Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash

by Edward Humes

  Her whole family has taken part in these efforts with enthusiasm, though the boys sometimes grumble about the limits on toy accumulation. Each has two bins, and all toys—Legos, trucks, whatever—must fit in them. If that means parting with something to make room for incoming, so be it. Her older son, Max, has nevertheless embraced the zero-waste philosophy with aplomb, including demonstrating for his fifth-grade class—and in a YouTube video—a Japanese cloth-folding technique for making a waste-free lunch. He makes a sandwich to bring to school, then does an intricate fold that turns a cloth napkin into a multi-compartment tube that holds the sandwich and a piece of fruit or a cookie, and rolls everything up into a compact parcel. At lunch, the cloth becomes his place mat during eating, and his napkin afterward. Then he puts it into his backpack to be taken home and reused or washed as needed. No paper, no wrap, no baggies, no trash.

  For birthdays and Christmas, the family emphasizes the giving of experiences rather than things. Trips and outings, hikes, camping, movies, museums, amusement parks—things the family can do together, relish and remember. They have a living tree they haul in every year for Christmas and decorate with heirloom ornaments.

  But Bea says their wasteless lifestyle is neither fanatical nor absolute. The boys desperately wanted a Wii video game system and the Johnsons, after much debate, said yes. Now Max wants a cell phone and his own computer, which his parents are resisting for the moment, despite the dreaded “all the other kids have them” argument. Battling the multimillion-dollar advertising budget of the consumer economy with the word “refuse” is and always will be a challenge, Bea says.

  After about two years into the low-waste lifestyle, Bea started a blog about her experiences, “The Zero Waste Home,” which offered both a narrative on her family’s quest and tips for others interested in trying their own hands at the “4 Rs.” The blog, in turn, generated news media interest, and eventually Sunset magazine showed up in Mill Valley to write about Bea Johnson’s efforts and to create a photo spread and report on her home as part of a series entitled “Inspired Homes of the West.”

  The article drew tremendous reader interest—and some strong emotions. Six months after the article appeared online, comments were still flowing in, nearly seven hundred of them. Many people were inspired. They loved the Johnson home’s smooth surfaces and open space, and the main work of art in the living room—a “living wall” of plants, green and lush. One reader admiringly called the magazine photos “minimalist porn.”

  But a sizable minority of comments were dismissive, critical or just plain mean. Bea was attacked for eating beef and therefore supporting a wasteful and environmentally damaging industry. She was pilloried for an annual trip to visit family in France because she didn’t adhere to her zero-waste practices there, and left behind an enormous carbon footprint since air travel is one of the most wasteful of human activities. She was criticized for choosing compostable toothbrushes made in Australia—their carbon footprint is huge, one commenter sneered. (Responded Bea: Her choice isn’t perfect, but still better than plastic toothbrushes, especially since almost all of them are made in China with an equally big transportation footprint.) There was an undercurrent of anger in those comments, as if the Johnsons’ lifestyle constituted an attack on the commenters’ choices and values. Some called her mentally ill, delusional, a child abuser (what, no junk food?) or an obsessive-compulsive. Their home and lives were deemed barren and stripped of creativity. They were fanatics who would destroy the country if their ideas were to spread. Singled out for derision was the family’s practice of digitally photographing the kids’ artwork, then recycling the paper copies. In all, the comments were so numerous and strong that one university professor left a note saying he was assigning his psychology class to study the responses.

  “Look, we’re not perfect,” Johnson says, bemused but not surprised by the reaction. She got a similar, if more muted, array of admiration and incredulity from friends and family. “We eat meat. I like makeup, I like to look nice, it makes me happy. And some of it has packaging. So no, we’re not perfect. But we’re not attacking anyone. We’re attacking waste. I believe the solution to our environmental problems starts at home. Not in Washington or on Wall Street, but in our individual buying choices. That’s how we vote, with our dollars, and they can change things. So that’s what we’re doing. And isn’t it interesting that it makes so many people angry? They seem to think I’m attacking the American Dream.

  “But I’m living the American Dream. I used to think it was the big house and the SUV and all that, but it’s not. It never was. That’s not the real dream. The real American Dream is having financial freedom. It’s being able to do what we want to do. It’s saving instead of wasting. What’s wrong with that?”

  CAN AN “ordinary” person make a difference? That’s the question Bea Johnson gets all the time. The problems are so big, people say, what difference can one person or one family possibly make? The Johnsons’ answer to this classic (and frequently paralyzing) question was to attend to their own nest first, to put down the wasteful things that once defined their home and possessions, and then find ways to help others to do the same with Bea’s blog and de-cluttering business, with their son’s ninja-lunch YouTube videos, with the example of a different way they provide to friends and local businesses in Mill Valley.

