Customer Reviews

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Garbage Land is an entry into that recent non-fiction genre that has brought us books and documentaries like Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me. Each address the inherent flaw of capitalism-- that its tenets are not physicanny or environmentally sustainable-- by looking at universally familiar subjects. While it's possible to avoid imbibing fast food, our culture, and our bodies, makes it virtually impossible not to produce waste. Elizabeth Royte makes the brave move to use her own actions as a catalyst to explore trash as the profit driven phenomenon that it is. Her findings are disturbing-- as far away as we may ship our garbage, it comes back to haunt us in so many ways-- yet the picaresqe, investigative narrative of the long, winding, sometimes heavily secured road to the dump is surprisingly rich and even inspiring. While she makes clear that the problem of trash is bigger than us all (it's in the culturally encouraged habit of consumption), and that we all participate in degrees of detritus denial, Royte manages to affirm the idea that change can begin with one less java jacket in the waste bin.

Sometimes I think there is a problem with having too much knowledge, and I thought that occasionally while reading this book. It is disheartening to know that our water supply and air supply is at "safe" levels only because the politicians (paid off by the garbage & recycling industry)tailor the acceptable level of contaminants to what the industry is willing to spend to clean it. This is one of the incidental facts I learned while reading this book. Although the author primarily focuses on following her stream of garbage, recyclables, and sewage to learn what happens to them, she also informs the reader of interesting facts. Did you know that NYC used to have a herd of wild pigs roaming its streets? The pigs ate all the food leftovers that residents threw into the streets. What's good about this book (besides learning more than you ever wanted about the ickiness of garbage) is that the author presents a balanced view of garbage vs. recycling and points out that recycling (which she calls a moral act) also has its many negative environmental effects. The best solution is (and I agree with her) is to watch consumption--if you don't need it, don't buy it. Don't buy products with a lot of unnecessary packaging. Also, the industry which produces the bottles and plastic, etc. should help by creating products that can be reused or recycled more easily. The author writes about her subject with humor and intelligence. The book is a good read and makes you look at the contents of your garbage can in a whole different way.

I found this book to be very interesting because I happen to live in Brooklyn from where the author's garbage orginates, so I know a lot of the locales referred to in the book. As I was reading I was wondering if someone outside of NY would agree. I think so.
The introduction explaining her method of how she tracked her garbage by separating and weighing in granular detail was worth skipping for me. This is a personal journey for Elizabeth, so she included many of her feelings as well as methods of experimentation to reduce, re-use and recycle. But the most interesting parts for me were learning how the system works not just here in NYC, but everywhere. The bottom line is that your garbage never really goes away, it just gets moved someplace that you don't see it. She covers all of it, from recycling, to sewage, to waste of all strains. And it's not pretty, folks. It's a matter of time before it comes back to you in some form through dangerous poisons in your drinking water or food, being washed up on a nearby shore, or in the air you breathe.
I personally think her efforts to reduce her own waste footprint, while admirable and noble, is too small to make a difference and the burden should be put on the massive industry that creates this junk that will either never break down or will wind up as lethal poisons. Just the bi-products of manufacture of all the packaging and product is enough to ruin our food, air and water supply for thousands of years.
This book is full of information everyone should be aware of and it got me thinking beyond my pail. It's not an easy pill to swallow, but Garbage Land made me aware of the scope of the problem and making industy responsible for their waste is now one of my personal issues.

A follow-up book: A nation like Japan has approximately the popluation of the USA in a country roughly the size of California...where do *they* put it all. I'd be interested.

Most of us no longer believe in the tooth fairy but we do believe every week or so the garbage fairy visits us to make our garbage disappear and the toilet fairy magically eliminates our eliminations with one flush.

Elizabeth got the idea to investigate the fairies. The book opens with Elizabeth weighing the garbage against the average American's garbage output of 4.3 pounds per day. Her daily weightings gave me a feeling of gross out and laughter.

This is the theme of most of the book. In her tours of landfills, treatment plants, recycling centers, and the sewer systems she met hostility, regulations, and confronting the enormity of the situation.

Elizabeth faces a difficult situation of describing some of the buildings, machinery, and systems of our trash. How can one describe tons of trash? And perhaps the most difficult of all ... how can she describe the smells?

Thankfully, Elizabeth has done that for us and open up a few eyes that there are no garbage or toilet fairies.

This book describes Elizabeth Royte's attempts to follow her household garbage as it was hauled out of her Brooklyn neighborhood. After getting to know her hard-working local sanitation workers and touring some nearby staging areas, Royte ran into trouble when asking to inspect the modern for-profit landfills. (NYC garbage often ends up in landfills in my ever-so-accepting state of Pennsylvania.) Landfills are now gigantic corporate operations where secrecy rules, as if they have something to hide from irate citizens or nosy government inspectors. I was disappointed that Royte gave up on the landfills so easily, because if she had stuck with her detective work, she could have written a powerhouse investigative report on this shifty business. Royte has better luck with following her recycled items, gaining much insight into the nature of recycling operations, from the questionable economics of citizen sorting efforts to whether or not recycling things really saves energy or raw materials. The answers to these questions will probably be more depressing than you expect.

