Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Royte (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 2005

DESCRIPTION: Like the bestselling Fast Food Nation, GARBAGE LAND lifts the lid off a world we take for granted, revealing its complicated, surprising underbelly. In this highly unconventional travel book, Elizabeth Royte leads the reader on a cultural tour guided and informed by the things she throws away. Structured around four separate journeys--those of Royte’s household trash, compostable matter, recyclables, and sewage--GARBAGE LAND is a literary investigation of the truly dirty side of consumption. Royte melds science, anthropology, and a strong dose of clear-headed analysis in her appraisal of America’s relationship with its garbage, examining the uncomfortable subject of waste in much the same way Mary Roach’s Stiff tackled corpses. By showing us what really happens to the things we’ve "disposed of," Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact--and that, like it or not, the garbage we create will always be with us.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The v-p of a New York City waste transfer station recommends, "You want to solve the garbage problem? Stop eating. Stop living." Indeed, to ponder waste disposal is to confront the very limits of our society. Where does it all go? Most of us are content to shrug off the details—as long as it's out of sight (and smell). Not so journalist Royte, whose book in some ways (including its title) echoes Fast Food Nation. That McDonald's is more immediately engaging a subject doesn't make, say, the massive, defunct Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., any less compelling. Royte nicely balances autobiographical elements (where does her Fig Newmans carton end up, anyway?), interviews and fieldwork with more technical research. Her method yields palpable benefits, not least a wealth of vivid refuse-related slang (maggots are known as disco rice). The details unavoidably venture into the nauseating on occasion, and some might find the chemistry of trichloroethane and other toxins a bit dull. As the NIMBY logic of waste disposal forces its practitioners into secrecy, Royte is obliged to engage in some entertainingly furtive skullduggery. All in all, this is a comprehensive, readable foray into a world we'd prefer not to heed—but should.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Royte is a journalist with a nose for the "sordid afterlife" of trash, thoroughly at home in the putrid world of "Coney Island whitefish" (used condoms); "disco rice" (maggots); and—the darling of American consumer culture and the nemesis of waste activists—"Satan's resin" (plastic). Her book takes the form of a quest for the surprising final resting places of her yogurt cups, beer bottles, personal computer, and organic-fig-cookie packaging, and leads to an impassioned attack on overconsumption in America. If Royte does not quite demonstrate the muckraking skills of an Eric Schlosser in "Fast Food Nation," she does expose the feculent underside of our appetite for things and challenges her readers to disprove the resigned assessment of a former New York sanitation commissioner: "In the end, the garbage will win."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (July 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316738263
• ISBN-13: 978-0316738262
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #135,202 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > Science & Math > Environment > Recycling

More About the Author

Elizabeth Royte is the author, most recently, of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It. Her previous books--Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and The Tapir's Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest--were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 2005 and 2001. Royte's writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper's, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and other national publications. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor for OnEarth. Her work is included in The Best American Science Writing for 2004 and for 2009, the environmental omnibus Naked, and Outside Magazine's Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison. A former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and recipient of Bard College's John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, Royte lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their daughter. She blogs, somewhat irregularly, at www.royte.com/blog

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Landfills, effluvia and fun, July 21, 2005

By 

Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (Hardcover)

It takes a dedicated person (or a nut!) to spend time with garbage as your companion, but Elizabeth Royte has done just that, and she did so over a period of many months. Her new book, "Garbage Land", is remarkably comprehensive, thoroughly engaging and downright fun.

How many people know the names of their garbagemen? The author certainly does as she relates a time where she did a stint or two picking up garbage with the local "San Men" around her neighborhood in New York. (yes, there are women in the "pick-up" business, too) Ms. Royte duly notes the "rejectamenta" that leaves her home as she includes chapters from recycling, waste sites and sewage treatment plants, to landfills, incinerators and composting. All you've ever wanted to know about garbage and the six degrees of separation thereof, (and many things you've never cared to know) are contained in this gem of a book. To say that she has done her homework may be a bit of an understatement. Sifting through her own household garbage week after week must earn extra points as I know of no one who would ever want to undertake something like that.

While the subject is indeed a fascinating one for her and for those of us who care to read about it, Ms. Royte is surprisingly (and refreshingly) not overly judgmental. Is recycling good, for instance? Well, yes and no, she offers. She introduces differing points of view and largely lets the reader decide. I must be honest and say that there are parts of "Garbage Land" that get heavily bogged down in technical terms and statistics, (which is why it took me a period of several days to get to the end) but the final "product" is as informative a look as one will most likely get these days.

The author is good at giving some astounding facts. Referring to anthropology students digging through dry landfills she says, "forty-year-old hot dogs look just like the ones currently sold in the Times Square subway station. Seventy-year-old newspapers can still be read. Cling Wrap still clings". I laughed out loud when she mentioned that "as late as 1892, a hundred thousand pigs roamed New York City's streets, feasting on scraps tossed out doors and windows by the working poor"..... Times may have changed but garbage is still garbage.

Elizabeth Royte has written a terrific book but she has also done a great service in enlightening us in an area of our lives about which most of us would rather not know. It is an eye-opener as well as a nose-opener. I highly recommend it.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling & Appalling -- a Must Read, July 16, 2005

By 

Mary Poplin - See all my reviews

This review is from: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (Hardcover)

I picked up this book the day it came out and found it so compelling -- and mind curdling -- that I couldn't put it down. I took it home and read it from cover to cover. Royte shows formidable skills as interviewer, detective, researcher and wordsmith. I admire her persistence in getting this story and telling it well. I rate it 5 stars -- right up there with several other page-turning, brilliantly researched exposes -- "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser, "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton and "The Whole Soy Story:The Dark Side of America's Favorite Health Food" by Kaayla Daniel. I cannot recommend this book enough.

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waste Not, Want Not, July 19, 2005

By 

Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (Hardcover)

Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land is one woman's journey to find out where her waste goes. She follows her putrescibles to the landfills, her recyclables to recovery facilities, and even tracks her poop all the way to the sewage treatment plant and beyond. She discovers that there are no easy answers and that consuming less is the best answer to the waste problem. The reason that I resonate so strongly with Garbage Land is that since the late `80s my wife and I have been on a quest to reduce, reuse, and recycle to the max [although I participated in the recycling program in Forest Hills, Pennsylvania when I was a teen in the `70s] and have run into many of the problems encountered by Royte. Even though Whittier, California now uses the 3 barrel system [yard waste, recyclables, and trash, with the trash barrel being much smaller than the other two], we still find the level of our trash disconcerting AND we live over the hill from the Puente Hills landfill, now the largest sanitary landfill in the world [enlarging the landfill has been mitigated by setting aside or buying land for parks in the hills, so it hasn't been a total waste]. I agree with the previous reviewer's comparison to Fast Food Nation - the books share a similar feel, although I find this one even lower key in the polemics department. I finished the book over the weekend while I was at a wedding in Mendocino County. The couple was married at the oldest organic winery in the country and their house is equipped with a composting toilet - I ended up feeling like a piker when it came to the 3 R's of waste. Garbage Land is food for thought for anybody thinking about their own impact on the planet.