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Rubbish! : the archaeology of garbage by…
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Rubbish! : the archaeology of garbage (original 1992; edition 1993)

by William L. Rathje, Cullen Murphy

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343974,923 (4.06)6
An eye-opening excursion through the world of rubbish, as Rathie leads us through scenarios like how everything is recycled in Mexico, finding an intact yacht under the streets of New York and how many attempts by well-meaning people to reduce waste has the opposite effect.

I read the original edition of "Rubbish" back in the 1990s so it is obviously somewhat out of date but it is unlikely that any newer book on the subject will be as engagingly written as "Rubbish". ( )
  MiaCulpa | May 3, 2019 |
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This book may have been written thirty years ago, but much of what is told is still relevant. The myths that it debunks continue to crop up every once in a while such as the Pampers in landfills, polysterene in landfills, the biodegradability of plastics and paper, and much more. The politics of trash is fascinating as is the science behind biodegradability (which rarely happens despite claims that it does). The history of trash and its influence on civilizations and what can be learned from trash in archeology is worth the reading of the book. I never knew that there was so much I didn't know about garbage, including all the terms used to describe various types of trash. The information in this book is told with humor and is based on a very thorough and scientifically rigorous Garbage Project. ( )
  Kimberlyhi | Apr 15, 2023 |
An eye-opening excursion through the world of rubbish, as Rathie leads us through scenarios like how everything is recycled in Mexico, finding an intact yacht under the streets of New York and how many attempts by well-meaning people to reduce waste has the opposite effect.

I read the original edition of "Rubbish" back in the 1990s so it is obviously somewhat out of date but it is unlikely that any newer book on the subject will be as engagingly written as "Rubbish". ( )
  MiaCulpa | May 3, 2019 |
Fascinating, counterintuitive, and useful. My previous books from the “landfill” reading program (Waste and Want and Gone Tomorrow) were both by journalists and full of the typical litany about the evils of capitalism, consumerism and waste. Rubbish!, OTOH, is by a scientist – archaeologist William Rathje – and is full of data rather than unchecked assertions. Some of that data is jawdropping.


Rathje was an archaeology professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. After initial research at Mayan sites piqued his interest in waste disposal (he comments that the Maya, rather than conforming to the stereotype of primitive people scrupulously reusing anything, “would throw away a Cadillac if the ashtray was full), Rathje started “The Garbage Project”. Initially this consisted of some contract work for the USDA about people’s eating habits – his team approached randomly selected Tucson residents from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds and asked to collect and sort through their garbage, with follow-up interviews (for the first counterintuitive fact, people were much more willing to have their garbage picked through than be interviewed). This disclosed that a long list of young wives tales about garage were just plain wrong:


* People are very poor at estimating their food consumption, tending to overestimate the amount of “healthy” foods they eat and underestimating the “unhealthy” foods; for example, based on packaging found in trash, Tucson residents overestimated their cottage cheese consumption by a factor of three and underestimated their candy consumption by a factor of two. (Although Rathje doesn’t mention it, this is significant for many diet related disease studies, which often not only use people’s reporting of their food consumption, but their memories of food consumption years earlier).


* As a corollary to the above, people were better at estimating their neighbors’ food and alcoholic beverage consumption than their own.


* Advertised shortages increase waste. People “stock up” on items and then discard them unused when the shortage is over.


* Garbage expands to fill the space available. When some communities began using large curbside containers for semiautomated garbage pickup, waste volume increased. Apparently people often stockpile things that won’t fit in a standard residential garbage can but discard them when they get a 90-gallon container.


* Residential hazardous waste disposal increases after (not during) publicly advertised disposal days. The advertisement draws people’s attention to things like waste paint, pesticides, solvents and so on; then they don’t get around to disposing of it on the special pickup days but dump it later. Just like the mis-estimation of food waste, people dispose of much more hazardous waste than they claim they do.


* It is apparently a Hispanic tradition that all baby food is prepared from scratch. No Hispanic mother in the study admitted to buying any commercial baby food; however Hispanic households discarded just as many baby food containers as Anglo households. (There was one pronounced ethnic difference, though; the most popular baby food in Hispanic households was pureed squash, while the most popular in Anglo households was pureed peas; conversely squash was the least popular baby food in Anglo households and peas were the least popular with Hispanics).


* Sometime later the Garbage Project did a similar sample in Mexico City and refuted a previously held theory of assimilation – it was believed immigrant food habits would be intermediate between those in their native land and those in their new country. This turned out to be dramatically wrong; in fact Mexican immigrants to the US eat more beef than their Anglo neighbors, eat more white bread, eat more high-sugar cereals, and drink more sugary beverages (and much more in all these categories than native Mexicans do). This was dubbed “the Hollywood Hypothesis” – the idea that immigrant consumed the way television and movies suggested their neighbors did, not the way they actually did.


* And on the same note there were wide differences between affluent Mexicans and poor Mexicans, but often in a contrary direction from relationships in America. For example, in the US canned vegetables are more likely to be eaten in lower income families; in Mexico City it’s the other way around. Similarly cigarettes are more likely to be consumed by the upper class in Mexico City and by the lower class in the US. One very strange observation was the use of toilet paper – affluent Mexicans not only use twice as much toilet paper as their lower class co-nationals, but almost six times as much as affluent Americans. (A speculative explanation was toilet paper gets used for a wider variety of purposes in the US than in Mexico).


While continuing to investigate home garbage disposal, the Garbage Project continued to landfill sampling, using a bucket auger to bring up samples from various levels in landfills across the US and Canada (Rathje’s description of a bucket auger is somewhat different from my own experience, but I only used one once and it may have been aberrant). This approach also debunked many of the popular green myths surrounding waste disposal:


* Plastics are an insignificant contributor to landfills by volume, making up less than 1% (public polls from the time Rathje was doing the work estimated plastic contribution at 29%). Not only that, plastic volume is decreasing with time – not because less is discarded, but because manufacturers keep developing ways to make plastic products lighter in weight and more compressible). Rathje speculates that plastic waste figures largely in the environmental litany because plastic products are usually colorful and visible while paper waste tends to be less conspicuous.


* Disposable diapers were estimated by the public at an astonishing 41% of landfill volume; the actual volume is less than 2%. Not only that, only one pathogenic organism was ever cultured from a landfilled diaper by the project’s microbiologist, and it wasn’t clear if that virus actually came from the diaper or from surrounding landfill debris. Rathje critiques two studies of relative energy usage by disposable versus washable diapers; not surprisingly the one financed by the washable diaper industry found that disposables consumed six times as much energy as washables, while the one financed by the disposable diaper industry only acknowledged twice as much energy usage. There were flaws in both studies, but more in the washables one; it didn’t account for energy used to grow cotton or transport diapers.


* The single largest contributor to landfills by volume (and Rathje notes volume is the limiting factor; nobody particularly cares how much a landfill weighs) is paper. The public was fairly good as estimating the volume of waste newspaper (public said 11%, actual was 13%) but way off in total paper products (public said 6%, actual is 40%).


* Modern landfills do not “biodegrade” anything in significant amounts. The project not only found things like newspapers and paper packaging in fairly intact condition in landfill layers that were 20 years old, they also found undecayed and apparently still edible (although nobody actually tried) food products in the same layers.


Continuing unapologetically with counterintuitive and “contrarian” positions, Rathje doesn’t think much of recycling. He notes that what most people think of as “recycling” is actually “sorting”, which is the easy part; unless there’s a use for the “recycled” material it’s just waste disposal with an extra step. In the “Law of Unintended Consequences” department, Rathje notes that paper recycling in the US contributed to the decline and demise of some youth sports programs in Europe; these had been getting a significant amount of their finances from “paper drives” but bulk paper from the US began arriving for one sixth the cost that recyclers had been paying for European paper. Metal recycling works very well; in a typical year more automobiles are recycled in the US than are produced – but even that has an impact on paper recycling; one of the major uses for short fiber paper (unsuitable for recycling to writing paper) is sound proofing material inside automobile body panels. Thus when the US car market tanks, so does paper recycling.


Rathje also takes a contrarian position on incineration, suggesting that waste-to-energy facilities can work if managed carefully. The main problem is feedstock; the incoming material has to be fairly carefully sorted – at considerable expense in labor and effort – to make sure it’s suitable for burning. It’s suggested it will make the most sense in places where landfills are just not practical – he cites Long Island and southeast Massachusetts, both with high groundwater tables, as potential candidates.


