Trash Talk: An Eye-Opening Exploration of Our Planet's Dirtiest Problem

Advance Praise for Trash Talk

As this sprightly book makes clear, it’s hard to throw something ‘away’ because a finite planet doesn’t really have an away—not even in orbit, where space junk is piling up. So we better start thinking through some new approaches!

—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

"Trash Talk is a brilliant, revelatory delight to read. It is an anthropological whodunit that thoroughly describes how much we extract from the living world and transform it into the dead world. Who thought a book on trash could be a page-turner. Think again!"

—Paul Hawken, author of Drawdown and Regeneration

"Like all of Iris Gottlieb’s books, Trash Talk is a marvel of fascinating information, relatable insights, and laugh-out-loud hilarious illustrations and commentary. You’ll be engrossed, entertained, and horrified by all the waste-related facts packed into the book, along with genuinely useful details about the world of trash that most of us know so little about. Everyone should read this book!"

—Margaret (Mei) and Irene Li, authors of Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2024 Iris Gottlieb

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gottlieb, Iris, author.

Title: Trash talk: an eye-opening exploration of our planet’s dirtiest problem / Iris Gottlieb.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023045926 (print) | LCCN 2023045927 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593712771 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593712788 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Refuse and refuse disposal. | Recycling (Waste, etc.) | Refuse collection.

Classification: LCC TD791.G718 2024 (print) | LCC TD791 (ebook) | DDC 363.72/8—dc23/eng/20231129

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045926

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045927

Ebook ISBN 9780593712788

Cover design and illustration: Iris Gottlieb

Book design by Shannon Nicole Plunkett, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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Contents

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

SO, WHAT IS TRASH?

Part 1

Our Trashy History

Chapter 1

ANCIENT SYSTEMS

Chapter 2

SO, HOW DID WE GET HERE FROM POMPEII?

Chapter 3

THE BEGINNING OF THE GARBAGE INDUSTRY

Part 2

Where Does Our Trash Go?

Chapter 4

POVERTY VS. WEALTH

Chapter 5

RECYCLING

Chapter 6

LANDFILLS AND INCINERATORS

Part 3

Waste at Home

Chapter 7

FOOD

Chapter 8

PLASTIC

Chapter 9

PAPER

Chapter 10

TEXTILES

Part 4

The Other 97 Percent of Waste

Chapter 11

CONSTRUCTION

Chapter 12

MINING

Chapter 13

RADIOACTIVE WASTE

Chapter 14

E-WASTE

Chapter 15

MEDICAL WASTE

Chapter 16

HUMAN WASTE, SEWER SYSTEMS, AND MORE

Chapter 17

THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY

Chapter 18

ORBITAL DEBRIS

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

_148350485_

To the garbage collectors and waste pickers of the world

Introduction

So, What Is Trash?

By generic definition, trash is anything worthless, unwanted, or discarded.[*1]

But what we deem trash can be drastically different from how our neighbors, other cities or towns, or countries across the world value those same objects. The classic (and overused) adage one man’s trash is another’s treasure is applicable beyond making yard art from scrap metal or scoring big on Antiques Roadshow from a thrifted painting. It’s relevant on a personal, global, and economic scale. It illuminates that trash is not always unanimously categorized or similarly managed across the board; for some it’s a treasure, for others it’s invisible, and for more it’s an enormous human and biological hazard. Humans don’t agree on what makes trash trash. The way we individually and collectively determine worth and value is lacking consensus. Our discord is a reflection of the global shift in wealth, labor, skill, and resourcefulness.

Depending on who we are and where we live, our definitions of worthless, unwanted, or discarded might vary wildly. In highly consumeristic cultures, the amount of trash produced is much greater, in part because of access to products, disposable income, and single-use cradle-to-grave production. The United States is, no surprise, the world’s biggest generator of household trash. Each American generates 1.38 tons of waste annually, contributing to the global trash production of 4.5 trillion pounds per year.[1] For context, that is 22.5 billion blue whales. Or if you were to stack it, it’d be 782,608 Great Pyramids of Egypt.[2] Or 42 times the total number of humans that have existed in the history of Earth (if each person was a pound of trash). Every year.

