The Hidden Life of Garbage

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted October 31, 2005.

If you have ever wondered, in the face of our ever-expanding landfills and increasingly elaborate packaging of consumer goods and consumption, what happens to the all the garbage, then Heather Rogers' informative and provocative new book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, published by the New Press, is for you.

It is not a shock that the United States is the number one producer of garbage on the planet; with just 5 percent of the global population we generate 30 percent of the world's trash. The average American throws away a staggering 4.5 pounds of rubbish daily -- that's 1,600 pounds each year, according to Rogers. And garbage is also a global problem; today the middle of the Pacific Ocean is six times more abundant with plastic waste than zooplankton.

So how did we get to this point? Garbage production doubled in the U.S. over the past 30 years, yet waste is increasingly hidden, and the focus on recycling is fading along with it. Rogers says this situation came about through an alignment of manufacturing and marketing forces, combined with goals of the mega-garbage collection companies like Waste Management and Browning Ferris, and even some environmental laws which ended up helping the mega-companies.

Together, the persistent twin emphasis on growth -- our ever expanding consumptive society -- and the encouragement of easy disposal has made it seem painless for us to increasingly evolve to a virtually "throw away" society. With new technologies the impact is particularly pernicious and the impact is often on the Third World, our society's garbage dump. Just think for a moment about how many televisions, computers, screens, cell phones, iPods and other devices and gadgets you and your office have tossed out over the past decade.

Rogers' book, stuffed full of hundreds of fascinating factoids, combines a history of garbage collection with a political analysis of how social and economic forces have created a great garbage monopoly, in much the same way that a few companies dominate many key markets until the "free markets" are no longer remotely competitive.

Mixed in with Rogers' analysis, the reader will encounter fascinating garbage stories of incinerators and mega-dumps, of waste streams and marketing schemes, all aspects of today's waste-addicted culture. Rogers brings an emotional voice to the narrative as the garbage story is both fascinating and appalling, sharing her feelings of being both awe struck and disgusted. Garbage: it really is quite a story.

In the end, while there is plenty to be discouraged about, the book also has heroes and some smart garbage solutions from reformers, ideas to which municipal leaders, like New York's Mayor Bloomberg, are paying some attention.

Heather Rogers sat down with AlterNet in late September at a noisy Cosi's Cafe in Greenwich Village for the following interview. An excerpt from the book accompanies the Q & A.

So why did you write the book? Tell me a little bit about the experience.

I wrote the book because I wanted to know what happened to my garbage. I knew that it disappeared -- and I knew that it didn't. I also was interested in this system that, if it failed to work, whole cities could be brought to a grinding halt. I wanted to know more about what garbage collecting looked like and how it really worked -- something so integral to the way a city functions.

Once I started looking into garbage, I realized that it was this really great way to talk about the way the market works, and its relationship to labor and nature. Also, it was an excellent way to talk about the larger environmental crisis, just through this everyday substance of garbage.

What was your mood while writing it?

It was up and down. There were definitely periods of time when I was very depressed by it ... but also times when I felt good.

I noticed that some of the language you used: "mysterious," "oddly fascinating," "awesome eerie scenes," "metabolism of the market," led me to think you went through some kind of a journey in this sometimes fascinating, sometimes disgusting world.

Yeah. It's true. It was exciting because going to an incinerator, going to a landfill, I got to see these things that are normally hidden from view in our society; certain things are kept in hiding and garbage is one of them. Production is another. To get to go into that realm and see it is kind of exhilarating. You do feel like you're going into a place you're not supposed to be. And also it's horrifying. I had nightmares after I went to see this landfill in Pennsylvania that I write about in the book.

There are key metaphors that I'd like you to comment on. One of them is the massiveness issue -- the mega-facility in Morrisville, Pa. you mentioned -- the 6,000 acres of garbage. Tell me about that as a response to the garbage problem, how massiveness has become the way with which garbage is dealt.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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