Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

“And no, those new biodegradable plastic bottles and bags intended to save the day so far haven’t saved much of anything. Turns out manufacturers failed to check whether their lab-tested degradability is compatible with the real-world network of local composters and recyclers across the nation. Mostly, they’re not.”

Much of Humes’s analysis in Garbology focuses on the disparity between the theoretical and the actual in our waste disposal system. Many supposedly green products and technologies are merely theoretically sustainable. In practice, achieving sustainability with these products and technologies is frequently prohibitively expensive, or our current society lacks the infrastructure to realize the theoretical benefits.

“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.