Common Read 2015- 2016 Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash: The Book

"Humes' 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

“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

“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

“Americans make more trash than anyone else not the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.”

“Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.”

“There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.”

“No matter where you are, there’s no getting over it, no getting away from it,” he has said. “It’s a plastic ocean now … We’re putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.”

“Half the oxygen we breathe emanates from microscopic phytoplankton sloshing around the surface of the ocean. After literally billions of years of performing that essential, priceless service, those vital organisms now must swim and feed and survive in a sea of plastic soup. Figuring out what’s up with those organisms is, Goldstein suggests, a pretty vital matter. If we are inadvertently killing them off, the result could be far less visible, but even more devastating, than deforestation.”

Mike Speiser’s sculpting technique is a study in geometric perfection and economy of motion. Every cut, every shave, every subtle drag of his blade has a purpose, each forming a small piece of a much larger work, sprawling and unique.

His peers call him Big Mike, for he is a mountain of a man, shaved head set like an amiable boulder atop broad shoulders and a mighty belly, six-two and more than three hundred pounds. He seems designed by central casting exactly for the purpose of wielding his main artistic tool—the towering, thundering 60-ton BOMAG Compactor. With its roaring, clanking assistance, Big Mike has helped build something unprecedented: the Puente Hills landfill, largest active municipal dump in the country.

Puente Hills is so sprawling that it has evolved its own ecosystem and nature preserve, spawned multiple community organizations formed to kill it, and holds enough strata of methane-spewing decomposing garbage to power a hundred thousand homes (which is exactly what is done with the eye-watering “landfill gas” bubbling up from beneath). Puente Hills has been the final resting place for the lion’s share of Los Angeles County’s ample daily flow of garbage for more than three decades—130 million tons of it and counting.

One hundred thirty million tons: Such a number is hard to grasp. Here’s one way to picture it: If Puente Hills were an elephant burial ground, its tonnage would represent about 15 million deceased pachyderms—equivalent to every living elephant on earth, times twenty. If it were an automobile burial ground, it could hold every car produced in America for the past fifteen years.

It is, quite literally, a mountain of garbage.

From www.huffingtonpost.com    Posted: 04/30/2012 5:51 pm EDT