Garbology Quotes

“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“The push for us to throw perfectly good things away and buy new things to replace them so that somebody else can get rich--an idea that goes against our own basic instincts and common sense--still holds us in thrall. We are married to a disposable economy dependent on waste.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Gluttony is, after all, one of the seven deadly sins, and it's not because it's associated with obesity, a threat to an individual's survival, but because it represents overconsumption to the point of wastefulness, a threat to an entire community. Today, a gluttony of consumption has become the norm.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Agreeing with the Johnson's views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change. ... It's always easier to oppose change than to propose it. Picking up trash on the beach makes us feel good. Admitting we lead wasteful lives that need to change--not so much.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Once upon a time, it used to require a sacrifice to buy something. you saved up, you gave up thing you might want just so you could put enough money aside to purchase something big or long-lasting or vital. Now, people tend to think the sacrifices is not buying.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Refuse. Because every time you say yes, you are inviting more to be made. You have created demand for more waste. So we refuse all of that.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“That study confirmed Keller's point: that a reusable grocery bag made of non-woven polypropylene plastic would have to be used at least eleven times to have a lower carbon footprint than using disposable single-use grocery bags. There were other comparisons in the study, too: Using a paper bag three times would do the trick, while it would take 131 trips to the market with a cotton bag to have a lower carbon footprint - which meant the material used for a reusable bag was critical.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Recycling trash, on the other hand, has a lower environmental impact and pound for pound, can save more energy than burning the same trash produces. Recycling aluminum cans, for instance, saves a whopping 96 percent of the energy needed to produce aluminum from bauxite ore. Recycling glass jars and bottles saves 21 percent of the energy needed to make new glass, recycling newsprint saves 45 percent, and recycling plastic beverage bottles saves 76 percent (other plastic types differ in the percentages, but the energy savings are there, too).”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Refusing things - and, specifically, disposable things - should not be confused with sacrifice, she says. Once upon a time, it used to require a sacrifice to buy something. You saved up, you gave up things you might want just so you could put enough money aside to purchase something big or long-lasting or vital. Now, she says, people tend to think the sacrifice is not buying. That's one reason we are swimming in waste, Bea says. In her view, not buying is never a sacrifice, It's a way of saving up for something really important, or saving time, or saving the planet. Or all three.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“The universally positive way in which these two are perceived makes for a fascinating contrast with the reactions that Bea Johnson provokes in people. The reasons for this are subtle but instructive. The first two trash-fighters identify a problem of waste in the outside world and ask people to give of their money or time to help solve it. And people do just that. They can spend money at a yard sale or spend time on the beach and help save the world - without making any fundamental changes in their own homes or lives.
But Johnson and her zero-waste crusade are a whole different animal. She has identified a problem not on a campus or a beach but inside everyone's home and lifestyle. And her family has responded by transforming itself in a dramatic way, becoming happier and more prosperous by rejecting the consumer economy and lifestyle most Americans live and breathe. Is there any wonder why this angers so many people ? Agreeing with the Johnsons' views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change. A kind of cultural physics comes into play in this sort of situation, a fundamental, almost Newtonian principle that states it's always easier to oppose change than to propose it. Or put another way, picking up trash on the beach makes us feel good. Admitting we lead wasteful lives that need to change - not so much.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Such perverse incentives for waste permeate the economy. Most sanitation systems charge homeowners the same rate for large amounts of trash rolled to the curb as they do for small amounts - one flat fee for all, whether your neighbor makes half the trash you do, or twice as much. But some communities use a "pay as you throw" model: make less waste to be hauled away, use a smaller size bin at the curb, and you pay less each month. Bigger trash bins receive bigger bills because there's more to haul - an eminently fair setup. With that model, an incentive to be wasteful is replaced by an incentive to be thrifty. Give each homeowner a recycling bin and make hauling its contents free regardless of the amount of recyclables inside, and another incentive is born: an economic incentive to sort trash properly (which a surprising number of people resist under the what's in it for me? objection to the minor inconvenience of sorting).”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Garbage has become one of the most accurate measures of prosperity in twenty-first century America and the world.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Half the oxygen we breathe emanates from microscopic phytoplankton sloshing around the surface of the ocean. After literally billions of years of performing that essential, priceless service, those vital organisms now must swim and feed and survive in a sea of plastic soup. Figuring out what’s up with those organisms is, Goldstein suggests, a pretty vital matter. If we are inadvertently killing them off, the result could be far less visible, but even more devastating, than deforestation.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“No matter where you are, there’s no getting over it, no getting away from it,” he has said. “It’s a plastic ocean now … We’re putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“We’re putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash