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Garbology

Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
The average American produces 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime and $50 billion in squandered riches are rolled to the curb each year. But our bins are just the starting point for a strange, impressive, mysterious, and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century.
In Garbology, Edward Humes investigates trash—what's in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families, communities, and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity. Along the way, he introduces a collection of garbage denizens unlike anyone you've ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles's Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists residing in San Francisco's dump, and the family whose annual trash output fills not a dumpster or a trash can but a single mason jar.
Garbology reveals not just what we throw away but who we are and where our society is headed. Waste is the one environmental and economic harm that ordinary working Americans have the power to change—and prosper in the process.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 9, 2012
      On average, every American will generate 102 tons of trash in their lifetime. Pulitzer Prize-winner Humes (No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court) asks how that number came to be, and what can be done to reduce it. To answer those questions, he interviews an interesting cast of characters, including Mike Speiser, the operator of the massive trash compactor at the Puente Hills landfill in Los Angeles, home to a 130 million-ton pile of waste; archeologist Bill Rathje, "the world's first garbologist," who asserts that "people don't really know their trashâ¦But through their trash, we sure do know a lot about them;" and Andy Keller, a vocal and provocative advocate for reusable shopping bags. Humes provides a history of waste management in America, from the use of piggeries in the 19th century (where garbage was fed to pigs) to today's reliance on landfills, and he examines the cycles of consumerism and the advent of plastics as obvious causes of the current trash crisis, pointing to a San Francisco family who lives a "near-zero waste lifestyle" as an example of possible alternatives. In his epilogue, Humes offers excellent tips for being more resourceful, so that our lives might not be "monuments to waste." Humes' take on the science and culture of "garbology" is both academic and deeply personal, making this a fascinating read.

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  • English

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