Trash Talk

Introduction

So, What Is Trash?

By generic definition, trash is anything worthless, unwanted, or discarded.

But what we deem trash can be drastically different from how our neighbors, other cities or towns, or countries across the world value those same objects. The classic (and overused) adage “one man’s trash is another’s treasure” is applicable beyond making yard art from scrap metal or scoring big on Antiques Roadshow from a thrifted painting. It’s relevant on a personal, global, and economic scale. It illuminates that trash is not always unanimously categorized or similarly managed across the board; for some it’s a treasure, for others it’s invisible, and for more it’s an enor- mous human and biological hazard. Humans don’t agree on what makes trash trash. The way we individually and collectively determine worth and value is lacking consensus. Our discord is a reflection of the global shift in wealth, labor, skill, and resourcefulness.

Depending on who we are and where we live, our definitions of worthless, unwanted, or discarded might vary wildly. In highly consumeristic cultures, the amount of trash produced is much greater, in part because of access to products, disposable income, and single-use cradle-to-grave production. The United States is, no surprise, the world’s biggest generator of household trash. Each American generates 1.38 tons of waste annually, contributing to the global trash production of 4.5 trillion pounds per year. For context, that is 22.5 billion blue whales. Or if you were to stack it, it’d be 782,608 Great Pyramids of Egypt. Or 42 times the total number of humans that have existed in the history of Earth (if each person was a pound of trash). Every year.

The production of trash is unfathomable, and yet our exposure to the amount of waste we generate is mostly from our own homes (or on the curb if you live in New York City) when we put it in a bin or toss it down the chute to be taken away in units of tied-up bags. We see what we create on a moment-to-moment basis, but not the cumulative effect of our neighbors, our cities, our countries. I see a bag of kitchen garbage fill up over the course of two weeks, add my bathroom trash to it, put it in the big trash can, and start over. I don’t think about it much once it’s out of the house.

Throughout many wealthy nations are many layers of bureaucracy or infrastructure that obscure our trash systems, accentuating our ignorance of the magnitude of waste. In some ways, this opacity serves a practical, beneficial purpose: the less we can see it, generally the further it is from our daily lives, and the less likely it is to cause serious sanitation and health issues. A nonexistent sanitation system contributed in part to the explosion of bubonic plague that wiped out more than twenty-five million people in the 1300s. When our infrastructures properly prevent biohazards that can cause illness, opacity serves the well-being of those who have the privilege to not be near mountains of garbage or incinerators. There are many, many populations throughout the United States and other wealthy countries that don’t have the benefit of distance from trash and its hazards. I will delve more into environmental racism and the inequity around waste disposal later in the book.

That same level of opacity also allows corporations to avoid their responsibility to generate less waste and handle the disposal of what they produce. Because much of how we handle waste is hidden, these companies can advertise false promises of doing better (“greenwashing”) and create self-generated environmental success metrics to keep the public in the dark, obscuring the true practices of big manufacturers and brands. If we don’t see the scale of what’s wrong, then we have very little ability to see what needs to be fixed beyond our small choices.

In many other places in the world, trash is anything but invisible. It is omnipresent in the form of the e-waste and recycling that the United States and Europe ship away—waste that provides dangerous and ex- tremely low-paying jobs. Tons and tons of discarded clothing sits in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Avalanches of garbage pose life-threatening hazards in Jakarta’s landfills. Makeshift villages are built atop landfills in Lagos, Nigeria.

The truth is there are many different facets to trash: what it’s made up of, how it’s handled, and who is impacted by it—both on personal and global levels. This book covers the historical, psychological, geographical, environmental, and class inequities around trash; and it all comes down to how we determine the worth of objects and people.

I am not a virtuous saint of zero waste here to instruct you, reader, to do better. I sometimes know what’s “right” and still don’t do it. I have had a jar of dead batteries on the kitchen counter for two years that will most likely end up in the trash and cause a problem at the waste facility that I’ll never witness, and I will feel guilty until I forget and the batteries accumu- late once again—at least until I have nothing left that’s battery operated. I don’t know what to do with empty cans of spray paint. I usually throw away plastic peanut butter jars after I let my dog gnaw on them because the amount of water to get them slightly less greasy doesn’t seem worth the trade-off for them to still potentially wind up being rejected by a recycling plant. I forget my reusable bags 50 percent of the time and usually don’t buy in bulk. I have a dog who produces waste that then goes into a plastic bag and becomes more waste. I have a stack of broken cell phones with screens held together by packing tape in my office, but can’t bring myself to go to the mall’s Apple store because it’s an all-around hellish experience. I subscribe to Vanity Fair to stay up to date on celebrity gossip.

