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Common Read 2015- 2016 Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash: Discussion Guides

Compiled by Maria Zarycky, Librarian, Instructional Media Center

Common Read Resource Guide - Penguin Books

Book Club Readers Guide

Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash

Book Club Readers Guide

  1. What surprised you most in reading Garbology and how does that connect with your life?
  2. What could people learn about you from your trash?
  3. When people talk about trash solutions, most focus on recycling. But Bea Johnson, of the Zero Waste Home blog, focuses on “refusing” – as in refusing to let plastic, party favors and excess packaging in her home in the first place. What do you think about this idea?
  4. Author Edward Humes reveals that our nation’s biggest export is our trash, and that our waste is far greater than many government and industry experts realize -- 102 tons per person in a lifetime. Can you think of better solutions than building Garbage Mountains like the one described at the start of the book?
  5. Garbology details the growing problem of plastic ocean pollution as a threat to sea life and our food supply. Responses include community beach cleanups and plastic bag bans in a growing number of cities. What more should we do?
  6. Kim Masoner, founder of Save Our Beach in Seal Beach, Calif., crochets plastic bags into bedrolls for the homeless. San Francisco’s dump has 3 resident artists making trash into art. What are your ideas for turning trash into treasure?
  7. Andy Keller, founder of Chico Bags, calls plastic bags “the gateway drug” to wastefulness. What’s your relationship with plastic and disposable plastic bags?
  8. Could you (do you) get by without plastic bags? Other disposables?
  9. What are people doing in your community to reduce waste? Does your town offer guidelines for recycling? Collect green waste separately? Encourage composting?
  10. It may not be possible to live truly waste-free. But we all can do better -- and save a boatload of money -- if we make it a priority to gradually change wasteful habits. What simple, practical habits can you change in your home that would reduce your 102-ton garbage footprint?


Penguin Books - Discussion Questions

 

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  • How much did you think about your own garbage production before reading Garbology? Do you agree with Humes’ assessment that America’s trash habit has reached dangerous proportions?

  • Do you take reusable bags to the store or use a refillable water bottle? If so, what spurred your decision to eschew the disposable versions? If not, why not?

  • Did you come across anything in Humes’ book that made you pause and reassess your own habits? What is your own most entrenched garbage addiction?

  • If you were part of Recology or a similar group using art to raise social consciousness, how might you repurpose waste to create a statement about our garbage crisis?

  • San Francisco became “the first major city to collect household food waste at the curb in separate bins along with green waste for composting” (p. 175), and Portland “adopted a climate change plan in 1993, five years before the famous Kyoto Protocols” (p. 222). Is the move toward sustainability better effected at the local level rather than by the federal government?

  • It’s ironic that conservation–minded Portlanders produce garbage at a slightly higher rate than the average American? Why might this be? How could this be counteracted?

  • Would you—like the citizens of Denmark—be willingly to pay a significantly larger percentage of your income in taxes if it meant an end to “medical, insurance and tuition bills . [and] a more conservation–conscious culture when it comes to purchases, energy, and fuel” (p. 229)?

  • How would you feel if a garbage–to–energy plant were built in your town? Would you feel more comfortable living adjacent to a landfill?

  • When was the last time that you saved up the money to buy something? Did you value it any more or less than something you bought on a whim or on credit?

  • What do you think about Bea Johnson’s lifestyle? Why do you think her blog (zertowastehome.com) and her family’s lifestyle have attracted such vehement negative criticism?

  • At the end of Garbology, Humes offers his five tips for reducing trash production. What are yours?