garbagescout blog

Just finished Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte. Quite good. It starts out like a sort of new-journalism Rubbish, but gets tougher. She goes places Cullen and Rathje didn’t (like, the Mafia and carting), and asks good questions (why do we bring drinking water from the Catskills, only to shit in it, then expend a huge amount of energy removing the shit so it can be dumped back in the river?).

Recommended, though I will be taking a break from reading books about waste. Really, and she talks about this at the end of the book, source reduction is the solution. For everything we buy, there is a huge consumption of resource just to get it to us. That’s where the real environmental and resource problem lies. Pushing recycling on the consumer is a way to divert responsibility from the manufacturers of this crap.

Frog Design employees are conducting an experiment where they will carry with them all trash that they create (or which, by buying, they have sanctioned the creation of) for a two-week period. Participants are allowed to recycle or compost.

It’s a good experiment, causing one partipant to muse about what it would be like if the cost of eventual disposal were borne by the consumer.

Imagine it costs $100 a pound to dispose of garbage. As a result when you purchase an item in a store, your decision making process now factors in the cost of disposal, of the product itself and/ or the packaging, before you purchase. We need a push/ accelerator/ catalyst to expedite the emergence of creative thinking & solutions to the garbage problem. Money will do that.

Municpal solid waste is a good case to use in discussing market liberalization. If govenment no longer collected waste, there’d be a lot less of it. At the same time, there would likely be a lot more burning of it, or dumping it in the ocean, or creating rotting piles of it in the street.