Garbage Land

Author: Elizabeth Royte
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0316030732
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
Out of sight, out of mind ... Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels.... But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away? In Garbage Land, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us on the wild adventure that begins once our trash hits the bottom of the can. Along the way, we meet an odor chemist who explains why trash smells so bad; garbage fairies and recycling gurus; neighbors of massive waste dumps; CEOs making fortunes by encouraging waste or encouraging recycling-often both at the same time; scientists trying to revive our most polluted places; fertilizer fanatics and adventurers who kayak amid sewage; paper people, steel people, aluminum people, plastic people, and even a guy who swears by recycling human waste. With a wink and a nod and a tightly clasped nose, Royte takes us on a bizarre cultural tour through slime, stench, and heat-in other words, through the back end of our ever-more supersized lifestyles. By showing us what happens to the things we've "disposed of," Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact-and that unless we undertake radical change, the garbage we create will always be with us: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we consume. Radiantly written and boldly reported, Garbage Land is a brilliant exploration into the soiled heart of the American trash can.

Garbage Land

Author: Elizabeth Royte
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0316030732
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Designing America's Waste Landscapes

Author: Mira Engler
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801878039
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
Publisher Description

Throwaway Nation

Author: Jeff Dondero
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538110334
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Americans are burying ourselves in our own waste. It’s befouling our air, land, waters, food, and bodies. The US tosses out enough foodstuff to feed the rest of the world. America is the largest buyer of fashion and cosmetics, the second dirtiest industry in the world. We lead the planet in transportation usage and waste, and we’re now polluting outer space. Throwaway Nation takes a look at the pileup of waste in the US, including the problem of plastic, the industry of overmedication, e-waste products, everyday garbage, fast fashion trash, space waste, and other forms of profligacy that serve to make our nation the biggest waster on the planet. Looking at the environmental impact of so much garbage, Dondero explores not just how we got here and where we’re headed, but ways in which we might be able to curb the tide. From what you do and don’t eat, what and how your products are packaged, the rampant production of clothes, the space and waste in which you work, live, what you breath, eat, drink, the tools you use to work and play, the energy overproduced and ill-used for a pleasant lifestyle, the waste you generate, and how humans are beginning to clutter the cosmos—all and more are profiled in the Throwaway Nation—and what we ought to do to prohibit and mitigate the flow of our garbage and to use it productively.

Resisting Garbage

Author: Lily Baum Pollans
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477323708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Resisting Garbage presents a new approach to understanding practices of waste removal and recycling in American cities, one that is grounded in the close observation of case studies while being broadly applicable to many American cities today. Most current waste practices in the United States, Lily Baum Pollans argues, prioritize sanitation and efficiency while allowing limited post-consumer recycling as a way to quell consumers’ environmental anxiety. After setting out the contours of this “weak recycling waste regime,” Pollans zooms in on the very different waste management stories of Seattle and Boston over the last forty years. While Boston’s local politics resulted in a waste-export program with minimal recycling, Seattle created new frameworks for thinking about consumption, disposal, and the roles that local governments and ordinary people can play as partners in a project of resource stewardship. By exploring how these two approaches have played out at the national level, Resisting Garbage provides new avenues for evaluating municipal action and fostering practices that will create environmentally meaningful change.

Garbage World

Author: Charles Platt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description

Gone Tomorrow

Author: Heather Rogers
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1595585729
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
“A galvanizing exposé” of America’s trash problem from plastic in the ocean to “wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators” (Booklist, starred review). Eat a take-out meal, buy a pair of shoes, or read a newspaper, and you’re soon faced with a bewildering amount of garbage. The United States is the planet’s number-one producer of trash. Each American throws out 4.5 pounds daily. But garbage is also a global problem. Today, the Pacific Ocean contains six times more plastic waste than zooplankton. How did we end up with this much rubbish, and where does it all go? Journalist and filmmaker Heather Rogers answers these questions by taking readers on a grisly and fascinating tour through the underworld of garbage. Gone Tomorrow excavates the history of rubbish handling from the nineteenth century to the present, pinpointing the roots of today’s waste-addicted society. With a “lively authorial voice,” Rogers draws connections between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our throwaway lifestyle (New York Press). She also investigates the politics of recycling and the export of trash to poor countries, while offering a potent argument for change. “A clear-thinking and peppery writer, Rogers presents a galvanizing exposé of how we became the planet’s trash monsters. . . . [Gone Tomorrow] details everything that is wrong with today’s wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators. . . . Rogers exhibits black-belt precision.” —Booklist, starred review

Fat of the Land

Author: Benjamin Miller
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9781568581729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
A fascinating hidden history of trash peels back the lid on two centuries of garbage disposal in New York City, surveying the philosophies, technologies and personalities that have shaped this rich story. Original.

Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up

Author: A. Booth
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137482842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Book Description
A guidebook to the allusions of T.S. Eliot's notorious poem, The Waste Land , Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up utilizes the footnotes as a starting point, opening up the poem in unexpected ways. Organized according to Eliot's line numbers and designed for both scholars and students, chapters are free-standing and can be read in any order.

World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planetâand What We Can Do About It

Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1916444628
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Speaking out when it's unpopular. Back in the day, Henry David Thoreau raged at the robber barons-the big shots of their age, despoiling the environment in the name of progress. Deep in the throes of the seemingly unstoppable growth of tech, a modern-day Thoreau has emerged in the guise of Gerry McGovern-decrying the massive, hidden negative impacts of tech on the environment. McGovern has thoroughly documented in World Wide Waste how tech damages the Earth-and what we should be doing about it. It is not just the acres of discarded computer hardware conveniently dumped in Third World countries. Every time an email is downloaded it contributes to global warming. Every tweet, search, check of a webpage creates pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They're on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It's not. Digital costs the Earth.