Synopses & Reviews
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of the world of garbage.Trash is America’s largest export. Individually, we make more than four pounds a day, sixty-four tons across a lifetime. We make so much of it that trash dominates America’s place in the global economy—now the most prized product made in the United States. In 2010, China’s number-one export to the U.S. was computer equipment. America’s two biggest exports were paper waste and scrap metal. Somehow, a country that once built things for the rest of the world has transformed itself into China’s trash compactor.
In Garbology, Edward Humes reveals what this world of trash looks like, how we got here, and what some families, communities, and other countries are doing to find a way back from a world of waste. Highlights include:
• Los Angeles’s sixty-story garbage mountain, so big and bizarrely prominent that it has spawned its own climate, habitat, and tour business.
• The waste trackers of MIT, whose “smart trash” has exposed the secret life and dirty death of what we throw away.
• China’s garbage queen, Zhang Yin, who started collecting scrap paper in the 1990s and turned it into a multibillion-dollar business exporting American trash to make Chinese products to sell back to Americans.
• Artisan Bea Johnson, whose family has found that generating less waste has translated into more money, less debt, and more leisure time.
As Wal-Mart aims for zero-waste strategies and household recycling has become second nature, interest in trash has clearly reached new heights. From the quirky to the astounding, Garbology weighs in with remarkable true tales from the front lines of the war on waste.
Review
“Humes offers plenty of surprising, even shocking, statistics…An important addition to the environmentalist bookshelf.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Review
“Unlike most dirty books, this one is novel and fresh on every page. You'll be amazed.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
Review
“Edward Humes takes us on a real romp through the waste stream.
Garbology is an illuminating, entertaining read that ultimately provides hope and tips for a less wasteful future. This book will make you want to burn, or at least recycle, your trash can!”
—Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland
Review
“In this well-written and fast-paced book, Ed Humes delves into the underbelly of a consumer society—its trash. What he finds is so startling and infuriating, you will never think about ‘waste’ in the same way again.”
–Samuel Fromartz, author of Organic, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network
Review
"Humes's argument isn't a castigation of litterbugs. It's a persuasive and sometimes astonishing indictment of an economy that's become inextricably linked to the increasing consumption of cheap, disposable stuff—ultimately to our own economic, political, and yes, environmental peril... his arguments for the rank inefficiency of our trash-happy, terminally obsolescent economy are spot on."
—Bookforum
Synopsis
A Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of Americas biggest export, our most prodigious product, and our greatest legacy: our trash 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 trashwhats 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 youve ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists residing in San Franciscos 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 changeand prosper in the process.
Garbology is raising awareness of trash consumption and is sparking community-wide action through One City One Book programs around the country.
It is becoming an increasingly popular addition to high school and college syllabi and is being adopted by many colleges and universities for First Year Experience programs.
About the Author
Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author whose eleven previous books include Force of Nature, Eco Barons, and the PEN Award–winning No Matter How Loud I Shout. He lives in Seal Beach, California.