  There’s no shortage of parallel examples of one person making a big impact. Rob Gogan, associate manager of recycling and waste services at Harvard University, took an epic instance of waste and turned it into a shining example of repurposing and reuse. Every year, when Harvard’s students depart campus for the summer, they leave behind roomfuls of perfectly good couches, chairs, tables, lamps and all manner of household items, abandoned without a care. And every year, Harvard would clear it all out and throw it all away—until Gogan launched what has been billed as one of the largest yard sales in America, right in Harvard Yard. Instead of heading to a landfill, those rescued items draw buyers from all over the region in search of a bargain.

  “It’s a dream job,” says Gogan. “Harvard is the wealthiest university in the world and affluence produces effluence. It’s a rich vein of ore for a recycler.”

  Then there’s Kim Masoner. She’s on a parallel journey against waste, though unlike Bea Johnson’s, hers started outside her home, and involves picking up waste rather than putting it down. But she, too, is testing the conventional wisdom that waste and pollution are too big for any one person’s efforts to matter. Over the past ten years, Masoner has become the queen of California beach cleanups.

  She draws an army of volunteers to the plastic-impregnated sands of Southern California, not only from the beach towns themselves, but from inland cities whose storm drains have sent the trash downstream to the coast. She is a diminutive, energetic, youthful fifty-something woman who’s been obsessed with picking up litter since age seven, and there’s something of the Pied Piper in her ability to get the unlikeliest characters to show up to help her pluck Styrofoam out of rocky jetties and plastic straws out of the dunes.

  “It’s our trash,” the mayor of the inland city of Azusa explained when he showed up at one cleanup with two busloads of high school students eager to clean the sands of the sleepy town where Masoner lives, Seal Beach. “We want to help clean it up.”

  Masoner got started in 1999 when she and her husband, Steve, started bringing a trash bag along during their daily walks on the beach, picking up debris as they went. When other people began asking the Masoners if they had extra bags to share so that they could join in, an impromptu beach cleanup ensued. It snowballed from there. Now the former director of the Seal Beach Chamber of Commerce spends all her time running Save Our Beach, a nonprofit community group that stages the most heavily attended monthly beach cleanups in Southern California, routinely drawing a thousand volunteers at a time. Corporations have her stage custom cleanups attended by their executives. Then she leads them in a class to learn how to crochet used plastic bags in
to yoga mats and bedrolls for the homeless—some of the myriad ways that Masoner has learned to repurpose waste instead of sending it to the landfill. The next day she’ll be teaching high schoolers how to make purses out of old videotape and bracelets out of trash. Her volunteers have picked up more than 200 tons of plastic debris and other garbage from Southern California beaches.

  “We can tell we’re making a difference,” she says. “There’s less trash every year.”

  Gogan and Masoner have been widely praised and admired for their efforts against waste. Masoner has received numerous awards. The Los Angeles Lakers honored her at a halftime ceremony. She is a beloved local hero.

  The universally positive way in which these two are perceived makes for a fascinating contrast with the reactions that Bea Johnson provokes in people. The reasons for this are subtle but instructive. The first two trash-fighters identify a problem of waste in the outside world and ask people to give of their money or time to help solve it. And people do just that. They can spend money at a yard sale or spend time on the beach and help save the world—without making any fundamental changes in their own homes or lives.

  But Johnson and her zero-waste crusade are a whole different animal. She has identified a problem not on a campus or a beach but inside everyone’s home and lifestyle. And her family has responded by transforming itself in a dramatic way, becoming happier and more prosperous by rejecting the consumer economy and lifestyle most Americans live and breathe. Is there any wonder why this angers so many people? Agreeing with the Johnsons’ views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change. A kind of cultural physics comes into play in this sort of situation, a fundamental, almost Newtonian principle that states it’s always easier to oppose change than to propose it. Or put another way, picking up trash on the beach makes us feel good. Admitting we lead wasteful lives that need to change—not so much.

  BEA JOHNSON remains optimistic (except for infuriating influxes of junk mail, which she is still helpless to stop). Despite the anger and the fear of change so many people seem to feel about her ideas, she feels certain that the advantages of a low-waste life will catch on—if for no other reason than that 40 percent savings on the household budget she can attest to. Who can’t use that?

  She says she sees signs of progress. The slow rise in the acceptance of reusable shopping bags is a great first step. And the responsiveness of businesses she has urged to improve also encourages her. When she found disposable plastic tasting spoons strewn on the sidewalk downtown, she asked the nearby ice cream store to do something about it. After a brief boycott and the shop owner’s tearful response, the shop began offering stainless steel tasting spoons that it washed between customers. Score another one against the disposable economy, Johnson laughs.

  Someday people will realize what her family now knows: that the real sacrifice is clinging to waste, and that the real American Dream, the original version of it, is waiting for those who give it up.

  “All of a sudden you become aware. And you say to yourself, what the hell was I thinking all those years? And that’s a beautiful moment. That’s where it starts.”

