Overview

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 trash--what's 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 you've ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles's Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists residing in San Francisco's 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 change--and prosper in the process.

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9781799975298

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Edward Humes is the author of a number of critically acclaimed nonfiction books, including Eco Barons, Monkey Girl, Over Here, School of Dreams, Baby ER, Mean Justice, No Matter How Loud I Shout, and the bestseller Mississippi Mud. He has received the Pulitzer Prize for his journalism and numerous awards for his books. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and Sierra. He lives in California. Joe Barrett, an actor and Audie Award and Earphones Award-winning narrator, has appeared both on and off Broadway as well as in hundreds of radio and television commercials.

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