These are very minor waste-producing behaviors in the grand scheme of things, and on the whole I unintentionally enact a lot of waste-reducing behaviors, which I’m afforded because of my life circumstances. Often using less costs more, and I have a certain level of class privilege that allows me to make choices that reduce waste. I live in a wealthy country, work from home, have access to a range of grocery stores, have the space to com- post, drive a relatively efficient car, and have no children. I rarely (if ever) buy new clothes, usually shopping at thrift stores or wearing the same thing for ten years. I don’t get takeout because I am rendered useless by the decision-making involved. Due to where I live and my class, race, and access to infrastructure, I have more choices available than many who must engage in waste production with much less safety and freedom.

Trash is inherently and sometimes confusingly imbalanced. The more wealth you have, the more options for wastefulness are at your disposal: frequently buying new things, traveling, getting takeout, not having to re- use. This is an intentional societal display of power through the culture of disposability.4 But in the same way that the wealthy have access to buy and dispose of more, the options to buy less are greater as well. The opportunity to grow one’s own food as a hobby requires free time; eco-friendly options are almost always more expensive than heavily packaged prod- ucts; reusable water bottles assume one has access to clean water to refill them; and composting services are generally privately owned and charge collection fees.

For those who do not have much wealth, affordable and accessible food choices often come in excessive packaging, and neighborhoods struggle with uncollected trash as a public health issue. Cheap and poorly made goods are more affordable but end up costing more in the long haul to frequently replace—and this cycle of waste can contribute to more socio-economic disempowerment. We don’t all have the time (or interest) to join Greta Thunberg on a two-week boat trip to avoid a plane ride.

The intention of this book is not to elicit shame or guilt around your personal choices. While those emotions can sometimes be useful for incit- ing change, we are just as likely to dig our heels in, shy away from, or turn our back on the topic altogether when scolded. I often give an eye roll at lists of “10 Things You Can Do to Solve Climate Change,” and I don’t want this book to be put down because it’s asking or instructing you to tackle things that feel pointless or beyond your scope of action. How we live is complicated. The choices we’re given do not set us up for success, and the systems in place are intentionally confusing. Much of the literature and ed- ucation around trash encourages personal change through bubbly, action-oriented behaviors without the information about why it’s important (or useless) beyond the basic idea of climate change or virtue signaling.

Action-oriented behaviors can certainly be useful and function to as- suage our eco-guilt (the guilt we have around not choosing the best, greenest option) but at the end of the day, the system is broken, and we as consumers have quite minimal power with our individual actions. A friend of mine has no municipal recycling or garbage pickup. When she took both types of waste to her local landfill, they had her dump both into the same pile, which would never be sorted. This is not to say that recycling never works or never happens, but knowing the realities of the infrastructure in place around you gives context for which actions do or do not help. This is by no means a get-out-of-jail-free card to take a nihil- istic approach and no personal responsibility, even though it’s a tempting route to lean toward. It’s certainly easy to slip into that mindset, and I often do, but there’s a balance of not totally throwing intentional actions out the window while recognizing we are each but blips in the grand scheme of waste generation.

Instead of shaming you or filling these pages with optimism, I hope to illuminate the real societal frameworks that, for the most part, we can’t see, so as to better understand where we fit into them, how to shift them, and how we got so deep into this global crisis. These systems range from advertising to manufacturing to class structures to ancient piles of oyster shells to bags of vomit on the moon to the mafia. Trash touches almost every facet of our daily lives, whether we are aware of it or not, and knowing more about the depths of the issue can show us where we can shift our be- havior, and where it’s the responsibility of larger systems to shift in order to halt current patterns and prevent future crises.

Context always matters, and there are extremely varied opinions when it comes to garbage. I will do my best to shed light on these topics and include different viewpoints on how these problems should be addressed. This is a rapidly shifting field of thought, and I am not an expert; but if anything, I hope context helps us all empathize with those negatively im- pacted by these problems, understand how we got to where we are, be angry at the right people, and navigate our personal responsibility. The situation is bleak, and this book is not a greenwashed portrayal of what’s going on. There are certainly bright spots as well as weird, gross, fascinat- ing, and surprising facets of the garbage world, but it’s often seeing the dark underbelly of an issue that shocks us into grasping the reality of it.

I hope what you learn will make you curious about the garbage all around you that you never noticed before.