Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

Bill Rathje is a garbologist who founded the Garbage Project in 1973. The Garbage Project applies archaeological techniques to garbage to study modern civilization and better understand environmental issues. The premise is this: “If we use the same archaeological tools and techniques previously employed on Egyptian pyramids, lava-encrusted Pompeii and the painted caves of Lascaux, what can we learn about American civilization from its garbage?” (163). Garbage is a perfect and informative record of a civilization. In garbage an archaeologist can observe a people’s diet, how they entertained themselves, what comforts they possessed, from what material they constructed their dwellings, what kind of work they performed, and how they spent their days and nights.

Rathje and his students have analyzed garbage to refute cultural stereotypes, analyze household waste and perceptions of such waste, aid in census data collection, and distinguish purchases based on economic class. Rathje and his team discovered that paradoxically, food waste increases during shortages because consumers hoard supplies and purchase things they don’t usually eat or know how to prepare well. Consumers are intending to act sensibly, but they are being wasteful. Also paradoxically, publicized collection days for certain types of waste, like hazardous materials, increase the rate of improper disposal. This is because people gather those materials for collection, forget to put them out, and later combine them with their regular trash. If the special collection were not publicized, those materials would remain in the residents’ homes. When provided with larger trash cans, residents increase their waste output to fill the new containers. The Garbage Project also provided insights unrelated to quantity and type of consumption: Many women take birth control pills improperly; low-income families are forced to waste money by purchasing smaller, more affordable packages rather than buying in bulk; alcohol consumption increases immediately after paydays.

The Garbage Project’s most poignant observation was that people lack an understanding of what they consume and what they waste. When surveyed about their own waste, people usually made wrong assertions: “Most people had no idea what was really in their garbage (or, for that matter, in their closets, refrigerators, cupboards and shopping carts)” (171). Knowing that when surveyed, people inaccurately report their purchasing habits, Humes concludes that focus groups and surveys that influence business decisions are worthless.

After spending years examining the trash above ground, the Garbage Project began digging in landfills to study our civilization’s waste on a larger scale. One of the most important things they learned was that landfills’ airtight chambers preserve organic waste—it does not decompose as experts once believed. Landfill waste decomposes slowly—enough to generate methane and produce waste-to-energy benefits, but not quickly enough for toxic leachate to flow into our underground water system.

Rathje is not concerned with America’s landfills. He contends that we have lots of space to bury our trash. Rathje’s concern is the trash that doesn’t make it to the landfill and enters our waterways. He argues that the biggest obstacle to environmental improvement is the disposable economy, stating “this is a flaw in how manufacturers create and consumers use disposable products” (178). He explains that every great civilization has three stages: (1) the growth period during which an insignificant nation rises to power; (2) the prosperous, gluttonous, and wasteful period that overextends a nation’s resources; and (3) the terminal shrinking period during which people conserve the nation’s suddenly scarce resources. Rathje believes the United States is currently in the second, prosperous and wasteful period, and he advocates shifting prematurely to a conservation mindset to prevent our terminal decline.