economy to favor such plastics, Humes still grants plastic’s pioneers the benefit of the doubt that their actions were ignorant, but not evil, as they failed to consider the life cycle of plastic.

“Retailers and manufacturers impose deep scrutiny on the front end of the consumer economy, in which the travels of goods on the way to market are compulsively micromanaged, dated, accounted for and tracked with optical scans and RF transmitters. That part of our consumer culture—the supply chain—is brightly lit. But the removal chain, that’s another story, a veritable black hole.”

Because costs associated with the waste disposal stream are “external” (not paid by product manufacturers and sellers) they are not contemplated and are largely hidden. Waste disposal contracts are negotiated on large scales, at city or town levels, and assimilated into tax bills as a non-itemized component of a larger number. Only a small number of waste disposal companies know the transportation routes waste takes on its way to its final destination. 

“Trash Track, according to Offenhuber, has started to point out some major inefficiencies in the waste stream by bringing transparency to the normally invisible removal stream. It raises serious questions about the efficacy of current recycling efforts, which all too often send certain kinds of waste great distances, expending fuel and energy that could be conserved if more waste and recycling was handled locally.”

Trash Track discovered our waste removal stream is very inefficient and environmentally damaging. If we regulated a closed-loop system in which product manufacturers were responsible for ensuring proper disposal of the goods they produce, the disposal stream would be as efficient as the supply chain. Other countries have had success in mandating manufacturers to take responsibility for the disposal of their products.

“In garbage, though, there are no half-truths, no spin, no politics. Conquerors may plunder the riches and thereby the historical record, but no one plunders trash. The accrual of what a people ate will be there, master and slave, worker and lord alike, an honest talk of crusts, rinds, bones and seeds. How they lived, what they wore, where their trade routes reached, even how and who they worshipped—all of that, and so much more, is contained in the record of their garbage, the unbiased arbiter and keeper of the inner life of any civilization.”

Waste provides a complete record of our civilization. Histories can be embellished or falsified, as can artistic depictions, but trash is honest. Much of what archaeologists learn about ancient civilizations is derived from trash. Rathje and his team of garbologists have discovered that even when researching contemporary trash, waste refutes common beliefs and stereotypes.

“Nevertheless, this work showed a new and more powerful side of the Garbage Project, as it moved beyond simply sorting trash and into comparing its real-world footprint with the results of surveys and polls. It became very clear that trash provided potent, unique clues about the inner working of society and country that could be found nowhere else. It also began to show why trash was such a social, environmental and fiscal problem: Most people had no idea what was really in their garbage […].”

Americans are ignorant of their own consumption habits. We frequently underestimate the amount of waste we create and misreport even the contents of our daily trash. Americans underreport food waste and overreport healthy items consumed. The invisible waste removal stream aids this disparity. We put our trash in a bag, throw the bag in a bin, and send it away. We don’t have to admit to ourselves that we waste excessively or that we don’t consume the high-quality items we’d like to. Once our trash leaves our property, we can pretend its contents are whatever we’d like them to be.

“The point is, Rathje liked to say, we have plenty of room to keep burying our trash until we find a better plan. Space for trash, in other words, is not the problem. Of far greater concern, as Rathje saw it, is the trash that doesn’t get into the landfill vault—the debris in the gulches, the plastics in the ocean, the waste that drifts off into rivers and streams.”

The most important thing we can do to address waste is ensure it reaches a landfill or recycling facility. Waste that does not reach either of those places finds its way into nature, frequently the ocean, where it affects ecosystems and public health. Landfills are an eyesore and a potent image representing the quantity of our waste, but landfills themselves are not a pressing environmental concern. Environmental damage caused by landfills pales in comparison to that of manufacturing and transporting items, and the percentage of disposed-of items that find their way into the ocean.

“And despite these impressive efforts, an underlying reality is that keeping trash out of landfills is not the same as making less trash in the first place. Indeed, San Francisco residents tend to make slightly more waste per person than the national average. So if anything, the knowledge that most trash is being recycled or composted may be giving San Franciscans license to be more wasteful rather than less.”

Increased waste among communities good at disposing of their waste (recycling, composting, waste-to-energy) is common. People in those communities may feel an implicit license to increase consumption. This is problematic because consumption itself inflicts a greater environmental cost than landfilling, so while San Franciscans treat their waste more sustainably than other cities, in total they damage the environment more than other cities because of the damaging manufacturing and transportation costs of their increased consumption.

