Total Garbage

February 1, 2024
Compelling stories of people working successfully to rein in America's wasteful habits. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Humes, author of Garbology, documents various initiatives to reduce, recycle, and reengineer harmful products, from food containers to gas-fired building furnaces. "We have unwittingly become," he asserts, "the most wasteful civilization in history," with the average American responsible for 1.5 tons of garbage each year. Waste occurs when we produce inefficiently and send the excess of what we have purchased to landfills. Humes is particularly concerned with the plastic waste--"400 million tons per year"--attendant to food packaging, disposable bottles, and the synthetics woven into our clothing. He considers "fashion waste," food waste, and the energy waste generated by the internal combustion engine. For each type of waste, the author notes the work of activists who have developed innovative ways to combat our profligacy--e.g., Jamiah Hargins, who started Crop Swap LA to replace resource-intensive and chemical-laden grass lawns with micro-farms; environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck, who made plastic food packaging a public policy issue; and Amory Lovins, who launched a revolution in energy-saving passive house design. Humes highlights the work of universities that have committed to sustainability and Peachtree City, Georgia, where electric carts are a dominant form of transportation. He discusses how energy-reduction technologies--such as induction cooktops, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and LED lighting--can help readers live less wasteful lives and stop damaging the environment. Humes believes strongly in healthy living, sustainable transportation, and a circular economy that recycles what it produces. His enthusiastic advocacy, attention to personal choices, and supportive data that seem beyond dispute make this a convincing argument and an informative book. An engrossing, practical guide to living healthier, less improvident lives and benefiting the planet by doing so.

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March 1, 2024
Humes (The Forever Witness, 2022) first investigated the exorbitant trash generated by our "disposable economy" in Garbology (2012). Here, ""total garbage"" doesn't only refer to the mounds of refuse in landfills but also to every aspect of waste, pollution, and inefficiency in our society. Humes considers nearly impossible-to-recycle packaging, car-centric transportation, fossil-fuel-generated electricity, the meat-heavy American diet, and indoor pollution from gas stoves that became an unlikely and absurd front in the culture wars. Humes takes aim at the shifting of responsibility for waste from the big companies that manufacture it to individuals, starting with the now notorious early 1970s "Crying Indian" ad. But this is not a work of doom and gloom. Humes shares stories of energetic individuals and activist groups coming together to make a difference themselves and pressuring government and businesses to clean up their acts. Each chapter ends with practical checklists of ways to reduce wasted resources and pollution while empowering people to organize action on a larger scale. Total Garbage is an engaging and uplifting book that offers compelling stories from experts and activists and strong recommendations to cut through the complacency or resignation that stymie efforts to create a greener, cleaner, more efficient world.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 5, 2024

Pulitzer Prize and PEN Award winner Humes returns with an immersive investigation of waste, his follow-up to Garbology. He considers waste of all kinds--plastic, food, and energy--and the way we accept and produce absurd levels of it. A big-thinking book that offers practical, can-do, advice. Prepub Alert.

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