Review by Ellen Arnstein
Working from home has given me the unique opportunity to watch the trash, recycling, and composting trucks visit my neighborhood every Wednesday – usually right during an important meeting. The other related stress of the pandemic is that without the ability to use reusable mugs at the café down the street I have become distressed by the amount of single use cups and lids and stirrers that I now need to dispose of.
In order to assuage my guilt and learn more about the issue, I picked Elizabeth Royte’s engaging 2005 book Garbageland off of my shelf. The good news is that only 2% of landfill trash is from household waste. The bad news is that only 2% of landfill trash is from household waste, prompting her to wonder (and confirm my trashistential crisis) if all of our worry and effort on trash reduction was just “another example of self-indulgence, the luxury of a guilty urbanite with sufficient time to ponder his outsize environmental footprint.”
But no matter what you decide – garbage navel-gazing or inspired activism - Royte’s adventures following the trail of her own trash -- and recyclables, and compostables, and poop -- to landfills, waste transfer stations, recycling plants, sewage treatment plants, and MulchFestNYC are worth a read. Royte makes sanitation and biosolids fun, connecting the different elements of the our garbage problem -- from a disposable/consumerist culture, to the expenses of responsible solid waste management -- to good policy solutions including reusing, plastic bag taxes, manufacturer responsibility, municipal mandates on composting and recycling, and reducing one's own garbage footprint.
Usually I recommend similar books or books by the same author but this is my first foray into trash so instead I will leave you with some resources instead:
Buy Nothing and Freecycle: hyper local groups to gift and receive used items
Catalog choice: website to opt out of all those pesky catalogs
Clivus Multrum: get the compost toilet of your dream!
Cradle to Cradle: a 2002 book by William McDonough and now a certification program for companies using recycled materials
Goodwill Dumping: a fabulous movie about what actually happens to the clothing we donate
Ellen Arnstein was an Environmental Education volunteer in Bolivia from 2007-08. She is now a certified arborist working for a Pacific Northwest conservation district. In her spare time, she plays the ukulele poorly, runs slowly, and reads a ridiculous amount of books (mostly about trees). Follow her on twitter @Lenni825 or check out her travel musings at lennisblog.blogspot.com