Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash - Hardcover

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AUTHORBIO: Elizabeth Royte has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper s, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker. She was the recipient of an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship in 1999. She lives in Brooklyn.

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The v-p of a New York City waste transfer station recommends, "You want to solve the garbage problem? Stop eating. Stop living." Indeed, to ponder waste disposal is to confront the very limits of our society. Where does it all go? Most of us are content to shrug off the details—as long as it's out of sight (and smell). Not so journalist Royte, whose book in some ways (including its title) echoes Fast Food Nation. That McDonald's is more immediately engaging a subject doesn't make, say, the massive, defunct Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., any less compelling. Royte nicely balances autobiographical elements (where does her Fig Newmans carton end up, anyway?), interviews and fieldwork with more technical research. Her method yields palpable benefits, not least a wealth of vivid refuse-related slang (maggots are known as disco rice). The details unavoidably venture into the nauseating on occasion, and some might find the chemistry of trichloroethane and other toxins a bit dull. As the NIMBY logic of waste disposal forces its practitioners into secrecy, Royte is obliged to engage in some entertainingly furtive skullduggery. All in all, this is a comprehensive, readable foray into a world we'd prefer not to heed—but should.
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Royte, a science writer, has written a disturbing and enlightening book about the 2 percent of our total waste stream that American households generate. Despite Garbage Land’s almost inevitable environmentalist sympathies, Royte does not offer up easy answers; in fact, she leaves readers sensing the futility of their own small efforts to recycle and reduce waste. Although Royte considers herself to be "in the middle of the argument," her liberal perspective might grate some readers. Even though portions of the book are overly technical or obviously biased, Garbage Land transcends the usual environmental audience to interest any reader.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Royte is a journalist with a nose for the "sordid afterlife" of trash, thoroughly at home in the putrid world of "Coney Island whitefish" (used condoms); "disco rice" (maggots); and—the darling of American consumer culture and the nemesis of waste activists—"Satan's resin" (plastic). Her book takes the form of a quest for the surprising final resting places of her yogurt cups, beer bottles, personal computer, and organic-fig-cookie packaging, and leads to an impassioned attack on overconsumption in America. If Royte does not quite demonstrate the muckraking skills of an Eric Schlosser in "Fast Food Nation," she does expose the feculent underside of our appetite for things and challenges her readers to disprove the resigned assessment of a former New York sanitation commissioner: "In the end, the garbage will win."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

*Starred Review* A visit to the filthy Gowanus Canal near her Brooklyn home got Royte thinking about garbage. What exactly does her family throw out each day? Who carries it away, where is it taken, how is it processed? To find out, she catalogs her daily household garbage and tracks her trash to garbage transit stations, landfills, and recycling plants. Royte's nervy and unprecedented journey through the land of garbage is fascinating, appalling, and--thanks to her keen first-person journalism, commonsense skepticism, and amusing personal asides--downright entertaining. Some of her more troubling disclosures include the hazards of sewage sludge and "e-waste," that is, discarded computers, televisions, and cell phones. Smart and persistent, Royte annoys the heck out of closemouthed government officials and waste-management businesspeople and trespasses when denied access to key sites, enduring foul smells and bad vibes to glean the truth about how waste is handled, who profits from waste, what opportunities are wasted, and how waste can be reduced. What her staggering expose tells us is that as the quantity, variety, and toxicity of our garbage increases, we must, like nature, evolve ways to reclaim and reuse everything we make. Donna Seaman
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