INTRODUCTION
On the second floor of the Manhattan East Sanitation Garage Number 11, over 45,000 objects are on display in a museum most people will never see. Treasures in the Trash is the life’s work of Nelson Molina, a retired sanitation worker who spent over thirty years saving things from the landfill while he worked his garbage route in Harlem. You can find Star Wars toys, rows of Pez dispensers, a Christmas corner with a life-size Santa, and even a signed letter from the White House, all pulled from bags and bins waiting to be emptied.
Treasures in the Trash isn’t open to the public, but Molina hopes his collection will eventually be moved to a space where “the people can come and see it,” he says. “People go to a museum, they see these artifacts. What I think people ought to see in a museum are what a sanitation worker picks out of the garbage that New Yorkers throw out every single day.”
Across the ocean, sanitation workers in Turkey rescued two hundred books from the trash and opened a library that now has over six thousand volumes! The library lends books to schools, prisons, and other programs around the country.
Have you ever heard the saying A weed is any plant that’s in the wrong place? The same goes for your trash: If you don’t want it, and you throw it in the garbage can, it’s garbage, right?
Is it still garbage if someone like Nelson Molina finds it and puts it in a museum?
In this book, we’re going to learn about trash by asking a few simple questions: What is garbage, where does it come from, where does it go, why do we make so much of it, and how can we do better? We’re also going to ask just how bad the trash problem is for ourselves and our planet, and if our garbage has anything to teach us.
The answers to those questions, and to almost every other question about your garbage, get pretty complicated. So put your gloves on and let’s take a peek in the trash!
Chapter One: WHAT IS GARBAGE?
Everything in the Treasures in the Trash museum, technically, is trash. In this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at garbage throughout history, but keep this idea in mind: How much of our garbage is really worthless? Or does “trash” have different meanings, depending on who’s looking at it?
OLD GARBAGE, NEW GARBAGE
Near the shores of the Mediterranean 2,500 years ago, a child played with a homemade doll. The doll’s body was made of rags, perhaps scraps left over from sewing clothes, and its head was made of clay. In the present day, across the ocean in North America, a child uses a tablet to play a video game, designing an avatar and choosing clothes for it.
The rag doll ended up in a scrap heap thousands of years ago, and the tablet is probably headed to the trash sooner or later. As long as there have been humans, there has been garbage. But as the doll and the tablet show us, people might have stayed the same throughout history, but our garbage has changed a lot.
What’s the difference between trash from a few millennia ago and trash today? For one thing, the kind of stuff we throw away has changed. For most of human history, trash has consisted of natural materials, including food scraps, wood, shell, clay pottery, stone, and bone.
The child who played with the rag doll lived in a world where everything else was made of natural materials too. Plastics and electronics didn’t exist 2,500 years ago, and even certain types of metals, like stainless steel, hadn’t been invented yet. In the pre-industrial world, things were made by hand, which meant that they were made more slowly and therefore they were considered more valuable. If you had to make everything you used, you’d be more likely to take care of it all and try to fix something when it broke, especially if you couldn’t just go to the store to buy a new one!
This doesn’t mean that families didn’t create garbage before the modern era, but they certainly made a lot less of it. A household might have dug a pit in the yard or used an old well to hold their garbage. The garbage pit would have been full of the discards of ordinary life: bones and other food waste, broken pottery, building materials, and broken tools.
Take a look at your kitchen trash can and your recycling bin. What kinds of materials are in there? You might see some natural materials like food scraps, or things made from a combination of natural materials and synthetic chemicals, like printed paper. You probably see a lot of plastic.
If you have a tablet or computer at home, its case is probably made of plastic, and you’ll find plastic in its inner workings as well. Think back to the rag doll: If you have a doll today, chances are it’s store-bought and made of plastic. You bring it home and remove it from its packaging. Some dolls have even been designed for “unboxing,” with a series of plastic packaging to go through: plastic wrap around its plastic container, which contains more plastic packaging for each of its tiny pieces of plastic clothing.
The same goes for most of the things in your house. Try going through just one room and see what you can find that has no plastic in it. It’s harder than you might think. Even the fabric on your couch is probably made of plastic!
