Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash is a 2012 non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes. Garbology is an analysis of American consumption, trash production, and what happens to everything in our disposable economy after we discard it. Through statistical analysis, interviews, and personal stories, Humes tells the story of our largest export—our trash—and how trash came to be synonymous with American life.

Humes divides Garbology into three sections: first, an analysis of our trash issue and an explanation of how we came to produce so much trash; second, an examination of the people who study our trash and where it goes after we discard it; and third, examples of waste warriors working to rectify our trash problem and put the United States on a path to sustainability.

Americans each produce about 7.1 pounds of trash per day—over 102 tons in an average person’s lifetime and more than any other economically advanced nation. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), from 1998 to 2000, the average American produced a third more trash than in previous periods. Humes estimates that one in every six large trucks in the United States is a garbage truck.

The global shift to a disposable economy began in the 1960s, when the plastics industry convinced large corporations to save money by packaging their products in cheap disposable plastic. Disposable packaging, such as plastic soda bottles, was cheaper for the companies than what they had been using, such as glass soda bottles, but it was more costly for the rest of society, which was now required to dispose of the packaging, transport it to a large recycling facility or landfill, spend energy and resources either converting the materials into something new or burying them in the ground, removing improperly disposed-of items from our forests and waterways, and dealing with the resulting environmental damage. Those costs weren’t considered because they were “external”—paid not by the corporation, but rather by society at large.

Humes interviews a landfill operator and the CEO of Waste Management—the largest waste disposal company and owner of most landfill space in the world—as well as people devoting their lives to removing trash from our oceans and ensuring no more is added, researchers who track thousands of pieces of trash to gain insight into our waste removal stream, garbologists (trash anthropologists who study trash to glean insight into our civilization), and many who are attacking our waste problem head on: garbage artists, sustainable entrepreneurs, waste-to-energy and other sustainable scientists, and everyday people living waste-free lives and doing what they can to reduce waste in our world.

While he describes industry contributions to our waste problem and outlines potential large-scale solutions, Humes places much of the blame for the US trash problem, as well as the burden for improving the situation, on individual consumers. Millions of individual choices, Humes argues, created the disposable economy, and millions of individual choices can reshape it into a sustainable, wasteless economy. Humes prescribes five actions everyone can take to greatly reduce their waste: Refuse wasteful and unnecessary items, buy pre-owned and refurbished items instead of new items, avoid bottled water, stop using single-use plastic grocery bags, and think about an item’s cost of ownership before purchasing.