I finished reading Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy as part of my participation in Green Bean’s May Bookworm challenge which is now going to continue into the month of June. As I mentioned before on this blog and on other blogs, this book was very thought provoking and shattered many of my preconceived notions about garbage and landfills.

I actually picked this book up by accident. The title caught my interest, and after picking it up and opening the book I found myself sitting cross legged on the floor of the library amazed at what I was reading. I am not sure what it is about garbage that fascinates me…but its related to my fascination with suburbia. Let me explain.

A few years back, I read "Building Suburbia" by Dolores Hayden that gave me an incredible insight into the growth and popularity of the suburbs. The book focused primarily on American suburbs, but the idea of a suburb was originally a British one that was later imported. Prior to reading Building Suburbia I had an incredible hatred of what suburbs stood for. I hated the fact that they were unwalkable, that they tended to be homogenous in every way imaginable, that they were inaccessible by trains and buses and I hated the culture that surrounded it - a sort of blandness that bugged me to no end.

One of the original ideas behind a suburb was the idea of having green space and empty clean, hygenic looking spaces. A livable area where one could pretend to live close to nature - and most importantly, a place that was not as dirty as a city. Before governmental agencies were established to take care of garbage and the general maintenance of cities, the cities were filthy. Horses died and rotted in open gutters, people tossed their garbage outside their homes by just flinging it outside their windows. In short, the urban environment was a festering mess of dirt and disease. Not exactly a place one would want to live in. With the invention of the combustion engine, travel to places outside of the city became possible. Wealthier families were able to live outside the filthy cities and enjoy breathing clean air. With the invention of street cars or trolley cars, commuting for work became a feasible option for many people. This later lead to the expansion of the automobile industry which lead to the desire to live further and further away from the dirt and grime of the cities. There are other reasons for the growth of the suburbs of course…but for now I’m going to focus on people’s desire to get away from dirt and grime.

So Building Suburbia shed light on a relatively modern view of people dealt with garbage, but I wondered how people dealt with garbage before the invention of automotive engines when one couldn’t just commute from a suburb. Well…here is an excerpt from Rubbish that describes the garbage habits of the residents of Troy (i.e. in the B.C. era):

The archaeologist C. W. Blegen, who dug into Bronze Age Troy during the 1950s, found that the floors of its buildings had periodically become so littered with animal bones and small artifacts that "even the least squeamish household felt that something had to be done." This was normally accomplished, Blegen discovered, not by sweeping out the offensive accumulation, but by bringing in a good supply of fresh clean clay and spreading it out thickly to cover the noxious deposit. In many a house, as demonstrated by the clearly marked stratification, this process was repeated time after time until the level of the floor rose so high that it was necessary to raise the roof and rebuild the doorway.

I paused for a very long time after I read the above para. It was a WTF moment for me. 

Rubbish has many such passages about ancient cultures and their garbage habits. But the book for the most part discusses compostion of landfills and various experiments conducted by Garbologists (people who root around in garbage under an academic banner) and the results of their analysis of the analyzed garbage. I found it surprisingly insightful. I, like many others, had the impression that landfills were filled with disposable diapers and plastic bags and tires. But the reality (at least in the 80s and 90s - when the analyses were done) is that "two kinds of garbage - paper and construction and demolition debris - account for well over half of America’s general refuse." I imagine that that number went up even further from the housing construction boom that seems to have ended recently…but that fact also surprised me. But on second though…demolition debris is a lot more voluminous then yogurt cups and disposable diapers. And I can’t imagine a thriving industry that reuses demolition debris especially with the risks with lead paints and so on.

Toward the end of the book, the authors made many suggestions regarding how garbage output could be reduced and I liked three of their suggestions. One was to incentivize the task by having people who put out a lot of garbage pay more and vice versa. Another suggestion was to encourage composting in households since removing food waste from landfills will result in something useful rather. The third suggestion that I liked was to encourage the purchase of products made from "post consumer recycled" materials. Ideally the product would have 10% or higher of post consumer recycled goods.

I could write a book detailing how useful and insightful I found Garbage. But instead I’ll suggest that you read it and I’ll end with another quote that cheered me up:

Over time, grand civilizations seem to have moved from efficient scavenging to conspicuous consumption and then back again to the scavenger’s efficiency. It is a common story, usually driven by economic realities.