The production of trash is unfathomable, and yet our exposure to the amount of waste we generate is mostly from our own homes (or on the curb if you live in New York City) when we put it in a bin or toss it down the chute to be taken away in units of tied-up bags. We see what we create on a moment-to-moment basis, but not the cumulative effect of our neighbors, our cities, our countries. I see a bag of kitchen garbage fill up over the course of two weeks, add my bathroom trash to it, put it in the big trash can, and start over. I don’t think about it much once it’s out of the house.

Throughout many wealthy nations are many layers of bureaucracy or infrastructure that obscure our trash systems, accentuating our ignorance of the magnitude of waste. In some ways, this opacity serves a practical, beneficial purpose: the less we can see it, generally the further it is from our daily lives, and the less likely it is to cause serious sanitation and health issues. A nonexistent sanitation system contributed in part to the explosion of bubonic plague that wiped out more than twenty-five million people in the 1300s. When our infrastructures properly prevent biohazards that can cause illness, opacity serves the well-being of those who have the privilege to not be near mountains of garbage or incinerators. There are many, many populations throughout the United States and other wealthy countries that don’t have the benefit of distance from trash and its hazards. I will delve more into environmental racism and the inequity around waste disposal later in the book.

That same level of opacity also allows corporations to avoid their responsibility to generate less waste and handle the disposal of what they produce. Because much of how we handle waste is hidden, these companies can advertise false promises of doing better (greenwashing) and create self-generated environmental success metrics to keep the public in the dark, obscuring the true practices of big manufacturers and brands. If we don’t see the scale of what’s wrong, then we have very little ability to see what needs to be fixed beyond our small choices.

In many other places in the world, trash is anything but invisible. It is omnipresent in the form of the e-waste and recycling that the United States and Europe ship away—waste that provides dangerous and extremely low-paying jobs. Tons and tons of discarded clothing sits in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Avalanches of garbage pose life-threatening hazards in Jakarta’s landfills. Makeshift villages are built atop landfills in Lagos, Nigeria.[3]

The truth is there are many different facets to trash: what it’s made up of, how it’s handled, and who is impacted by it—both on personal and global levels. This book covers the historical, psychological, geographical, environmental, and class inequities around trash; and it all comes down to how we determine the worth of objects and people.

I am not a virtuous saint of zero waste here to instruct you, reader, to do better. I sometimes know what’s right and still don’t do it. I have had a jar of dead batteries on the kitchen counter for two years that will most likely end up in the trash and cause a problem at the waste facility that I’ll never witness, and I will feel guilty until I forget and the batteries accumulate once again—at least until I have nothing left that’s battery operated. I don’t know what to do with empty cans of spray paint. I usually throw away plastic peanut butter jars after I let my dog gnaw on them because the amount of water to get them slightly less greasy doesn’t seem worth the trade-off for them to still potentially wind up being rejected by a recycling plant. I forget my reusable bags 50 percent of the time and usually don’t buy in bulk. I have a dog who produces waste that then goes into a plastic bag and becomes more waste. I have a stack of broken cell phones with screens held together by packing tape in my office, but can’t bring myself to go to the mall’s Apple store because it’s an all-around hellish experience. I subscribe to Vanity Fair to stay up to date on celebrity gossip.

These are very minor waste-producing behaviors in the grand scheme of things, and on the whole I unintentionally enact a lot of waste-reducing behaviors, which I’m afforded because of my life circumstances. Often using less costs more, and I have a certain level of class privilege that allows me to make choices that reduce waste. I live in a wealthy country, work from home, have access to a range of grocery stores, have the space to compost, drive a relatively efficient car, and have no children. I rarely (if ever) buy new clothes, usually shopping at thrift stores or wearing the same thing for ten years. I don’t get takeout because I am rendered useless by the decision-making involved. Due to where I live and my class, race, and access to infrastructure, I have more choices available than many who must engage in waste production with much less safety and freedom.

