Chapter 9 of Garbology was both fascinating and disappointing. What fascinated me was how Recology, a waste company located in San Francisco, had talented artists like Andrew Junge and Hector Dio Mendoza create astonishing artwork from items found in local trash dumps. The disappointing side of this is the fact that we accumulate enough trash to make enormous art pieces. Humes specifies in Chapter 9 how Mendoza had put his designs together. The trunk of the tree is made out of drug ads, its branches built from credit card offers, and its leaves made out of catalog pages. It's a symbol of our terrible wasting habits in tree form is what I call it. Andrew Junge built a life-sized Hummer out of plastic foam.
I truly was amazed by Recology and the duties they perform. It is now one of the biggest trash companies around, as well as, the biggest organic compositor. Recology found a way to sort reusable trash and use them for fertilizer. By creating this cycle, we could reduce trash drastically.
After finishing Chapter 9, I began to realize the difference between recycling and actually making less waste. I agree with Humes' beliefs that, getting rid of this trash epidemic doesn't just mean that we have to waste less and take less to the landfills, its trying to change the mentalities of people. We have to make people understand that buying paper plates or throwing away tones of plastic bottles is not what our culture should be adapting to. We shouldn't make decisions with a scale of how convenient you could make your daily tasks. As people's mentalities change, people will buy less non-biodegradable products, manufacturer's will stop making them, and our landfills will stop piling up with things that just stick around.
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