Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Throwing Things Away

Our recent record-breaking snow accumulation is almost completely melted, and things are returning to normal around the Portland area, but one of the storm-related news stories that's still lingering is about garbage. Most residential streets in Portland don't get attention from city snow plows, and the snow and ice on those streets was just too much for garbage trucks. Some neighborhoods missed two consecutive garbage pick-ups. But this week, local residential garbage pick up has resumed, and reading about it in the Oregonian made me start to think about the character of trash. What is it, how do we manage it, where do we store it, and what can it tell us about our culture? So, read on for a short selection of rubbishy books that may help ask (and answer) a multitude of fascinating questions about garbage!

First, how did garbage come to be such an important element of modern life? Susan Strasser explores refuse in American culture in her eloquent history Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Strasser begins with an exploration of what came before or contemporary consumer culture – before about 1900, streets stank and people were ranker than we are now, but actual garbage, waste that's so useless no one cares to save it, was quite rare. Many thousands of people were employed in the business of picking through trash looking for useful and valuable objects. They were, in fact, recycling, though they didn't call it that. The spread of industrialization, rising standards of living, mass market advertising, and many other factors helped change that culture into the one we inhabit today. Waste and Want explores the path from an era of careful stewardship of items to one that emphasizes new, clean, disposable objects.

Next, what does garbage indicate about us and our culture? Archaeologists have long used midden heaps and trash pits to examine the details of people and cultures of long ago. In Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage, authors William Rathje and Cullen Murphy document the work of the University of Arizona's Garbage Project. Scientists in this celebrated study comb through the trash generated by contemporary Tucson residents (and later by people in other cities), and then analyze the garbage to better understand people's consumption patterns. For example, during the spring of 1973, there was a nationwide shortage of beef. Garbage Project scientists collected data on beef in the trash from spring 1973 to spring 1974, and found to their surprise that beef waste during the shortage (excluding fat and bone) was 9 percent of all the beef bought in the area, while in the months after the shortage ended, waste was only 3 percent. Garbage Project staff finally hypothesised that the greater waste during the shortage might be due to the prevelance of "crisis buying" during shortages. People bought more beef than they strictly needed, and then weren't able to use it efficiently.  Fascinating!

Finally, doesn't our first-world disposable society create a lot of trash that isn't necessarily garbage? Ted Botha profiles dozens of people who collect things other people have thrown away in Mongo: Adventures in Trash – treasure hunters, compulsive collectors, dumpster divers, can collectors, and many other people who are fascinated by trash, earn their livelihood from it, or just find it irresistible.  Botha takes readers on a field trips with a collector who patiently scans closed landfills with a metal detector, a suburban woman who trolls Manhattan alleys and sidestreets for unexpected treasure, a specialist who focuses on finding discarded books, and many other dedicated trash pickers.