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, people often saw objects flying over the Puente Hills landfill that looked like birds but which were in fact plastic bags. Bags are a modern problem that previous public sanitation officials like Waring didn’t have to deal with.
Plastic bags are perhaps the most visible sign of the modern garbage problem, and they frequently represent the excesses of consumer culture. Here, their resemblance to birds suggests that trash intrudes on the natural world.
Themes
Around that time, Big Mike enjoyed acting as an informal ambassador for Puente Hills, speaking with tour groups and the press. While people who live near the landfill can appreciate its efficiency, most still want it gone. There’s also a dark side to the landfill: it was used at least once to cover up a murder. While not as sensational as murder, perhaps the even darker side of the landfill is how it reflects the consequences of consumerism in the United States, where people buy things just to throw them away within a year.
The murder at Puente Hills is really more of a trivia fact than a substantial issue on its own. As a symbol, however, it shows how landfills can be used to bury dark things that people don’t want to have to think about. Humes ties this anecdote to consumerism, which thrives by trying to make people forget about the consequences of what they’re consuming.
Themes
Some have blamed American consumerism on the rise of television (and TV advertising). While few dispute the connection between TV and consumerism, it is ultimately just one factor. One of the prominent pioneers in corporate branding during the mid-twentieth century was J. Gordon Lippincott (whose company created the Campbell’s Soup label, the Chrysler logo, the Betty Crocker spoon, and the General Mills “G”). Lippincott noted that the United States was perhaps the first society in the world that threw things away before they were worn out.
Though the issue of consumerism is much larger than any one person, J. Gordon Lippincott represents it better than just about any other American in history, due to his involvement with so many iconic brands. Though Lippincott isn’t portrayed as an outright villain, in many ways he is the antagonist for the book, embodying the consumerist attitudes that must be defeated in order for the U.S. to truly solve its trash problem.
Themes
Lippincott’s goal was to fundamentally change American culture, replacing thrift with conspicuous consumption. Though he was intelligent, many of Lippincott’s advertising schemes were based on total lies, trying to make products seem to be the opposite of what they actually were. His work coincided with the introduction of credit cards, which helped get rid of the old idea of saving up to buy things.
While consumerism may seem to be synonymous with the U.S., thrift used to be considered a core American virtue and is in many ways the opposite of consumerism. This passage shows how Lippincott’s success was not guaranteed and how it was only possible due to a culture-wide shift in the United States.
Themes
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Not all agreed with Lippincott’s vision of the United States—some rejected the idea of a nation focused on consumption and waste. Vance Packard was one of the main critics of American wastefulness, suggesting that consumption was not a good long-term economic strategy and that conservation and durability were more important. Packard’s pessimistic books sold well, but ultimately; it was Lippincott’s vision of the U.S. that became more successful.
This passage shows that the mid-20th century was not all about consumerism; in fact, even at the time, there were people like Vance Packard who saw consumerism’s problems and criticized it. This point helps make the argument that consumerism isn’t inevitable and that one day some new philosophy could take its place.
Themes
In addition to being linked to the golden age of TV, American consumerism was also linked to the “plasticization” of the country. Between 1960 and 2000, plastic went from being 0.4 percent of municipal waste by weight to 11 percent. In 2000, Americans consumed 100 billion plastic bags a year, costing retailers $4 billion. The rise of plastic coincided with the rise of disposable products, which often had plastic packaging.
Plastic embodies many of the contradictions of the modern garbage crisis: it’s designed to be disposable, but in fact, it lingers in landfills well beyond its intended use. Again, Humes highlights the fact that plastic is a relatively recent invention, implying that it’s not inevitable that plastic will continue its dominance in the future.
Themes
One of the biggest symbolic changes of the 1960s was when Coca-Cola went from reusable glass bottles to “one-way” glass bottles. Soon after came the plastic two-liter soda bottle, ensuring that soda distribution would never again be as sustainable as it was in 1960, even with more ambitious recycling programs. For soda manufacturers, the switch away from reusable glass lowered costs, pushing hidden costs, like increased pollution, onto taxpayers.
Coca-Cola represents the tendency of large American corporations to prioritize their own interests above all else. While some might argue that it is good for businesses to find ways to cut costs, this passage shows that, often, the costs of production are just being shifted from the business itself onto the consumers (in this case, in the form of pollution, which is expensive to clean up).
Themes
While disposable new products helped grow landfills, an equally significant issue was the end of old methods for disposing of waste. Previously, piggeries used to take up a lot of waste, with pigs eating up edible portions of waste.
This passage helps emphasize how different waste disposal looked in the past. It also foreshadows some of the more creative solutions for dealing with waste that people propose later in the book, particularly the company TerraCycle, which uses worms for a similar purpose.
Themes
Though pigs were a major garbage-disposal force up through World War II, around that time, people began to believe that garbage-fed pigs were worse for human consumption, with a worse taste and the chance of infecting people. New laws decreed that garbage fed to pigs had to be heated to sanitize it, and this ended up being so expensive that piggeries as a source of garbage disposal had mostly vanished by 1970.
This passage once again highlights how waste management policy intersects with politics. While there may have been issues using garbage-fed pigs for human consumption, ultimately the change in garbage disposal practices came about because the culture changed and people began adhering to new ideas about sanitation.
Themes
Two other recent changes—the compacting garbage-truck and the green plastic trash bag—had an unexpected effect on increasing waste, since they made it more difficult for scavengers to identify useful material and remove it before it went to landfills.
This section gives another example of how seemingly innocuous ideas can have unexpected negative consequences. It relates back to the theme that one of the most dangerous parts of the garbage crisis is how so much waste is hidden from most people.
Themes
Finally, landfilling became more common because industrial-size incinerators declined in popularity. New clean air laws caused them to close in most places around the country, except New England, where landfill space (and land in general) was at a premium.
As the situation with landfills here shows, solving the garbage crisis will not necessarily take a one-size-fits-all solution, since waste management policy is often determined by local factors like geography.
Themes
This growing trash crisis was what ultimately led to the expansion of the Puente Hills landfill outside of Los Angeles in the 1970s. The landfill, which was initially created as just a backup plan, accidentally grew into the largest active landfill in the country in 2011, both an engineering marvel and a cautionary tale that shows the consequences of excess through mountains of trash.
While a towering mountain of trash might seem like a negative thing, Humes doesn’t only criticize the Puente Hills landfill. He acknowledges it as an achievement in dealing with trash, even if he believes that its fundamental premise is flawed. Though Puente Hills represents a problem, it is out in the open, unlike most of the 102 tons of trash that every American produces in a lifetime.
Themes
