"Garbageland" - One Trashy Book
Category: Books & Writing...
Posted Sunday, October 30, 2005 at 03:34 PM [GMT-6]

The title of Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land invites lame jokes (such as this post title) but the subject of this book is no laughing matter. The author gets her hands dirty (see...I told you!) literally and figuratively while researching what really happens to the million tons or so of trash we Americans generate each day.

For a year, Ms. Royte kept detailed notes of what her household (which consisted of herself, her husband and their young daughter) threw away. She categorized their trash by type (food, plastic, metal, paper, etc.) and weighed each category. She then undertook to follow the disposal process of each category from their New York City curbside pickup to the final resting place. She befriended members of the NY Sanitation Department ("san men"), trespassed on some of the most infamous dumping grounds in the nation, traveled across the nation to witness firsthand how the more "enlightened" cities dealt with their garbage, clambered through municipal water treatment facilities and got the real scoop on the pros and cons of recycling.

All of these pieces and more come together in a book that sometimes reads like a government accounting publication...if you want statistics, you've come to the right place. If you can think of a measurement somehow related to trash, Ms. Royte has found someone who has quantified it. The fact that these statistics are sometimes inconsistent or even contradictory should serve to underscore the complexity of the issues.

She also weaves in historical and sociological perspectives on garbage and ultimately argues that as our society has flourished economically and acquired a consumerist mindset, the price being paid is steadily rising and the ultimate impact on our environment, health and quality of life has some rather terrifying aspects.

It's tempting -- and easy -- to dismiss some of these dire warnings as eco-terroristic hyperbole. But it's also difficult to ignore or argue against some of the hard scientific data that indicates that we are, in very specific ways and places, poisoning ourselves with our own discards.

Defining the problem, however complex, is really the easy part. Coming up with the solutions is an order of magnitude more difficult and Ms. Royte uncovered very few true success stories...and none which are now in place and working on a municipal level. Even recycling, which we're told is our ultimate salvation, is shown to be little more than a feel-good guilt-sop in most cases.

What we throw away is directly related to what we acquire and consume. Given the snail's pace of developing scientific and engineering solutions to the problems of an ever-growing pile of garbage, it appears that the answers are found in what we as consumers decide to do about our own individual behaviors, and how those who make and sell products to us react to those decisions.

I just dropped an empty soda can in my deskside trash, despite knowing that it's headed for our local landfill. It wasn't an act of defiance (I really do care about our environment), or ignorance (thanks to Ms. Royte) or lack of alternatives (aluminum is one of the few products that is successfully recycled in these parts). It was simply a behavior that I've learned, the consequences of which seem insignificant enough in the overall picture that doing anything different just isn't worth the effort.

So, I suppose that it can be argued that Garbage Land comes up short. It educated me but failed to change my behavior. However, that's actually a snapshot of the whole situation. Until each of us not only understands the problem but decides to -- as the cliché goes -- become part of the solution, the best efforts of a tiny minority of concerned citizens will not be enough to solve the problem.

Garbage Land is a well-researched and -written account, even with the mind-numbing statistics, and I recommend it to anyone who has questions or concerns or ideas about what's happening to their trash...all 4.3 pounds of it per day.

I want to acknowledge and thank Miriam Parker, my "Book Angel" over at Time-Warner Book Group, for the copy of Garbage Land, which is published by Little, Brown and Company, a subsidiary of TWBG. Two of the many ironies highlighted by Elizabeth Royte are that (1) her own book was not printed on recycled paper and (2) if it sells big, it will mean that that many more additions to the waste problem with eventually be generated. Nobody keeps books forever, right?

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