Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
By Heather Rogers
The New Press, 2005
288 pages, $39.95 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Three human-made objects are visible from outer space — the Great Wall of China, the pyramids, and another "towering monument to civilisation", the Fresh Kills Landfill on the outskirts of New York City. A goodly slice of the 230 billion kilos of garbage that US households throw out each year has gone to this massive waste dump, writes Heather Rogers in The Hidden Life of Garbage. Burned, dumped or buried, our trash might be out of sight and out of mind to all but astronauts, but it is not out of this world and the environmental bill is mounting.
Dioxin and other toxic chemicals are released when rubbish is burnt, or they leach into the ground when it's buried. Plastics, which make up 40% of packaging waste, slowly leach hazardous materials into the earth over their life-span of hundreds and thousands of years. Incineration, the most toxic waste disposal option, also produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The malignant and abundant "E-waste" from hundreds of millions of rapidly obsolete computers and other electronics, deposits deadly solvents (polychlorinated biphenyls), lead and other heavy metals into the environment. Enormous quantities of energy and natural resources are wasted in the production of swiftly junked commodities.
The mounting piles of trash, says Rogers, are the result of social forces. One in particular — "monopolistic corporate power" — shapes what gets thrown away. The extensive repair and re-use of consumer commodities, which was common in the nineteenth century has been radically transformed by industrialisation and mass consumption-based economic growth. Household consumer spending accounts for two thirds of the US$11 trillion economy, the waste business $50 billion. "No wonder there is so much trash", says Rogers, "garbage is good for business" — providing industry can keep people buying, and trashing, non-stop.
The post-war economic boom had found the magic formula and ushered in "the golden age of garbage". Single use, disposable commodities like the paper plate, disposable nappies, fast food and throw-away beer cans lived out their brief life-span from mass production line to tip.
The profit joy-ride threatened to founder, however, as markets became saturated. The solution? The notorious market fix of built-in obsolescence. Goods were manufactured to intentionally wear out faster than necessary, whilst mass production efficiencies made it cheaper to replace than repair them. The more consumers threw out, the more businesses could sell.
And each time we bought, we bought more packaging. Foremost amongst the huge packaging market is the non-returnable beverage container — 125 million disposable plastic cups are tossed every day in the US. And the joke is on the shoppers, who pay for the packaging in the price of the product. In 1988, $1 of every $10 spent by consumers on food and beverages in the US paid for packaging.
Shoppers, however, had to be taught by manufacturers and retailers to consume and discard with abandon. The throw-away lifestyle, says Rogers, was not primarily the result of consumer demand for convenience, as is often argued by industry. Consumer choice was narrowed because individual, plastic-packaged goods meant greater profit margins and more sales, often for "needs" invented by the advertising industry, a skilled exploiter of human desire, anxiety and envy.
The manufacturing industry has, however, been diligently airbrushing itself out of the trash responsibility chain to obscure the facts of waste and to fend off challenges to wasteful production techniques. "Greenwashing" corporate fronts, like the 50-year-old Keep America Beautiful, for example, focus on the eyesore of littering by individuals to distract the public from options that would inconvenience industry such as mandating the refillable container and refundable container deposits.
Exporting the problem is a favourite option. US garbage is dumped in India, China, South Africa, the Philippines and other trash receptacles of the "global South" where cheap labour and weak regulatory frameworks offer highly competitive dumping fees whilst making the trash mountains ever more invisible to western consumers.
Industry's favourite ploy, however, has been recycling, an essential practice but one whose ecological limits are carefully dissected by Rogers. Not all the discards carefully sorted by households actually get recycled, whilst those that are, are often re-manufactured only once. Recycling is also energy-hungry. Its ideological benefit to industry is that recycling normalises high levels of wasteful mass production and consumption by taking the guilt out of wasting.
State-regulated, democratic controls over production materials, processes and product durability are necessary for production to be restructured to design waste out of a product before it winds up as trash. Regulation must also address the colossal industrial waste generated in the production process itself — for every tonne of household waste, seventy tonnes are spat out by industry. Enhanced by an analytical framework of Marxist economic philosophy, Rogers cogently shows that our growing mountains of trash are the tip of a capitalist production system whose wasteful inefficiency turns everything to rubbish.