Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

  • Edward Humes
Avery: 2012. 288 pp. £16.90, $27 9781583334348 | ISBN: 978-1-5833-3434-8

Consumption drives economies but threatens human existence. Two books deal with this global issue in diametrically opposed ways. Ecologist Rob Hengeveld's Wasted World is a monumental cri de coeur, echoing ground-breaking 1970s thinking on the issue. But Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist Edward Humes' Garbology delivers hard facts and practical solutions.

Credit: MARTIN O'NEILL

The United States accounts for one-fifth of global consumption but only one-twentieth of the world's population. Humes focuses on how to reduce the average US citizen's lifetime legacy of 93 tonnes of refuse, using personal stories to draw out the wider social issues around waste management.

The usual approach, Humes observes, has been to make waste “appear to disappear”. This is borne out by evocative examples such as the great Pacific garbage patch: not a continent-sized floating island of rubbish, as many imagine, but rather a “swirling sewer” of “barely visible particles circling endlessly”. Humes shows how innovative clean-up technologies — such as an artificial 'beach' that collects fine marine debris but not sea life — can be part of the solution. But the more practical answer, he says, is to avoid creating the waste in the first place.

Reducing waste means consuming differently. Humes doesn't believe that profligate consumption is hard to shift. He sees humans as naturally thrifty, and points out that prodigious marketing has gone into creating modern consumer culture, down to the engineered 'preference' for plastic bags over paper ones. Not that Humes is anti-business: as in his book Force of Nature (HarperBusiness, 2011), he presents a balanced picture of the choices faced by major companies.

Key to Humes's 'can do' message are case studies of commercially successful innovations. Recycling company TerraCycle, for instance, was launched in 2001 by two students at Princeton University in New Jersey, who turned university food waste into organic fertilizer by feeding it to earthworms. Their start-up gained publicity from lawsuits lodged by a larger competitor contesting their advertising claims, even though they lost. TerraCycle is now one of the world's fastest-growing recycling firms.

Humes thinks that individuals can make a difference by simply saying no to unwanted stuff, and focusing on the cost of lifetime ownership rather than the purchase price. The pioneers of new attitudes towards waste, says Humes, are “ordinary people”, not moralists or separatists. In this sense, his book is simultaneously reassuring and radical.

Wasted World: How Our Consumption Challenges the Planet

  • Rob Hengeveld
Univ. Chicago Press: 2012. 360 pp. $30, £19.50 9780226326993 | ISBN: 978-0-2263-2699-3

In Wasted World, Hengeveld's intellectual compass is firmly aligned with the powerful decades-old environmental rhetoric of thinkers such as environmentalist Donella Meadows (co-author of The Limits to Growth; Universe Books, 1972) and population biologist Paul Ehrlich. Hengeveld argues that we are depleting resources and polluting the environment faster than human survival can bear — literally “wasting” the planet.

To his credit, Hengeveld squanders no space on using resources more efficiently in support of economic growth. He homes in on how the human population already exceeds Earth's capacity. His basic argument is convincing, but most of the book is a rambling litany on how we waste our world. When Hengeveld finally commits to how much Earth can carry — and gives one paragraph of solutions — he proposes that we reduce the population to less than one billion, through contraception and voluntary sterilization.

Aside from the plan's obvious difficulties, it points the finger at the populations that are growing fastest, not those consuming most. Indeed, Hengeveld says that 75% of Earth-threatening future population growth will be in “poor, non-developing countries”. By contrast, the United Nations estimates that the least-developed countries (LDCs) will contribute around 38% of growth up to 2050.

More important is that the LDCs have an annual energy consumption of less than 500 kilograms of oil equivalent per capita, compared with 7,045 kg in the United States. So a Haitian or Ethiopian family of 14 uses less and pollutes less than a single US citizen.

Any serious discussion of planetary capacity must address this. Paul and Anne Ehrlich's most recent analyses give equal weight to population, inequality and power. But Hengeveld does not engage much with these ideas, nor with research that explores how a steady-state society might live, work, eat and govern.

One of Humes's interviewees suggests that the liberty at the heart of the American dream is a call to the financial freedom of reduced consumption, rather than bondage to belongings. Messages such as these — which Humes dubs “the new normal” — strike a chord in these times of recession, resource scarcity and uncertain futures.