Garbageland
Monday, July 9th, 2007Just 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.