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
Bill Rathje, arguably the world’s first garbologist, used a tool called a bucket augur (typically used for drilling wells) to dig up and inspect old trash. Some of his findings were surprising, like a bowl of guacamole that was 25 years old but was still green underneath the initial layer of brown. The guacamole was a sign that landfills weren’t working as advertised—things weren’t supposed to be preserved like that.
In 1973, Rathje founded the Garbage Project, which aimed to be a systematic analysis of modern waste. Rathje was a natural contrarian and started off trying to use trash as evidence to disprove popular misconceptions. While garage had sometimes been studied by journalists and detectives, the Garbage Project was the first large-scale investigation of its kind, using techniques that resembled archaeology.
While Rathje is perhaps the most openly contrarian of the people profiled for the book, ultimately all of the garbage activists are motivated by some amount of contrarianism. Humes shows how contrarianism doesn’t necessarily equate to negativity, and how it is frequently a necessary force to drive positive change.
Themes
In its first year, the Garbage Project investigated what happened when a beef shortage drove up the price. Surprisingly, the more expensive beef actually led to more wasted beef in the trash. Rathje figured that shortages (and particularly the publicity around shortages) led people to hoard beef, leaving more of it to go to waste.
One of the benefits of Rathje’s approach to trash was that it relied on hard evidence, which allowed it to look objectively at trash and make some surprising observations that run counter to what people might expect.
Themes
Another finding of the Garbage Project was that special collection days for hazardous materials often led to more improper disposal instead of less. Rathje figured out that many people rounded up old junk to throw out on special days, then accidentally missed the day and decided to throw out the trash anyway.
This passage continues the theme of well-intentioned ideas with real, tangible benefits that nevertheless have surprising negative consequences. The purpose of these sections is not to discourage new ideas, however, but simply to encourage even more experimentation.
Themes
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Yet another finding from the Garbage Project was that larger trash cans inspired houses to produce more trash. Other findings offered diverse insight on everything from alcohol consumption (highest around paydays) to candy eating (with most Halloween candy being eaten but lots of Valentine’s Day chocolate discarded in unopened wrappers).
These findings help provide a foundation for one of the central ideas of the book: that people have a lot of false ideas and delusions about their own trash production. While these specific examples are mostly trivia items, together they paint a picture of a nation that fundamentally misunderstands how its trash works.
Themes
The Garbage Project expanded its scope and influence, particularly after being asked by the U.S. Census to help calculate the number of households, particularly two-parent households, in poor communities using data from trash. Though Rathje and his colleagues helped develop potentially useful techniques for the 1990 Census to solve its problems with undercounts, ultimately the Census Bureau decided that it might attract bad PR to be perceived as digging through people’s trash.
Rathje’s work was met with resistance and setbacks, and arguably there is even some merit to the idea that his methods involved an invasion of privacy. Nevertheless, the main takeaway from this passage is that it would’ve been possible to take Rathje’s methods even further, if he’d only been given the proper support, but that opportunity never materialized.
Themes
Still, despite the Census setback, the Garbage Project had other successes. In one notable survey, the project showed that there was a big discrepancy between how much alcohol people reported drinking and what the trash record actually said (although interestingly, alcohol consumption by volume was mostly the same across income groups).
Again, the data collected from the Garbage Project is theoretically free from people’s assumptions and biases, and this is what allows it to give such unusual and surprising insights into people’s consumption habits.
Themes
Taking even more inspiration from archaeology, the Garbage project began digging to excavate landfills. Rathje and his colleagues found that landfills weren’t decomposing trash, as many claimed, but in fact just “mummifying” it. Though this seems like a bad thing (and it was), one unexpected benefit was that it meant toxic materials were less likely to make it into the soil.
Though Rathje was a contrarian, he adopted a lot of his methods from the discipline of archaeology. Rathje’s research shows how a garbage revolution will involve not only questioning the status quo, but also incorporating the best of older traditions into the process of making new ones.
Themes
Based on their findings, the Garbage Project came up with a First Principle of Food Waste: “The more repetitive your diet—the more you eat the same things day after day—the less food you waste.” While nutritionists do value variety in a healthy diet, the Garbage Project showed how the concept of variety had been exploited by big companies to make people buy food they didn’t want or need.
This passage connects back to consumerism from earlier. It shows how a person’s natural—even healthy—desire for variety can be manipulated by companies that simply want to turn a profit, with disastrous side effects for the environment.
Themes
Rathje estimated that if all the U.S. trash could be moved to one landfill, the landfill would be about the size of the Bronx and 120 feet high. This is big but not gargantuan—Rathje’s point was to illustrate that space isn’t the biggest issue with modern trash. His bigger concern is the trash that doesn’t go to landfills and instead ends up in the oceans.
Despite being a contrarian, Rathje took a pragmatic approach and didn’t criticize landfills just on principle. He allowed that in theory, landfills could be a viable solution to the garbage crisis, before explaining why, in practice, landfills aren’t a good solution.
Themes
By 2011, Rathje had retired and gotten into Buddhism, disappointed that little about American consumption had changed in his lifetime. In 2001, he wrote about how he believed the United States had entered its “Decadent” period, the time after the Classical Period of a civilization when the civilization begins running out of resources, with actions to prevent the fall taken too late.
Rathje’s retirement and negative predictions seem to suggest that he got discouraged near the end of his career and perhaps frustrated with the limits of what one person could accomplish. Though the word “decadent” is often used today to mean “luxurious,” it originally referred to something in a state of decay.
Themes
With Rathje retired and his Garbage Project over, no one in academia stepped up at first to fill his position in garbology. Eventually, however, Sheli Smith, one of the first Garbage Project students, helped lead a renaissance in garbology. Smith started to work with her local school to teach children about garbage. The program was successful and soon expanded to other schools, where students seemed eager to learn and confront the waste they saw every day in their schools.
In spite of Rathje’s discouragement, however, the presence of new activists like Sheli Smith suggests the possibility of a more hopeful future where others continue Rathje’s work. The success of garbology programs at schools suggests that future generations have the potential to be smarter about the trash crisis than previous generations—perhaps in part because they are increasingly motivated by necessity.
Themes