GETTING RID OF TRASH
Nothing much changed in the world of trash disposal for quite a while from the days of the household trash pit or scrap pile. Ancient Athens experimented with town dumps, ruling that no citizen could dispose of trash within a mile of the city limits. Mayans in the Yucatán Peninsula had central dumps too, although they often disposed of trash outside their homes, as did households all over the world. In medieval Paris, heaps of trash around the city were so enormous they made it hard for French soldiers to see invading armies!
Some European city streets in the Middle Ages had a single gutter running down the center to carry rainwater (and urine) away to nearby waterways. Residents often treated them as garbage heaps, blocking the channels with everything from construction rubble to poop to dead animals.
To prevent trash from piling up, some medieval cities created official dump sites outside city boundaries and charged fines to anyone who was caught dumping their waste in the streets. In Coventry, England, a law stated that all animal dung had to be carted away. Dung-covered streets were such a problem that some cities provided dung carts for citizens to use! Medieval farmers knew the value of all that poop: It was collected and used as manure for local fields.
But things we don’t need anymore haven’t always been tossed or trashed. Wherever there has been a profit to be made from other people’s castoffs, there has been someone willing to try. The “rag-and-bone man” sounds like a character from a scary story, but for centuries, these peddlers would collect scraps and broken objects from American households, offering more useful things like pots, pans, or tools in exchange.
Peddlers could sell scrap metal to manufacturers and things like ashes and cooking grease to soap makers. A few scraps of fabric might not be useful to one family, but in the days before paper was made from wood pulp, a peddler could collect a large quantity of rags and sell them to a papermaker. Peddlers often followed regular routes in rural areas, where a trip to the dry goods store in a wagon over dirt roads could take all day.
Waste pickers were another essential part of the garbage economy. In large American cities after the Civil War, formerly enslaved people and immigrants often did the work of separating different types of waste straight from the trash piles of wealthier people and selling anything of value to junk dealers. While the wealthy might have thought that their old rags, rubber, wool, bottles, and metals were worthless, the waste pickers understood their value and turned countless piles of castoffs into cash for themselves and their families.
Even children had a role in the business of making money from garbage. In nineteenth-century London, children known as mudlarks scoured the banks of the River Thames at low tide for coal, nails, or anything else they might be able to sell to earn a few pennies. As recently as the mid-twentieth century in Finland, children would comb through waste piles and sell the paper they found to buy candy and toys.
As more goods were made in factories instead of by hand, we started to make more garbage. Suddenly it became easier to buy new things—and easier to throw away old things. The Industrial Revolution also brought more people crowding into cities in search of jobs and new experiences, and where there are lots of people, there is lots and lots of trash.
One common way of handling edible garbage in cities and rural areas was pig-keeping. Some cities in the United States allow people to keep chickens today, but in the 1800s, pigs and horses were a common sight too. At one point, New York City was home to 100,000 pigs, usually owned by members of the working class who let their hogs graze on garbage before slaughtering them for food: literal trash to treasure!
When they weren’t inviting pigs to eat their food scraps, New Yorkers and other city dwellers relied on ocean dumping to dispose of their mounting waste. Garbage was loaded onto barges and dumped at sea or in rivers. No one except frustrated city officials liked this solution because the garbage often returned on the tide or showed up in a downstream community.
In the 1890s, Washington D.C.’s practice of dumping its waste into the Potomac River angered the citizens of Alexandria, Virginia, so much that some of them captured a flat-bottomed, garbage-hauling boat and set fire to it. That might seem like an extreme way of dealing with the problem, but imagine the monthly garbage output of D.C. washing up in your town: It included not only thousands of tons of household trash, but hundreds of dead horses and a thousand dead dogs.
As more people crowded into cities from other countries, mainly from Europe, and from rural parts of the United States, household trash became an ever-larger problem. None of the usual solutions were ideal, as they came with their own complications. Pigs might eat trash, but they leave something behind too. Imagine the stench created by thousands of city- dwelling pigs!
