A brilliant exploration into the soiled heart of the American trash can.Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels … But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away?

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

This is a very dense book that appears to cover every possible aspect of garbage disposal and recycling in New York in particular and California and other states in general. Its quite interesting and very worthy and ... ultimately meaningless as a statistic towards the end reveals that only 2% of all garbage is household waste. The rest of it is industrial, primarily manufacturing and commercial, mostly restaurants and fast food outlets. One of the quite shocking (if you imagine this planet weighed down with detritus) figures is that for every 100 pounds of manufactured goods, 3,200 pounds of waste are generated.  Elizabeth Royte quotes from a paper by Samantha McBride of NYU's Dept. of Sociology on consumer recycing. 'Such programs', she wrote, redirect 'the focus of environmental concern away from the material unsustainability of the current economic system, instead turning it inward on the self'.   As long as we insist on living in an economy that revolves around forever researching, developing, manufacturing, selling, purchasing, using and discarding goods in favour of the Next New Thing, the focus on trash will be how to deal with it. We really should be concentrating on how not to make so much of it in the first place. But we won't, we're too addicted to 'new'. The thought of an economy that does not depend on consumerism would be considered anti-patriotic by Americans and, in any case, be unworkable in any present Western society.  So what to do? Buy a bag that says Green on it, divide up the garbage and feel satisfied that you are doing your bit for the planet and forget the other 98% that nullifies your efforts. Blinkers.

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Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

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