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ALTHOUGH it is the buried tombs and the lost cities that get all the press,
one of the most valuable things that an archaeologist can dig up is rubbish.
Palace murals and heroic statues record the sanitised, official version of
history, but a society's garbage tells the true story of how its members
lived.
With that thought in mind, archaeologists of the future are in for a treat.
The industrial societies of the world's developed countries are the most
wasteful ever, their spoor turning up in every corner of the Earth. Almost by
definition, waste is something that most people prefer not to think too much
about. But Edward Humes, an American journalist, is fascinated by the stuff.
“Garbology” is his attempt to make sense of our historically unprecedented
readiness to throw things away.
The book begins at the Puente Hills landfill, an artificial mountain near
Los Angeles. It is the biggest dump in America, 30 years old, 150 metres high
and containing 130m tonnes of rubbish within a 700-acre footprint. If it were a
building, it would be among the 20 tallest in the city. Building a rubbish pile
is, it turns out, surprisingly high-tech. The mountain is a giant, putrid
layer-cake, with dozens of strata of rubbish separated by soil and plastic
liners designed to contain the brew of noxious chemicals that would otherwise
leach into groundwater. The rot produces methane, which is collected via a
network of pipes that penetrate the mountain, and burned to produce
electricity.
From there, Mr Humes traces the history of garbage in America, beginning
with New York's “White Wings”, an army of municipal rubbish collectors created
to clean the city's stinking streets in the 19th century, through the heyday of
backyard incinerators (and the smog they produced) to the modern day, where the
most common solutions often involve burying the stuff in the ground or dumping
it in the sea. He talks to the researchers who are chronicling the
plasticisation of the oceans, a swelling suspended solution of pulverised
plastic. And he describes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous expanse
of the Pacific Ocean where currents concentrate the trash over a continent-sized
area.
The author is just as interested in the creation of rubbish as its
disposal. But whereas few will disagree with the gist of his observations about
the shortcomings of our modern, disposable, consumer culture, the analysis is
rather superficial. Mr Humes comes close to blaming a single man—J. Gordon
Lippincott, an industrial designer—for the creation of the entire wasteful model
of modern consumerism. And although it is understandable that an American author
should write a book looking mostly at the problems of America, it nevertheless
feels like a missed opportunity. Some of the most interesting parts of the book
come towards the end, where he discusses some of the possible solutions—such as
Denmark's strategy of burning rubbish to produce electricity, or an Irish scheme
to charge shoppers for plastic bags, which led to a 90% drop in their use. Food
for thought, and more.
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发表于 2016-7-11 08:54:13