  BEA JOHNSON’S TEN WAYS TO GET STARTED ON THE LOW-WASTE PATH

  1. Bring glass jars, totes, cloth bags and cartons to the grocery store to carry food.

  2. Buy in bulk. It eliminates packaging and can be more economical in the long run.

  3. Refill clean empty wine bottles at local wine bottling events instead of buying new ones.

  4. Use microfiber cloths instead of paper towels.

  5. Make your own multipurpose cleaner out of vinegar, water and castile soap.

  6. Use handkerchiefs instead of paper tissues.

  7. When buying makeup products, choose a company that takes its packaging back and recycles it.

  8. Only recycle paper if it’s been printed on both sides. Otherwise, use the blank side for making lists or jotting down notes.

  9. Use cloth napkins instead of paper napkins. That means cocktail napkins, too.

  10. When packing a lunch, wrap sandwiches or other food in a cloth napkin instead of using wax paper, plastic wrap or plastic bags.

  EPILOGUE

  GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

  When this book was conceived, I intended to write about our 64-ton lifetime trash legacy, not the 102 tons it turns out to be. This original, smaller calculation was based on the widely accepted and official data point produced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which asserts that the average American produced 4.5 pounds of trash a day. When I discovered midway through this project that these numbers were wrong, that Americans were actually churning out an average of 7.1 pounds a day and sending twice as much trash to the landfill as we were being led to believe, it did more than change the central metaphor of a book about garbage.

  It meant our trash problem—our trash addiction—already the biggest on the planet, is way, way worse than we’ve been told. It also meant our solutions have been much more paltry than most people understand. We’ve barely put a dent in our collective garbage mountain, and what we have accomplished—moderately increased recycling compared to decades past—is more about rearranging the deck chairs than changing the course of a ship headed for disaster.

  It would be easy to focus on the implications of these flawed numbers as a scandal or a crisis—or as evidence that there is little that can be done about those hundreds of millions of tons of trash getting shuffled to the curb and hauled off for burial. It would be so tempting to throw up our hands, to say it’s just too big to confront, to surrender to trashy inertia. Really, what can any one of us do about an ocean, a mountain, a 102-ton leviathan of trash?

  In a word: plenty.

  The discovery that even our top garbologists can’t keep track of our trash, that they are as clueless as the rest of us, is best viewed not as a crisis, but as an invitation and an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back and consider a new normal. What better time than today, a time of economic hardship, to reconsider our wastefulness, to absorb the lessons of MIT trash trackers and ocean plastic netters and a family of four in Marin County, and then find our way back?

  Think about it. We are wasting so much stuff every day that trash has become a geographic feature—particles transforming oceans, garbage mountains dominating landscapes, a landfill visible even from space. How can that be acceptable? How can that have become normal?

  Or look closer to home and see just how our daily choices as consumers in a disposable economy have made our everyday lives monuments to waste. Look in your bathroom: The shampoo, body wash, cosmetics, shaving cream, deodorant and health products you buy come in packages that cost us three times as much as the manufacturing cost of the products they hold. In other words, the hair conditioner bottle destined for the trash is actually more costly and valuable than the hair conditioner it contains. And these disposable things are designed to have a few days’ useful service, then survive for thousands of years as potentially harmful and definitely costly trash. Why do we tolerate that?

  In 2010, Americans spent $11 billion on bottled water of equal or lesser quality than tap water that costs consumers ten thousand times less. Forty to 50 percent of that expensive bottled water turns out to be mere tap water put in a plastic bottle with a fancy label slapped on, not to mention a bigger markup than any other product this side of the Hope Diamond. We throw out 60 million water bottles a day, in a country where the high quality and safety of inexpensive tap water is the envy of most countries in the world. One full day’s worth of America’s total oil consumption—about 18 million barrels—is spent hauling that bottled water around. Why?

  The waste picture for milk is even worse than bottled water: Thirty percent of the milk produced in America is thrown away because of inefficiencies that let it expire or spoil before it can nourish anyone. All that energy, all that shipping, all that cattle feed, all that refrigeration, all that effort—nearly a third of it is wasted, thrown away, trashed. The r
est of our food supply suffers similar losses—in a world where hunger is a growing, deadly problem, at least a quarter of the total American food supply is fated to become garbage. And we’re paying for that, every day—in higher food prices, high utility bills, pollution and debt.

  We accept products, from phones to stereos to televisions, designed to be disposed of rather than repaired or upgraded. We have transformed soda from a treat to a staple, though it has negative nutritional value and wastes colossal amounts of plastic, petroleum and water while fueling an unprecedented wave of child and adult obesity. The added bonus: Recent research has found that a common plastic chemical, BPA, that can leach from plastic beverage bottles and is found in most of our systems, may make the human body further prone to obesity. We drive cars so primitive in their design that they waste four-fifths of the energy produced by burning gas. Our power plants use only a third of the energy produced by burning coal, with the rest wasted, quite literally going up in smoke. Did you know that the average cable TV box plugged into your wall, a device that never fully shuts down even when your television is off, uses more electrical power than most refrigerators? Why does your cable company accept such a ridiculously wasteful device from the manufacturer? Why does your city council that contracts with the cable company accept such a system? Why do you accept it, since you’re the one who has to pay the waste-bloated utility bill?