You can tell a lot about a neighborhood or city by examining its trash. Below are two pieces of paper I found on the street behind our house.
On the left is a sheet of music for the song “By the Sea” which is part of the musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Baber of Fleet Street.” Stephen Sondheim wrote the song.
On the right is a sheet that is to be used to critique a research paper on Faustian bargains. A Faustian bargain is one in which a person trades something of moral value for knowledge, power, or riches. For example, selling your soul for lots of gold. An example research paper is On the Faustian Dynamics of Policy and Power.
Our trash could have been liquor bottles or McDonald burger wrappers or soiled diapers or meth spoons. Not this neighborhood. We seem to be chock full of intellectuals and artists. Or maybe some neighbor kid who is taking AP courses had a strong wind rip pages out of their binder.
Archologists study the garbage of ancient civilizations. Garbology is the study of modern refuse .
William Rathje is regarded as the founder of Garbology. His studies of landfills in 1987 led to conclusions such as:
Americans were wrong about what they thought they threw away most. When combined, the three most infamous types of trash—diapers, fast food containers, and Styrofoam—amounted to less than three percent of the landfill’s waste. Rathje found that plastic was 20-24% of waste and paper alone was 40 percent of the waste found in landfills. Thirteen percent of this paper waste was from newspapers.
Who knew ?
A picture of William Rathje at work is below on the left. As Americans we should be proud that the largest landfill in the world (photo on the right) is in Las Vegas. At 2,200 acres it is more than twice the size of other top ten landfills in China, India, and Mexico. I guess the casino visitors produce a lot of trash – the landfill gets 9,000 tons of garbage a day. Probably not too many scores for Broadway musicals are in that garbage.
You might have expected that most plastic in this country was recycled rather than tossed into the garbage can. While the amount of plastic that is recycled has increased it is still a minor percentage of all discarded household plastic. The graph below shows the level of plastic waste in US municipal solid waste disposal sites per annum (in tons).
You might wonder why the amount of plastic dumped into landfills has increased over the last 20 years? I did. The answer (from the National Renewable Energy Lab – part of the Department of Energy).
The researchers noted the amount of landfilled plastic waste in the United States has been increasing because of several factors, including low recycling rates, population growth, consumer preference for single-use plastics (straws, bottles, utensils), and low disposal fees in certain parts of the country (it’s cheap to dump stuff reducing the desire to reuse). The problem has been exacerbated by China’s refusal beginning in 2017 to import nonindustrial plastic waste from the United States.
I love fascinating tidbits of information like this! I bet you are amazing at Jeopardy. Also, the trash in my neighborhood isn’t as intellectual as yours, as the other day I walked by a Michelob Ultra Light can and a black construction garbage bag. I think that tells me someone likes to do home improvement while drinking low-carb beer!