What is America's largest export, most prodigious product and greatest legacy? It's our trash. Each of us in on track to toss 102 tons of garbage in the course of our lifetime. Our disposable plastic alone outweighs the entire U.S;. Navy. But we don't like to think about our trash. We send it on trains, trucks or barges to landfills hundreds of miles from where the garbage was created. We don't have to see it, but in so many ways the disposable, non-biodegradable items that fill our trash are coming back to haunt us, in forms like the Great Pacific Garbage patch of plastic that threatens marine life and ultimately our own.
On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Pulitzer Prize Winner Edward Humes, whose new book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, boggles the mind with the severity of our trashy ways. But it also shares compelling stories of families, companies and communities that are finding a way back from all that trash.
Edward Humes received a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper coverage of the military. He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Magazine and is the author of eleven nonfiction books. He lives in Seal Beach, CA.
- KBOO