Trash is inherently and sometimes confusingly imbalanced. The more wealth you have, the more options for wastefulness are at your disposal: frequently buying new things, traveling, getting takeout, not having to reuse. This is an intentional societal display of power through the culture of disposability.[4] But in the same way that the wealthy have access to buy and dispose of more, the options to buy less are greater as well. The opportunity to grow one’s own food as a hobby requires free time; eco-friendly options are almost always more expensive than heavily packaged products; reusable water bottles assume one has access to clean water to refill them; and composting services are generally privately owned and charge collection fees.

For those who do not have much wealth, affordable and accessible food choices often come in excessive packaging, and neighborhoods struggle with uncollected trash as a public health issue. Cheap and poorly made goods are more affordable but end up costing more in the long haul to frequently replace—and this cycle of waste can contribute to more socioeconomic disempowerment. We don’t all have the time (or interest) to join Greta Thunberg on a two-week boat trip to avoid a plane ride.

The intention of this book is not to elicit shame or guilt around your personal choices. While those emotions can sometimes be useful for inciting change, we are just as likely to dig our heels in, shy away from, or turn our back on the topic altogether when scolded. I often give an eye roll at lists of 10 Things You Can Do to Solve Climate Change, and I don’t want this book to be put down because it’s asking or instructing you to tackle things that feel pointless or beyond your scope of action. How we live is complicated. The choices we’re given do not set us up for success, and the systems in place are intentionally confusing. Much of the literature and education around trash encourages personal change through bubbly, action-oriented behaviors without the information about why it’s important (or useless) beyond the basic idea of climate change or virtue signaling.

Action-oriented behaviors can certainly be useful and function to assuage our eco-guilt (the guilt we have around not choosing the best, greenest option) but at the end of the day, the system is broken, and we as consumers have quite minimal power with our individual actions. A friend of mine has no municipal recycling or garbage pickup. When she took both types of waste to her local landfill, they had her dump both into the same pile, which would never be sorted. This is not to say that recycling never works or never happens, but knowing the realities of the infrastructure in place around you gives context for which actions do or do not help. This is by no means a get-out-of-jail-free card to take a nihilistic approach and no personal responsibility, even though it’s a tempting route to lean toward. It’s certainly easy to slip into that mindset, and I often do, but there’s a balance of not totally throwing intentional actions out the window while recognizing we are each but blips in the grand scheme of waste generation.

Instead of shaming you or filling these pages with optimism, I hope to illuminate the real societal frameworks that, for the most part, we can’t see, so as to better understand where we fit into them, how to shift them, and how we got so deep into this global crisis. These systems range from advertising to manufacturing to class structures to ancient piles of oyster shells to bags of vomit on the moon to the mafia. Trash touches almost every facet of our daily lives, whether we are aware of it or not, and knowing more about the depths of the issue can show us where we can shift our behavior, and where it’s the responsibility of larger systems to shift in order to halt current patterns and prevent future crises.

Context always matters, and there are extremely varied opinions when it comes to garbage. I will do my best to shed light on these topics and include different viewpoints on how these problems should be addressed. This is a rapidly shifting field of thought, and I am not an expert; but if anything, I hope context helps us all empathize with those negatively impacted by these problems, understand how we got to where we are, be angry at the right people, and navigate our personal responsibility. The situation is bleak, and this book is not a greenwashed portrayal of what’s going on. There are certainly bright spots as well as weird, gross, fascinating, and surprising facets of the garbage world, but it’s often seeing the dark underbelly of an issue that shocks us into grasping the reality of it.

I hope what you learn will make you curious about the garbage all around you that you never noticed before.

[Verbatim excerpt from A Boke of Kokery]

How Big Are We Talking?

Enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool is a common unit of measurement, but I would hazard a guess that most people have not stood next to an Olympic-size swimming pool. And if you have, there’s a good chance you didn’t store it away in the mental measurements folder with quarts, gallons, cups, and tablespoons. It’s a pool, not a measuring cup. If you’re an Olympic swimmer, I’m sorry I won’t be using your preferred metric of comparison.

A Comparison of Useless Measurements

The one pool-related moment that should be solidified in our collective cultural memory is the old woman swimming in spaghetti in Patch Adams, but that was a small pool in a backyard. The non-noodle-related Olympic pool is a common choice of measurement for garbage production—it holds eighty-eight thousand cubic feet. Useful? Not really. How about a blue whale, as I mentioned earlier, as a size comparison? Nope! The concept of one million? Not useful for most of us.

In an effort to find something that’s an easily imaginable volume with which to quantify garbage production, let’s try on a semitruck container for size. We see them all the time, and they’re very big, but not so big as to be impossible to conceptualize. A standard semitrailer holds 3,800 cubic feet—twenty-three times less than an Olympic-size pool. So, those pools are really, really big.

Globally, humans produce eight hundred thousand Olympic-size pools of garbage a year—or 18.4 million semitruck containers worth of trash. We’re back to the challenge of conceptualizing a million (much less eighteen of them), but it’s easier to recognize the sheer volume of garbage when imagining 18.4 million semitrucks clogging the highways. At about seventy-two feet in length, that’s 250,000 miles of truck. The National Highway System of the entire United States totals 161,000 miles, meaning every mile of highway in the US would be bumper-to-bumper semitrucks, with half of those being full in both directions.

Conceptualizing the scale of trash production is one of the hardest challenges of the issue—it’s a scale too big for most of us to understand, and without really feeling grounded in the scope, it’s hard to grasp the dire nature of the problem. Throughout the book there will be measurements of scale in tons, acres, and a portal to another dimension in Oscar the Grouch’s trash can. While it’s all mind-bending amounts, the bottom line is that it’s enormous.

And next time you’re at an Olympic pool (never), you can imagine it full of twenty-three semis.

A Note about This Book

Before truly delving into the world of trash, I want to give a preface about the object you’re holding, including any e-readers out there. There is a certain level of hypocrisy involved in writing a book about trash, as it requires tons of paper, water, energy, chemicals, and ink to produce, and many copies of it will eventually end up in landfills (approximately 320 million books are tossed per year).[5] We aimed to print this book in the US on fully recycled paper, but due to opacity issues, concessions were made: printing in Canada using less environmentally friendly paper, though one that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. This book itself reflects the environmental tradeoffs ever present in consumer goods.

It’s relatively difficult to find transparency around the true impact of publishing, in part because there are an enormous number of factors that go into any given publication, including the size of the publishing house, current supply and demand of resources, where the printing happens, how it’s shipped, what’s used to bind the spine, and if it’s in color or not. Our increased demand for online shopping and instantaneous shipping from companies like Amazon has also made it more difficult for the publishing industry to make any meaningful progress toward more sustainable fulfillment and distribution methods. Beginning in 1995, Amazon began advertising itself as Earth’s Biggest Bookstore, and has held that title, currently making up over 60 percent of US book sales. Publishers heavily rely on the online retailer and have little control of how their books are handled once they leave the warehouse, despite hopes that the industry can be greener.[6] There is some pushback against the increasing monopoly of Amazon’s bookselling within online shopping, with companies stepping into the ring. For example, Bookshop, a certified B Corp[*2] online retailer of books from independent bookstores, aims to pull traffic away from Amazon to directly support local bookshops around the country.[7] Over 80 percent of their profits go directly to independent bookstores and they kept many afloat during COVID-19 shutdowns. If you love this book so much and want to buy a copy online for a rat-obsessed friend (see chapter 5) or your wasteful aunt, I encourage buying from Bookshop.org if possible.

On the production side of things: I will get