Garbology

Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

By: Edward Humes

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

The average American produces 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime, and $50 billion in squandered riches are rolled to the curb each year. But our bins are just the starting point for a strange, impressive, mysterious, and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century.

In Garbology, Edward Humes investigates trash - what's in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families, communities, and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity. Along the way he introduces a collection of garbage denizens unlike anyone you've ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles' Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists residing in San Francisco's dump, and the family whose annual trash output fills not a dumpster or a trash can but a single mason jar.

Garbology reveals not just what we throw away but who we are and where our society is headed. Waste is the one environmental and economic harm that ordinary working Americans have the power to change - and prosper in the process.

©2012 Edward Humes (P)2016 Tantor

It might make you feel guilty.

However it also might inspire you to make less garbage and be part of the solution not such a big part of the problem.

Great listen!!!

This was a great book to listen to to get the basics on where our garbage goes and the future of our waste stream.

Very insightful

Easy to listen and comprehend. I found it informative and useful. Got some ideas how to reduce clutter.

A phenomenal read & serious eye-opener

I absolutely recommend this book. Everyone needs to know the information & insight it reveals about trash, what we do with it, & our remarkable rate of accumulating it. Read it & tell a friend, I’m baffled this still isn’t a common source of discussion

Go ZERO WASTE!

It is great to help you learn the process understanding garbage affects us and our economy.