RUBBISH! The Archaeology of Garbage, Book Review

The book titled Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy was a very interesting read.  Created in 1973, the archaeology of garbage was a program primarily created as an exercise in archeology for students at the University of Arizona Tucson.  The most fascinating aspect of the book is the discoveries of what our garbage tells about us as a society.  It was interesting the amount of detailed behavior that can be discovered by going through trash.  For example, in times of product scarcity our garbage shows that we waste more of the scarce product. Another major fact Dr. Rathje’s team discovered is that our landfills are not filling up from disposable diapers which is taking up about 1% of a landfills mass.

There have been some in the PLA (corn plastics) industry who use quotes from Dr. Rathje’s book to support an argument that composting biodegradable plastics is better for the environment than landfilling them.  Their argument takes some of the data out on context by looking at the hundred year old “poor” environmental designs of landfills.  The printing of “RUBBISH!” was in 1991 with most data provided in the book ending in 1988.  Most of the data in the book is over 20 years old.  As with many things from our past we eventually discover better and more environmentally sound solutions.  Yes, it is absolutely true that traditional dry-tomb landfilling is not the best solution for dealing with our garbage.  As a society we have made significant improvements to the methods we use for disposing of garbage.  Since the writing of the book we have implemented hundreds of recycling programs as well as the EPA requiring methane from the anaerobic biodegradation process happening in landfills to be captured and burned or used to create clean energy.  The EPA in the last 5 years has also changed laws with recirculating leachate through a landfill so to accelerate biodegradation by up to 10x.

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