“But then, consumers hated pretty much every plastic thing compared to whatever material the plastic was imitating or supplanting—at first […] All the bag makers had to do was flood the market, exercise a little patience and let the unnatural take its course. That’s long been the bottom-line truism of the industry: If you plasticize it, they will come—whether they want to or not. That’s how you build a disposable economy, and it had worked since the 1950s.”

The American public has rejected the disposable economy every step of the way. Americans wholly rejected plastic as a product when it was introduced, Americans rejected single-use plastic bags until they were forced on the public, and Americans reject planned obsolescence and disposable packaging. Despite resounding rejection, industry groups flood the market with their cheap disposable products, limiting consumer choice to their products.

“The federal lawsuit hit the next year, in March 2007. The established leader in the plant food business, The Scotts Company, makers of the Miracle-Gro line of products, alleged in its 177-page complaint that TerraCycle was copying the bigger company’s distinctive yellow-and-green boxes—what’s known as a ‘trade dress’ violation—as well as breaking the World War II-era Lanham Act, which bans false advertising claims that harm another brand’s business. The Lanham Act is the go-to law for big companies upset with the marketing claims of upstarts, as they are complex and expensive cases to litigate—which gives the Goliaths of the business world the advantage.”

The Lanham Act is a World War II-era intellectual property law drafted so broadly that it encourages abuse. Most states prevent frivolous use of the Lanham Act through anti-SLAPP laws (SLAPP is an acronym for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”). They are typically filed by large, well-funded organizations against small, less well-funded actors to prevent someone from exercising First Amendment rights or competing in the marketplace.

“That said, plastic bags are a comparatively modest part of the waste stream. They are part of the marine pollution problem, but how much remains unclear. They take up room at landfills, but other packaging forms a bigger part of the 102-ton legacy. Why, then, are so many cities making bags a priority?”

Not only are single-use plastic bags a small component of American waste, but also alternatives are not necessarily more environmentally friendly. The most common bag substitute is paper, which is more environmentally costly to produce and ship. While paper bags are theoretically recyclable, they are not recyclable if they are greasy or dirty. A McDonald’s bag stained with hamburger grease is not recyclable, and neither is a pizza box or a cardboard computer box treated with chemicals and solvents and padded with foam. These items must be landfilled like plastic alternatives, and many reach the ocean just like plastic alternatives. If they are mistakenly collected by a recycling truck in a single stream recycling district, the entire content of that truck must be landfilled.

“Nineteen percent of Denmark’s power is generated by wind, the highest in the world. An even greater amount of the country’s energy supply is derived from trash. In a country where electricity is generated by nonprofit electrical cooperatives in which the ratepayers are also the plant owners, attitudes about utilities and energy are very different from those in America.”

Denmark has succeeded in sustainability by rejecting a market-based approach, mandating companies and individuals comply with strict regulations, and embracing sustainability as a way of life. The small-scale nature of their energy production also contributes to the success of their efforts. They didn’t need to convince a large company to finance an inefficient process by constructing a mega waste-to-energy plant to service all of Copenhagen—they formed a series of small facilities organized as cooperatives, making the project more manageable.

“There is a flaw in the recycling case: After a certain point, the energy gains are more theoretical than practical for many types of trash.”

Recycling is ubiquitous, and the actual process of recycling an item is hidden from us, so it is easy to forget recycling is a market-based strategy. Theoretically recyclable items are only recycled if a market exists for them, and only if that market demands a high enough price to compensate for the costs of recycling and provide a profit to recyclers. This process is also dependent on the technology required to recycle a specific product. Many theoretically recyclable products, as much as two thirds, are not recycled. Humes argues that what isn’t recycled should be converted to energy in waste-to-energy plants. That is of course a market-based system as well with its own limitations.

“Once upon a time, it used to require a sacrifice to buy something. You saved up, you gave up things you might want just so you could put enough money aside to purchase something big or long lasting or vital. Now, she says, people tend to think the sacrifice is not buying. That’s one reason we are swimming in waste, Bea says. In her view, not buying is never a sacrifice. It’s a way of saving up for something really important, or saving time, or saving the planet. Or all three.”

Consumer credit has been increasingly available every decade since the post-war boom and is an inextricable component of our disposable economy. If we are to continue purchasing increased amounts of products to continue economic growth, we must have access to continually higher amounts of credit. Credit is now an essential part of American life: student loans, mortgages, medical debt, small business loans, and of course credit cards. The US consumer credit system is an endless cycle of increased credit lines and bankruptcy. Much like our endless stream of waste, it is unsustainable.