num_pages: 288
description: A Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of Americas biggest export our most prodigious product and our greatest legacy: our trash. The average American produces 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime and $50 billion in squandered riches are rolled to the curb each year. But our bins are just the starting point for a strange impressive mysterious and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century. In Garbology Edward Humes investigates trashwhats in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families communities and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity. Along the way  he introduces a collection of garbage denizens unlike anyone youve ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles Garbage Mountain landfill the artists residing in San Franciscos dump and the family whose annual trash output fills not a dumpster or a trash can but a single mason jar. Garbology reveals not just what we throw away but who we are and where our society is headed. Waste is the one environmental and economic harm that ordinary working Americans have the power to changeand prosper in the process.
language: English
title: Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
publisher: Avery