Royte's coverage of recycling turns out to be the most useful aspect of this book, and you may conclude that it's not all it's cracked up to be. That's because Royte shows that consumer and household waste actually makes up just a tiny percentage of what goes to landfills, and quaint small-scale efforts by individual citizens barely make a dent when large-scale commercial and industrial operations are given no reason to reduce their infinitely greater amounts of waste. Eventually, the book narrows down its arguments to the real benefits of reducing consumption and consumerism, because in theory we won’t have to worry about disposing of waste that is never created in the first place. (A New York City sanitation official provided the telling quote that I used as the title of this review.) Unfortunately, Royte jumps around among a great many smaller issues in refining this concept, which results in quick and spotty coverage of many important aspects of the garbage universe, while the reduce-reuse-recycle consensus is not backed up by any corroborated economics or authoritative philosophy. That gives this book a scattershot, unfocused, and inconclusive feel, though the basic information is certainly useful for those concerned about their own ecological footprint. [~doomsdayer520~]

You may think garbage is one of those unsavory necessities best forgotten at the curb. An icky, but essentially boring fact of life (like sewage, which also comes into the discussion). True, it is a guilt-inducing environmental hazard we ordinary mortals can't do much about, but there are all sorts of people out there for whom your detritus is a livelihood, a challenge, a crusade or all three.

And Elizabeth Royte's lively, anecdotal adventure on the trail of trash introduces us to many of them, from the two sanitary workers who personally shift 20,000 pounds in the four hours she accompanies them, to the head of San Francisco's recycling program who manages to divert 95 percent of his household trash from the landfill in headlong pursuit of Zero Waste.

Royte frames the story around her own household trash in Brooklyn, NY. For a year she weighs and sorts it, taking notes on its contents. She wants to know where it goes when it leaves her. Her first foray with a "san man" (New York has one female garbage collector) team is an eye opener.

"The men seemed dour and angry to me and I was afraid to ask them questions. On foot, I watched and I followed. Soon I realized they seemed sour only because they were concentrating. In constant motion, lifting heavy barrels, they could get hurt if they didn't pay attention. Metal cans banged against their legs; trailer hitches poked from high SUV bumpers. Drivers honked, urging the men to hustle it up, to get their truck out of their way. Double-parked delivery vans blocked their progress. There was also a surprising amount of dog [dirt] near the garbage cans and many plastic bags were shiny with urine. Had I never noticed this before?"

Garbage collection, it turns out, is three times more likely to get you killed than being a fireman or a policeman.

A couple of transfer stations later (from which most of NYC's garbage heads to other states) Royte is ready for a real landfill. Although now closed, "the Fresh Kills Sanitary Landfill was the K2 of trash heaps, and I was determined to make an assault on its closed and forbidden slopes." Unable to get in, she explores the evolution of landfills in grisly detail, makes a canoe foray around the place through a successful salt marsh restoration, describes state-of-the-art dump technology and its various oozing, leaching failures, and then fails to get into a lesser Pennsylvania dump -the final resting place of her own actual trash.

People who handle large amounts of our trash, Royte discovers again and again, are more than a little secretive. " `This isn't goods they're transferring from place to place,' " she's told, " `This is bads.' "

Amusing and adroit as Royte is, landfill descriptions lose their savor after an unsurprisingly short time, but she moves on to incinerators, waste-to-energy incinerators, sewage and sludge fertilizer and myriad forms of recycling. Not a one of them is a winner in the fight against expense, pollution and energy consumption.

Waste to energy plants seem like a dream come true. Burn garbage and furnish energy. But the plants are very expensive and the toxins they produce - both airborne and ash - contain things like dioxins, mercury, lead and sulphuric acid, to name a few.

Recycling efforts teem with politics, psychology and futility. Some environmentalists are avid recyclers; others object to recycling as a panacea that soothes the guilt of the average householder, making us feel like we're doing our bit, and takes the heat off manufacturers who should be held ultimately responsible for the things (especially the packaging) they produce. Yes, recycling can save trees, but recycling uses energy and produces toxins. Plastic recycling is particularly problematic.

And, to put things in perspective, 98 percent of all trash is pre-consumer. Industrial. But Royte, who would clearly like to reduce her own garbage "footprint," weighs it all, keeps her sense of humor, and arrives at a balance. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

- Portsmouth Herald

I found "Garbage Land" extremely informative and entertaining. For those of us who are trying to make informed choices on how to live our lives in ways that benefit the environment, this is a great read. I highly recommend it!