Highly propagandized with unsubstantiated claims against anything capitalistic or democratic. Interestingly she chose a disposable item to convey her very tainted messages about trash. ( )

I read this when it first came out, in 2006, and despite other reviewers' complaints of its dullness, I found it fascinating and extremely readable. And it angered me. One particular chapter I remember most clearly - one that I tend to cite during dinner parties, before I stop myself - is called "The Golden Age of Waste", and deals with the post-war consumer boom in America. Everyone had a kitchen full of shiny new appliances, so advertisers began to convince people they needed a second fridge for the garage, a second washer and dryer for the "related living" setup in their new sprawling ranches. When this tactic failed to move enough units, the idea of built-in obsolescence began to take hold.

Or take the neat trick that pop bottlers have pulled on the American public since the early 1970s: To maximize profits, they did away with multi-use, refillable bottles, and shifted the burden of bottle disposal onto the consumer, then admonished the consumer to "Keep America Beautiful(KAB)." The story of how this was effected, and the cynicism of the KAB campaign is enough to make any recycling-minded person weep.

Author Heather Rogers was born the year before this reviewer, and one suspects she, too, was a child of PBS's "Sesame Street" and "The Big Blue Marble," and was also encouraged to "Give a Hoot" by Woodsy the Owl. Her clear prose and meticulous research make this a book to be savored and revisited, and recommended to anyone with even a passing interested in understanding the history and problems of garbage in America. ( )

Not even thinly disguised watermelon propaganda. This is a book treatment of a documentary by Heather Rogers. There is the usual environmental litany – landfills leach “toxics”, incinerators “spew” smoke, Diesel garbage trucks “belch” exhaust (sometimes the incinerators belch and the trucks spew, for variety). It is all, of course, the fault of Capitalism, which forces the downtrodden to consume and discard. Rogers quotes Das Kapital three or four times, and at one point describes how the masses inexplicably cooperate with their “class enemies”. Needless to say, the solution to the garbage problem is always increased government oversight (to give her some small credit, she never actually uses the word “socialism”).


Unfortunately for her, Rogers repeatedly dilutes her own argument by recounting numerous examples of the benevolent government making things worse on the trash front, starting all the way back with the New York City banning free-roaming pigs in 1849 (free-roaming pigs were good in Roger’s book, since they gave the working class a source of protein, and their elimination put the workers even more into the grip of Capital, since now they had to buy ham instead of growing it themselves). The unintentional self-parody goes on; somehow home incinerators are good but their bad when Capital runs them; privately owned trash collection is bad but when the government puts small scavengers out of business by prohibiting landfill picking that’s bad too; the huge trash conglomerates like BFI and Waste Management are extremely bad, because they are capitalistic, but it was good when the cities contracted with them to lower rates. Like the EPA, Rogers favors lower consumption rather than recycling – but then argues that recycling creates jobs. When I was in the business, the major obstacles to recycling were EPA regulations.


Rogers has the same affection for “the good old days” held by many people who didn’t live through them, pointing out (with several references to the previously reviewed Waste and Want) that Americans used to use it up, fix it up, make it do, or do without – without the accompanying note that those things involved boiling down fireplace ashes to mix with hog fat for soap or having you children gather dog excrement off the street to sell to tanners. She praises a San Francisco commune that recycles its “grey water” for irrigating a garden - without noting that government health code regulations almost always prohibit such use (they do in all the Colorado jurisdictions I’ve checked; don’t know about San Francisco), and washing and reusing glass jars for drinking containers instead of disposable cups (without doing the energy analysis to demonstrate that such use is actually beneficial or studying the health risks involved). And she tiptoes around the disposable diaper issue, noting that it makes things more convenient for mothers but again managing to blame capitalists by claiming that they could have made reusable diapers just as convenient if they had devoted the same amount or research effort. The book is full of blanket, undocumented assertions like this.


Even blind pigs find acorns (until regulations prohibit it) so there is a short redeeming section on the New York City garbage wars. Up until the 1990s, the NYC trash hauling business was run by the Mob (in a peculiar lack of political correctness, Rogers goes out of her way to point out that the earlier gangsters in the trash business were Italian-Americans and Jews. Oh, wait, I forgot it’s politically correct to dis Jews now). The NYC garbage business (for commercial and industrial customers; residential trash was municipal) was composed of hundreds of small companies, some with as little as one truck and four employees. They all paid protection and were guaranteed business – unpleasant things happened to you if you jumped somebody else’s trash claim. New York City disposal rates were the two to three times as high as any other major city. BFI and WM decided they were tougher than the Mob, and (with the assistance of the NYC district attorney and the FBI) that turned out to be the case – even though one of the WM executives had a dead dog wired to his doorknob with a note reading “Welcome to New York” in its mouth. A couple of small company owners that had assisted the prosecutors were shot to death in their office, but other than the dead dog the most the big companies got were threatening phone calls and some equipment sabotage (they had armed guards on their trucks for a while). I remember reading part of the story serialized in Waste Age, but didn’t read the whole thing until here.


Well, I really can’t recommend this one to anybody who doesn’t want their blood pressure raised to potentially dangerous levels. I suppose it should be read, just like Creationist literature should be read, just to get a handle on how to rebut stuff like this – but it’s a strain. ( )

I read this book immediately after finishing GarbageLand. Both authors are from New York City, both books came out in 2006. Two authers dealing with the same subject, starting in the same geographic area, could I possibly learn anything from a second book about garbage? Unequivocally: YES.

Rogers' work is vastly superior in her analysis of historic, political and economic information. After a start that was nearly a mirror of GarbageLand where she talked about how city trash was handled in the early days (mostly pigs roaming the streets), to early sanitation attempts, the evolution of landfills and other disposal methods. After the historic overview, Rogers moves into how garbage came to be such an enormous problem. Much of what we discard is still usable as it is, or could be put to use in a different fashion.

According to the author, our society had to be conditioned and encouraged to create waste. A marketing consultant from the mid-twentieth century named Victor Lebow is quoted, "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption..."
p. 114

Rogers points out that while recycling does offer real benefits, it also functions to divert public attention away from stronger reforms. The idea of recycling serves as a message that greater consumption is fine because the act of discarding can be environmentally responsible. Manufacturers also improve their own image by reinventing themselves as "caretakers of the planet" and unleashed what Rogers calls, "a new phase in corporate greenwashing."

Polluters, regardless of how touching their ad campaigns, will not willingly engage in any meaningful change in their production practices without regulation. Unfortunately, the current popular terror against government regulation of anything works to maintain the problem as it is. Rogers appeals to citizens of the U.S. to remember that governments must act in the public interest, and not simply an agent of business. ( )

This is an excellently written and informative history of residential trash handling over the last century. The author's focus is primarily on presenting the facts to support her central thesis: wasting is immoral. This very strong persuasive style permeates the book almost to the point of calling into question the factual content. In places where I knew facts before reading the book, I was surprised by her presentation at times. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed each and every chapter, and put down the book each day better educated than the day before. ( )