In the mid-nineteenth century, New York City began an experiment with a new technology called waste reduction. This isn’t the same reduction you’re probably familiar with from “reduce, reuse, recycle.” In this case, reduction means to literally reduce the volume of garbage (mainly food scraps and dead animals) by cooking it in enormous vats where the solids condensed and were used to make fertilizer for farms. The greasy liquid that was created in this process was then used to make soap and candles.
The city put all its reduction plants on Barren Island near Brooklyn, and soon a community of mostly immigrant and African American workers and their families grew on the island. Eventually a one-room schoolhouse was built for the island’s children, but after the single teacher left, no replacement came for eighteen years.
While the reduction process removed a lot of the city’s trash from the public eye, it was still very much in the public nose. As you can imagine, boiling large quantities of dead horses (so many that the waters surrounding Barren Island became known as Dead Horse Bay) created such a foul smell that the wealthy owners of nearby estates complained that it was ruining their health and happiness. Chances are, they weren’t very worried about the health or happiness of the people who worked and lived on Barren Island, but they had a good reason to be concerned about the stink. Until the discovery of germs, many people thought disease could be spread by bad smells.
New York also built the country’s first municipal incinerator, a controlled facility designed to reduce the volume of trash by burning it down to ash. The ash could then be used as filler in construction but was often dumped in waterways or in open pits just as before.
A cheaper solution was simply to dump trash into open pits on the outskirts of cities, in low-lying areas, or along coasts, but that practice brought all the same problems found by leaving trash on city streets, from the stench to rat infestations. It also added new problems that came from having so much garbage collected in one place. Toxic gas filled the air as masses of garbage decomposed, causing air pollution and even fires. In some places, bears were seen scavenging in open pits.
Today, any of your household trash that doesn’t get recycled or reused probably ends up in a modern sanitary landfill, although a few cities run modern incinerators. Sanitary landfills have been the most common way to dispose of our trash in the United States since the first one opened in the 1930s.
MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE
The official name for all the stuff that we throw away at home, at school, and in our restaurants, stores, and offices is municipal solid waste, or MSW. MSW covers all the things we toss regularly: paper and cardboard, glass, metals, plastics, yard waste, food scraps, wood, rubber and leather, textiles (like clothing), and miscellaneous trash that doesn’t easily fit into any of the other categories. It doesn’t include things like construction debris, industrial waste, hazardous waste, or electronics. It doesn’t count medical waste, although it does count other types of everyday waste from hospitals.
The Environmental Protection Agency, or the EPA, tracks the amount of municipal solid waste American communities make every year. In 2018, we made an average of 4.9 pounds of trash per person per day, for a total of 292 million tons. That’s the weight of over 5,600 ships the size of the Titanic! The biggest waste category is paper and cardboard. Next comes food scraps, then yard waste and plastics, and then metals like aluminum (soda cans) and steel (soup cans).
The average is 4.9 pounds, so you might have made less than that, or possibly more. Imagine if you had to carry it all around with you for a week, as students in some environmental studies classes do! Our daily personal trash output has stayed pretty steady for the past few decades, but our total garbage output keeps going up. In 2018, the country made 84.1 million tons more garbage than in 1990. Why? Because today we have a larger population, which means more people making trash.
The EPA also tracks where we send our trash. In 2018, we recycled 24 percent of our trash and composted 9 percent of it. After incinerating 12 percent and handling some food waste in other ways, the rest, 50 percent, went to the landfill. That’s half of our trash in landfills. The biggest category of landfilled waste: food. Food makes up over 24 percent of everything we send to landfills. Plastics is just behind at almost 19 percent. We’ll look more closely at how we make all this garbage and exactly what happens on each of these trash pathways later on.
AWAY
Why should we think about what happens to our garbage after it’s left our homes and curbside bins? One answer might be that it’s never really gone.
Imagine a candy bar in a wrapper made of flexible plastic. You eat the candy bar, you throw the wrapper away, someone empties the garbage can and takes it away, and eventually it just goes away. Away might mean that you don’t have to think about that piece of trash anymore, but it doesn’t mean it disappears completely.