As you might gather, I think pretty highly of this book, especially compared to the others cited. However, it’s not without a few flaws – the most important being that it’s dated; originally published in 1992, with a second edition in 2001. That means that a lot of the public attitudes toward garbage Rathje cites may have changed, due to ongoing lifestyle changes. Since Dr. Rathje died in 2012, there probably won’t be another updated edition. He was an editor of the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste, published 2012; from online descriptions it’s (at least for now) the definitive work; unfortunately at $350 it’s outside my means no matter how fascinating it promises to be. Maybe it will turn up at a garage sale. ( )
1 vote setnahkt | Dec 18, 2017 |
This book documents the fascinating efforts of the Garbage Project in Tuscon, AZ to use archaeological practices to study garbage - officially known as municipal solid waste - collected from outside peoples' homes as well as excavating landfills. These studies show patterns of consumption and disposal that are different from what people volunteer in surveys. Rathje also describes many fascinating I-never-thought-of-that aspects of garbage and it's disposal in landfill and incinerators, including a historical survey. He also debunks many popular beliefs about trash. For instance, things people think are common in landfills (styrofoam and diapers) are not, while we don't usually think of the things that do take up a lot of landfill space (construction debris and paper). And while the concept of biodegradable waste is popular, excavations show that very little actually biodegrades in landfills, although this may be a good thing as it prevents the creating of waste slurry that contaminate water and surrounding areas. Even recycling is more complicated than believe, as many things collected to recycle (with the exception of aluminum) far exceed the demand of manufactures to recycle them. This book is surprising in both what it reveals about humanity through our waste as well as the sense of optimism it gives in that the waste problems while huge are not as bad as we may think they are. Much of what is described in the book happened 20 or more years ago. I'd love to see an update on the Garbage Project and how the challenges of municipal solid waste are being addressed today ( )
2 vote Othemts | Dec 9, 2015 |
Definitely a life-changing book. Much of what I thought I knew about landfills was incorrect. Most importantly, plastic is not our most voluminous garbage; paper is -- by an order of magnitude. Current plastics contain a lot of air and compact very well in the modern garbage truck. Our landfills aren't overflowing with non-biodegradable plastics; they're overflowing with biodegradable paper that isn't bio-degrading because the landfill is anaerobic. So, now I'm much more careful with my paper recycling and worry less about plastics (though obviously they still use hydrocarbon resources that we might put to better use than water bottles.)

I highly recommend this book. It's very readable (though a tad repetitious towards the end) and full of counter-intuitive information. ( )
1 vote aulsmith | May 25, 2012 |
A note to what Rubbish is not. It is not a book like the Story of Stuff, or Garbage Land that explores what happens when you throw something "away." Rubbish is literally about garbage archaeology and details the findings of a group of "garbologists" who examine the contents of garbage cans and landfills.

The findings of the Garbage Project are certainly fascinating and worthwhile. In order to cut down on waste that makes it into landfills, it certainly helps to know what we are wasting in vast quantities. That said, I always find it amusing when anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists profess to find "objective truth" in research that is rife with assumptions, and the first section of this book certainly makes a lot of claims about what household waste tells us about certain populations. (As an engineer, I read anything that can't be proved with well tested equations with a skeptical eye.)

Part two of Rubbish exposes the myths that plastics and disposable diapers are wreaking havoc on our landfills. The Garbage Project found that landfill contents are largely filled with construction debris and paper. For me, this raises the obvious question: why? Is it so much cheaper to demolish and reconstruct than to recycle or renovate old buildings, and is it because there are so many incentives given to buy new homes? The author doesn't really cover these issues at all, which is interesting given how much space he gives to "disposable diapers are not a problem!" That said, I don't consider plastic and other packaging to be any less of a problem just because it's not the number one constituent of a landfill. Any percentage of a ton of landfilled crap is still a ton of landfilled crap.

Rubbish is truly a proponent of landfills, and to an extent incineration. I don't know why they wouldn't be considering the Garbage Project literally depends on landfills and garbage for their very existence. This sentiment pops up in the third section of Rubbish, and is when I started to dislike the book.

