Garbology: Chapter 8

Chapter 8 discussed about a man named Bill Rathje, founder of the Garbage project. He became the world's first garbologist and his discoveries revealed our lack of understanding of our own waste. I have to say, he should be known as a legend across the world. His project began when two of his students from the athropology class he was teaching, decided to study stereotypical ideas by studying neighborhood trash. They concluded that too much food was being thrown away. In the U.S. Army alone, they were throwing away food that were still perfectly edible. They later began to save 2.5 million pounds of wasted foods. This influenced Rathje's ideas and drove him to start the Garbage Project.

Throughout his discoveries, Rathje concluded that the biggest issue with trash was indeed food wasting. About 17 percent of our average waste is comprised of good waste. He also discovered that hazardous household waste such as paint, was illegally being dumped into ordinary trash bins. Humes mentions how Rathje and his workers had designed special collection days but that only felt like it was making it worse. At first the term "garbology" was a joke, but now it is actually accepted in various English dictionaries defined as "the study of a community or culture by analyzing its waste"(qtd by Humes 168). We have so much trash that we've created a term and a study of garbage.

Rathje's main purpose for this project was to make people understand that they do not necessarily know what their own trash consists of. To prove this theory, he surveyed American households and concluded that families overestimate their average intake of healthy foods and exaggerate the amount of unhealthy food and alcohol they actually consume. 

What surprised me the most was Rathje's discovery about how the garbage that we think gets decomposed, actually just sits there in the landfills. They had found newspapers from hundreds of years back that was still easily readable. The devices that were built to be biodegradable did not break down at all. In the first few chapters of Garbology, Humes discussed an important discovery that talked about how it is possible to create electricity with the amount of methane found in landfills. Well is this not the answer to our landfill problems? The trash found in landfills is found to last for a long time, as it just sits in the dumps. Can't that also mean that we could use this to our benefit and create long lasting electricity source? Thats a question I would like to ask Humes himself.

The part of the chapter that really got me thinking was when it discussed about how society has made the word "trash" a synonym to "waste". As Humes says, it is something we want to disappear, but isn't waste a verb, an action? 

After finishing this chapter, I got to thinking. How is it that people prefer to buy so much as they're wasting their money, trash it shortly after, and pay  taxes with their money just to keep it out of sight. They shouldn't waste money on things they don't need in the first place. As I continue reading, I begin to process more and more information that I was blinded to all this time. We need to change routines that shouldn't be routines in the first place.