Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Garbology, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Hidden Costs of Waste
Consumerism vs. Conservation
The Power of Individuals
Money and Politics
Summary
Analysis
In 2011, there was one city that consistently ranked as one of the greenest and most sustainable in the U.S.: Portland, Oregon. Despite its successes, however, the city still produced huge amounts of trash, with a slightly higher per capita rate than the U.S. average. Portland was looking for old-fashioned solutions to trash, like expanded composting plants as well as more experimental processes, like one called plasma gasification that vaporizes garbage at high temperatures (which was still too expensive for large-scale use).
While this passage praises many of the achievements of Portland, what it is ultimately doing is setting up the rest of the chapter, which deals more with the dangers of complacency. While Portland is far ahead of many other places in the U.S., its status as a pioneer helps obscure the fact that the city is actually behind many cities outside the U.S. when it comes to waste management.
Themes
Still, none of the proposed solutions for Portland’s trash problem addressed the central issue: how to stop making so much garbage in the first place. One Portland official predicted that the next trash revolution would take place before 2020.
Humes gets at the heart of the problem with Portland’s green initiatives: none of them do anything to address the consumerism that leads to so much trash being created in the first place.
Themes
Another city with impressive green credentials in 2011 was Copenhagen, Denmark. Unlike Portland and other American cities, however, Copenhagen had made real progress in reducing waste produced: only 3 to 4 percent of waste goes to landfills in Copenhagen, compared to an average of 69 percent across the U.S. The secret to Denmark’s success was how it turned trash into renewable energy, burning it to generate power. Unlike the massive waste-to-energy plants proposed outside Los Angeles, Denmark had a network of smaller plants.
The experience of Copenhagen shows how U.S. trash experts have been held back by looking inward rather than also considering solutions from abroad. While waste-to-energy plants previously failed in the U.S. for a variety of reasons, Denmark provides a counterexample to suggest that the failure of waste-to-energy in the U.S. might have had more to do with the implementation than with the idea itself.
Themes
Denmark’s path to success began in the 1970s, when an oil embargo led to gasoline shortages around the world, prompting many countries to invest in greener alternatives. In addition to the environmental benefits, Denmark’s modernization helped it become energy independent and stop relying on foreign oil.
Throughout the 1970s, and particularly in 1973 and 1979, there was an oil crisis in the U.S. and Europe with a limited supply of oil and rising prices. This was generally due to political conflicts in the Middle East. This led some countries to look into other sources of energy.
Themes
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Denmark’s waste-to-energy system used a technology called “mass burn,” which burns large quantities of trash but has high smokestacks that help filter out most of the worst toxins created by burning trash, particularly compared to coal plants and landfills. In the U.S. in 2011, waste-to-energy plants remained objects of skepticism and fear, even though many studies suggested they were better for the environment than alternatives.
Humes suggests that it is worthwhile putting up with some known negatives if the resulting positives help outweigh them. Nevertheless, the problem in the U.S. is that politics make it difficult for anything with short-term negative effects to be implemented.
Themes
Compared to normal recycling, waste-to-energy has the potential to be significantly cheaper. Though recycling retains some important energy advantages, these are offset by factors like transportation costs. Some have feared that waste-to-energy might encourage people to stop recycling, while others, like waste-to-energy advocate Nickolas Themelis, have argued that the two complement each other, since no recycling process uses 100 percent of the material.
Humes seems to consider waste-to-energy as the most realistic of all the proposed solutions to the landfill problem, which is why it comes near the end of the book (as a culmination of all that came before). Though Humes doesn’t always agree with the people he quotes, the inclusion of waste-to-energy advocate Themelis provides further support for the idea that Humes believes waste-to-energy is the best solution.
Themes
One of the problems waste-to-energy faced in 2011 was similar to the problems solar energy faced in the U.S.: officials only conceptualized them as massive, utility-scale plants. In fact, the success stories from other parts of the world mostly involved smaller community-based plants.
To pitch waste-to-energy to the U.S., however, an activist would have to explain why waste-to-energy failed the first time it was introduced. Here, Humes tries to do just that, showing how the U.S.’s focus on large-scale operations stopped it from finding the success that Denmark did.
Themes
Ultimately, Themelis believed that what was really needed in the U.S. was a change in culture to become less wasteful. Both Themelis and Andy Keller of ChicoBag saw recycling as simply a coping mechanism to help Americans feel better about overconsumption. Plastic bag bans represented a first step to directly addressing the problem. But problems remained, and even cities like Portland faced massive resistance to simple ideas like food scrap composting (which involved less regular trash pickup).
As the chapter ends, Humes once again connects everything back to consumerism. While waste-to-energy is an important option to consider, it is ultimately not enough to fight back against consumerism, which has proven again and again to be the motivating force behind the garbage crisis.
Themes