We know about people in the past because many of their possessions are still with us today, either in museums or still buried in the ground or in a garbage heap. Maybe, after it had been played with for years and years and its owner outgrew it, that rag doll from the beginning of this chapter was thrown away. But how far away is away if the doll was lying in a trash pile, waiting to be rediscovered by an archaeologist more than two thousand years in the future? What if away doesn’t really exist because, even when we think we’ve gotten rid of something, it’s actually still there?
And what does that mean for us and our garbage today?
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
Trash is, by definition, the stuff we don’t care about anymore. Even the way we use the words trash and garbage to refer to things we don’t like says something about what we value and what we don’t. What is valuable and what is trash varies by time and culture too. It might have been common to use rags for doll clothing 2,500 years ago, or even a hundred years ago, but how many of us use rags that way today?
Nothing becomes garbage until someone decides to get rid of it. Why do we decide to get rid of things? Usually, it’s for one of a few reasons: It’s used up, or broken, or it doesn’t fit, or we have no further use for it, or we simply decide we don’t want it anymore. Have you ever thrown out something perfectly good just because you decided you were too old for it, or it was out of style, or because you were running out of space?
In this book, we’ll explore where our trash comes from and who’s responsible for it. But no matter where that responsibility begins, we still have choices to make about the kinds of things we buy or don’t buy, and what we do with them when we don’t want them anymore. That’s one reason you should care about garbage: It’s personal.
Another reason is that garbage isn’t just ugly, like a street covered in plastic bottles and bags. It’s actually bad for the environment in a lot of ways. The nineteenth- century doctors who thought garbage caused disease might have been wrong in some ways, but we’ll see how your garbage plays a bigger part in the health of our planet—and you—than you might have realized.
Chapter Two: WHERE DOES OUR GARBAGE COME FROM?
Garbage comes from everywhere. If garbage is just the name we give to things we don’t want anymore, almost everything you and your family own is future garbage. You might want and need your possessions now, but what happens next week or next year? As soon as you put something into a garbage can or a recycling bin, whether it’s a single-use plastic water bottle or a scruffy old jacket, it’s garbage.
In this chapter, we’ll check out different categories of trash, but first, let’s get our feet wet in the waste stream.
DOWNSTREAM AND UPSTREAM IN THE WASTE STREAM
We call the flow of trash from our homes and businesses “the waste stream.” Sounds almost pretty, doesn’t it? No? The waste stream might not be good for fishing, but it’s a useful way to think about how garbage is produced and where it goes. Every product you use and every scrap of food you eat has “downstream” and “upstream” waste issues.
Think about the last time you got a drink from the soda fountain at a fast-food restaurant. The upstream waste issues are all the things that had to happen to get that soda into your hands. The downstream issues include everything that happens to it when you’re done drinking. Every product goes through a life cycle, which shows how it’s made, how it gets to consumers, and what happens when it’s used up.
We’ll start with the cup. A factory had to get raw materials to make the cup, the lid, and the straw. This is called resource extraction. The paper in your cup started out on a tree farm. Heavy machinery had to come in and cut the trees. Even if your cup was made with some recycled paper, most of it will be new pulp. The logging machinery needed gas to run its engines, which also had to be extracted. (We won’t even get into the materials and energy needed to make the logging machinery!) Unless you’re using an eco-friendly all-paper cup, your cup has a plastic liner to prevent leaking. Plastic comes from oil or natural gas—that’s more resource extraction!
Turning raw materials into finished products is the production phase. More machinery and energy get used to turn the trees into pulp. Bleaching chemicals are added, and the pulp is made into plastic-lined paper. The paper might be printed with a design or logo. Now the paper is ready to be molded into a cup, and the bottom is attached by heat sealing, which melts some of the plastic to form a seal.
Once the cup is ready, it has to get to a store or restaurant so you can buy it. This is called distribution. In the U.S., most distribution happens in large trucks, which also require materials and energy.
The straw and lid have to go through resource extraction, production, and distribution too. Looking at all these upstream and downstream costs is a product’s life cycle assessment. A measurement called a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) is often used in life cycle assessments to see what kind of impact different products have on the climate. Using ten paper cups with lids has the same CO2e as driving a car one mile.
Text copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Donnelly
Illustrations copyright © 2023 by John Hendrix
