J. Gordon Lippincott
J. Gordon Lippincott was an advertising consultant who was involved in the creation of some of the most recognizable American branding and advertising, including the Campbell’s soup label, the Chrysler logo, the Betty Crocker spoon…
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George E. Waring
George E. Waring was the man appointed in the early twentieth century to help tackle New York City’s massive waste and sanitation problems. A former Civil War colonel who asked his employees to salute him…
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Bill Rathje
Bill Rathje was arguably the first “garbologist,” and he earned this title by taking a research approach to trash that borrowed techniques from more well-established disciplines like archaeology. In 1973, Rathje founded the Garbage Project…
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Mike Speiser (Big Mike)
Mike Speiser was a worker at the Puente Hills landfill, which was located outside of Los Angeles. Puente Hills was one of the biggest, most technologically advanced landfills in the world, even offering tours to…
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Mary Crowley
Mary Crowley was a teacher who became a sea captain and dedicated her life to attempting to solve the trash problem in the Pacific Ocean. Her nonprofit, called the Kaisei Project (after the Japanese for…
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Get the entire Garbology LitChart as a printable PDF.
Tim Pritchard
Tim Pritchard was a Seattle resident with no special connection to garbage until he began to volunteer with MIT’s Trash Track, a program that tracked trash by using GPS technology taken from recycled cell phones…
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Andy Keller
Andy Keller was the founder of ChicoBag, a startup based around a reusable grocery bag that represented one of the earliest efforts in the U.S. to push back against the proliferation of plastic bags. Keller…
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Miriam Goldstein
Miriam Goldstein was an ocean scientist who came from a younger generation than Mary Crowley, and who was more of a scientific insider than Crowley. Goldstein and her colleagues studied the Pacific Garbage Patch…
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David Steiner
David Steiner was the CEO of Waste Management, the largest garbage company in the U.S. Before Steiner’s time as CEO, Waste Management had a bad reputation, as it was caught polluting and illegally dumping during…
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Deborah Munk
Deborah Munk helped run the artist-in-residence program at a San Francisco garbage dump, which attracted ambitious artists like Niki Ulehla. Though the artist-in-residence program started in the 1990s as a novelty, it quickly proved…
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Bea Johnson
Bea Johnson was an au pair from France who went on to found her own company focused on personal sustainability. After her family was temporarily forced to live in a small apartment, she decided she…
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Tom Szaky and Jon Beyer
Tom Szaky and Jon Beyer were two Princeton students who collaborated to found TerraCycle, a company that used worms to recycle food waste into fertilizer. The project expanded from a business contest entry into a…
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Vance Packard
Vance Packard was a contemporary of the advertising consultant J. Gordon Lippincott, and at the time, he was perhaps the most vocal and widely read critic of the growth of consumerism across the U.S…
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Charles Moore
Charles Moore was an ocean researcher who, like Mary Crowley, took an interest in pollution in Pacific waters. In 1997, Moore avoided conventional sailing wisdom and deliberately sailed into the doldrums (the areas with…
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Sheli Smith
Sheli Smith was a student of foundational garbologist Bill Rathje. She helped expand upon his work, focusing particularly on education and public awareness through a school program that started local but quickly expanded to…
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Nickolas Themelis
Nickolas Themelis was a prominent waste-to-energy advocate. Like many waste-to-energy advocates, he believed that turning old trash into energy was the best option from a practical, environmental, and economic perspective. Like Andy Keller and the…
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The Gastons
The Gastons were a family on the South Side of Chicago who, in 2010, had to be literally rescued from all the trash in their home because they were compulsive hoarders. Though their situation might…
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Minor Characters
Harm Huizenga
Harm Huizenga was a Dutch immigrant in Chicago who founded the company that would eventually become Waste Management, though in his time, it was just a small family-run business. He eventually left the business to his son-in-law, Dean Buntrock, and his nephew H. Wayne Huizenga.
Dean Buntrock
Together with H. Wayne Huizenga, Dean Buntrock was responsible for taking a small family-run business founded by Harm Huizenga and, by acquiring other companies, turning it into the multimillion-dollar company Waste Management, the leading U.S. garbage company.
H. Wayne Huizenga
Working with Dean Buntrock, H. Wayne Huizenga helped take his uncle Harm Huizenga’s family business and turn it into the multimillion-dollar Waste Management, the leading U.S. garbage company.
Niki Ulehla
Niki Ulehla was an artist at a San Francisco garbage dump’s unconventional but highly successful artist-in-residence program. Ulehla was working on a piece inspired by Dante’s Inferno.
Zhang Yin
Zhang Yin was China’s first female billionaire; she achieved this by finding a way to export the U.S.’s trash to China. Her experience shows not only the volume of trash generated by the United States, but also the huge amounts of money involved in managing waste.
