Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

A Pulitzer Prizeâ€“winning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of the world of garbage.

Take a journey inside the secret world of our biggest export, our most prodigious product, and our greatest legacy: our trash. Itâ€™s the biggest thing we make: The average American is on track to produce a whopping 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime, $50 billion in squandered riches rolled to the curb each year, more than that produced by any other people in the world. But that trash doesnâ€™t just magically disappear; our bins are merely the starting point for a strange, impressive, mysterious, and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century.

In Garbology, Pulitzer Prizeâ€“winning author Edward Humes investigates the trail of that 102 tons of trashâ€”whatâ€™s in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families, communities, and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity. Along the way , he introduces a collection of garbage denizens unlike anyone youâ€™ve ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angelesâ€™ immense Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists in residence at San Franciscoâ€™s dump, and the family whose annual trash output fills not a dumpster or a trash can, but a single mason jar.

Garbology digs through our epic piles of trash to reveal not just what we throw away, but who we are and where our society is headed. Are we destined to remain the country whose number-one export is scrapâ€”America as Chinaâ€™s trash compactorâ€”or will the country that invented the disposable economy pioneer a new and less wasteful path? The real secret at the heart of Garbology may well be the potential for a happy ending buried in our landfill. Waste, Humes writes, is the one environmental and economic harm that ordinary working Americans have the power to changeâ€”and prosper in the process.
Country USA
Manufacturer Avery
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2012-04-19
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Avery
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2012-04-19
Format	Kindle eBook

Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

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