Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

Bea Johnson lives a virtually waste-free life with her family in a San Francisco suburb. She is a sustainable living blogger and helps families live with less through her company Be Simple. The Johnson family limits purchases and excludes wasteful items. They avoid packaging by shopping at specialized packaging-free stores and fit an entire year’s worth of trash into one mason jar.

Andy Keller formed the company ChicoBag after visiting his local landfill. ChicoBag makes reusable bags to replace single-use plastic bags. Keller created the character of the Bag Monster as part of a public relations and educational campaign to promote sustainability in schools and communities across the US. Keller and ChicoBag were sued by three plastic bag manufacturers in an effort to quiet his criticism of their products. The suit settled out of court, but ChicoBag and Keller’s anti-plastic message gained prominence because of publicity from the lawsuit.

J. Gordon Lippincott is the advertising genius behind the rise of the disposable economy. Lippincott used the rise of commercial television advertising in the 1960s to convince Americans to buy more, frequently upgrade perfectly usable products for newer ones, and not worry about disposing of anything. Lippincott brought a mantra of consumption to the American lexicon and banished the Depression ideal of frugality. 

When Garbology was published, David Steiner was the CEO of Waste Management, the largest trash disposal company and largest global holder of landfill real estate. Under Steiner’s leadership, Waste Management implemented several green initiatives and was a leader in waste-to-energy production, though its business model remains dependent on landfills and waste production.

Zhang Yin is the founder of Nine Dragons Paper Holdings, a multibillion-dollar company and recycling industry leader. Yin began collecting and shipping US paper waste to China in the 1990s to be recycled. China had a timber shortage and paid well for the US trash, which was inexpensive for Yin to collect and ship because she stocked empty vessels returning to China from US ports. With Nine Dragons Paper Holdings, Yin became China’s first female billionaire. 

Bill Rathje became the world’s first garbologist when he founded the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona in the 1970s. Rathje is an anthropologist who led a team for more than 30 years to deduce insights about our civilization by studying garbage.

New York City appointed Colonel George E. Waring garbage czar in the early 1900s. Waring trained over 2,000 street cleaners, instituted household recycling programs, and pioneered waste-to-energy initiatives that were replicated throughout the country and formed the basis of modern municipal waste collection. Journalists credited Waring’s efforts with eradicating disease in the city’s ghettos.