Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash by Edward Humes

(Avery, $27)

“Archaeologists of the future are in for a treat,” said The Economist. As many a relic digger will tell you, garbage offers the truest record of how past societies lived, and the average American today is generating seven pounds of the stuff per day. Getting a head start on the competition, former journalist Edward Humes has taken a comprehensive look at how our culture has become the most wasteful ever. He begins his journey atop a putrid 500-foot-tall landfill outside Los Angeles, investigates the “chowder” of plastics accumulating in our oceans, and tracks the growing stream of U.S. refuse heading to China. By volume, Humes argues, trash is America’s No. 1 export to our chief economic rival, whose residents are busily recycling our spent keyboards and milk cartons into new products that the rest of the world needs.

Rubbish, said Marc Levinson in The Wall Street Journal. It sounds clever to claim that America’s greatest contribution to today’s global economy is as “China’s trash compactor,” but Humes’s alarmist rhetoric often outruns the facts. His seven-pounds-a-day figure may be more accurate than the Environmental Protection Agency’s significantly lower estimate, but he never mentions that per-person solid-waste rates are actually declining in the U.S. Think about it. No more phone books, fewer newspapers, more recycling programs. “Americans haven’t stopped throwing a lot of trash away, but we don’t face a crisis spinning out of control.”

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Maybe not, but Humes’s reporting will still linger in the minds of readers, said Jenifer B. McKim in The Boston Globe. “The cast of colorful characters” he introduces includes a thoughtful bulldozer driver, “the world’s first garbologist,” and husband-and-wife hoarders burying themselves in the everyday detritus most of us throw away. Eventually, Humes slips into an advocate’s role, recommending a ban on plastic shopping bags and a commitment to new technologies that can more efficiently convert garbage into electricity. “Preachy? Perhaps. But this book gives a pretty solid argument” for why we should heed Humes’s call.