Garbology

On May 24, 2010, in a ruined home on the South Side of Chicago, rescue workers in hazmat suits searched for an elderly couple, the Gastons. The Gastons were hoarders and compulsively collected trash, filling their homes with it. Though the Gastons were an extreme example, somewhere between 3 and 6 million Americans at the time were estimated to be compulsive junk hoarders.

Though hoarders are unusual, the amount of trash they generate isn’t unusual. In 2011, Americans made more trash than any other group on the planet, throwing out an average of 7 pounds per person per day, every day of the year. In a lifetime, that added up to 102 tons of trash.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that between 1980 and 2000, the average American started throwing out about one-third more trash every day. This was far above predictions that people made in the earlier part of the 20th century. Some American politicians see trash as a positive sign—though it causes environmental and economic problems, it is ultimately a signal that people are buying goods and that the economy is prospering. By contrast, during the Great Recession in 2008, landfill growth slowed considerably.

The only difference between hoarders and average Americans is that the waste of hoarders is visible, while most Americans’ trash is invisible, hidden away at landfills. In the early 21st century, the annual trash load of the U.S. was equivalent to the combined weight of every U.S. adult, multiplied by 18. While EPA reports were considered the most accurate records of American trash output, more recent independent surveys have shown that historically, the EPA has underestimated the amount of garbage produced and overestimated the percentage of trash that gets recycled.

The lifetime 102 tons of garbage only accounts for trash that Americans throw away in cans by the curb. A more comprehensive figure that includes transportation, energy use, and sewage would raise the lifetime average to 2,700 tons of trash. The numbers are so high and yet so little-known that it’s as if trash is an addiction in the U.S.

In 2006, Zhang Yin became China’s first female billionaire by finding a way to export America’s garbage to China. China desperately needed scrap paper to recycle (since it had deforested large parts of the country during the Great Leap Forward). Zhang found a way to amass large amounts of scrap paper from American cities, then sell it to China. Trash has become the U.S.’s biggest legacy: the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island is one of the few man-made objects visible from space.

What does it mean that every American generates a lifetime of 102 tons of trash, and what can be done about it? Garbology uses a three-part structure to approach the issue in three different ways: problem, investigation, and solution.

Though hoarders may seem like part of the waste problem, they also help point to a solution by showing that trash does have value in a strange way: as a physical sign of wastefulness. But while hoarding is more honest than hidden consumption, even better than both would be to find a way to avoid accumulating so much trash in the first place. A table at the end of the introduction lists shocking statistics about American annual waste, including over 28 billion pounds of food thrown away.