Section three talks about how recycling doesn't work when people adopt it on mass scales because it's no longer economically feasible. While I don't disagree that tons of plastic waste is "recycled" by being shipped to countries in poor regions of the globe, recycling is truly beneficial for reducing the amount of paper, glass and aluminum that gets wasted in landfills. (Plastic, on the other hand, doesn't really get recycled at all, so I tend to agree that it's a dubious prospect.) The author is a big proponent of aluminum and aluminum recycling, which isn't surprising given the funding agencies listed in the back of the book (Alcoa, etc.), which makes me doubt their stated objectivity and non-biased stance given earlier in the book.

Finally, the author decides that consumers are mostly to blame for the garbage we create. Extended producer responsibility is not even mentioned in this book, although I wonder if the idea had been thought up in the early 1990s (something tells me it was). Composting is given little paragraph space, but then is listed as an essential to reducing the amount of lawn and food waste that enters our landfills. How would that be possible in cities, given the author's skeptical stance on municipal composting earlier on in the book? I live in a city without a municipal compost program and literally zero lawn space of my own. I have tried two methods of indoor composting and failed. This is not something individuals in cities, or who quite frankly aren't inclined to compost, can do on their own. And finally, packaging and electronic items would certainly be designed better if producers had to deal with the end product instead of consumers. While the author states that businesses are already economically incentivized to reduce their packaging as much as possible to bring costs down, anybody who's purchased anything in a plastic clamshell package or anything that's covered in layers of plastic and foam that are nearly impossible to remove, and which take up way more space than the object itself, knows that is obviously not enough to reduce packaging waste.

Rubbish states that anybody who is hard-line about recycling, landfilling or any option alone without seeing a middle ground doesn't help solve our garbage problem. However, I think that environmentalists do a good service by looking at the pitfalls of our modern system. Bipartisanism doesn't get us anywhere, as evidenced by our current political situation, and I think that analogy can safely be projected onto our environmental situation as well. Whether or not we are drowning in garbage is true, something is clearly amiss in a society that creates so much toxic waste. What myself and this book differ on is what we should be doing about that. ( )
4 vote lemontwist | May 20, 2011 |
A discussion of the Garbage project at the University of Arizona that spent many years counting and inventorying the nation's garbage. Some amazing facts were discovered, including the fact that paper doesn't disintegrate very well in sanitary landfills. I use this book all the time in my classes. ( )
  Devil_llama | Apr 20, 2011 |
Co-author William Rathje is the director of the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona, a research group which over the years has investigated all kinds of garbage-related subjects. Now, you might well think that there can't possibly be all that much about garbage that's worth researching, but if so you would be very, very wrong. It turns out that not only is the excavation of ancient garbage heaps an invaluable tool for archeologists investigating ancient civilizations, but that searching through garbage cans and landfills can tell us a surprising amount about our own society, some of it not just academically interesting but of real practical use. And, of course, understanding garbage -- how it's generated, how it's disposed of, and the various factors that influence those things -- is also extremely important when it comes to figuring out the environmental and economic factors involved in areas such as landfill management and recycling. This book talks in some depth about all these things and quite a bit more, and it offers up plenty of genuinely fascinating facts about garbage. (For instance, did you know that so little biodegrading happens in landfills that newspapers can remain perfectly legible for decades after they're buried? Amazingly enough, there was even a court case in which documents that had been consigned to a landfill many years before were dug up and used as evidence.) The authors also engage in a considerable amount of calm and level-headed discussion on the public policy issues surrounding garbage, including taking a thoughtful and interesting look at the surprisingly vast differences between the things that people believe are filling up our landfills and the things that actually are. Admittedly, since the book was first published in 1992 some of that is a bit dated, but it remains very much worth reading. And while the text is full of carefully presented scientific facts and figures, it's also extremely readable and features occasional flashes of very real wit. ( )
4 vote bragan | Feb 8, 2010 |
It may be difficult to believe that a book about garbage is one of the most interesting books I've ever read, but it's true! Rathje takes the reader from ancient Troy to modern New York, and shares important insights into current policy gleaned from years of actually digging through garbage. ( )
  szarka | Oct 26, 2005 |
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