Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash - Edward Humes Audiobook

Written by Edward Humes
Read by Joe Barrett
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc.
Release date: June 28, 2016
Duration: 08:36:03

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.

Humes offers excellent tips for being more resourceful, so that our lives might not be “monuments to waste.” Humes’ take on the science and culture of “garbology” is both academic and deeply personal, making this a fascinating read.