Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (17 page)

Rathje also noted that when sanitation departments provide larger trash cans to households, those households immediately begin to produce more trash. He calls this Parkinson’s Law of Garbage. It’s based on the original Parkinson’s Law, formulated by British bureaucrat C. Northcote Parkinson, who in 1957 noted that work expands in order to fill whatever time is available for its completion. The trash version of this principle holds that “garbage expands so as to fill the receptacles available for its containment.” Rathje discovered this after researchers were perplexed by the fact that households in Phoenix threw away a third more trash than their counterparts in Tucson, despite the largely similar demographics, culture and geography shared by the two cities. At the time, Phoenix collected its trash with mechanized garbage trucks and 90-gallon standard bins; Tucson had smaller trash receptacles. In 1988, Tucson switched to the same system Phoenix used, and the average amount of garbage produced—a figure that had barely budged for fifteen years—suddenly went up by a third. The difference was made up by more yard wastes (had they been composted or just left on the ground before?); old clothes (had they been donated or given to others in the past?); household toxics (long accumulated in basements and garage); and recyclable plastics, glass and cans (previously bundled for separate collection, now quickly and easily dumped in the bigger bin). Parkinson’s Law suggested the need for separate mechanized bins for recyclables, which has since become the industry standard.

Other garbage insights large and small emerged:

•   Discarded birth control pill dispensers showed that a substantial minority of women were taking the pills incorrectly (missing and skipping days).

•   The presence of condom wrappers in the trash rose 45 percent in the first two years after AIDS hit the news, suggesting that the public had taken seriously health admonitions to practice safe sex.

•   Families in low-income neighborhoods tended to buy the smallest-sized packages of food, while the trash from affluent neighborhoods was rife with large- and economy-sized products—which means the poor end up paying more money for packaging than food, while the food dollars of families with cash to spare go much further.

•   The amount of alcohol consumed did not vary with phases of the moon, as legend has it, but drinking rates did increase considerably at certain times of the month: immediately after the paydays of major local employers.

•   Finally, the Garbage Project issued a mild warning to romantics to rethink how they celebrate February 14: While almost no Halloween candy is ever thrown in the trash (only wrappers), a great deal of Valentine’s Day candy never leaves the wrapper or box, and ends up at the dump instead.

These sorts of insights, whether they suggested that serious policy changes were in order or merely served as fascinating trivia, had a cumulative impact: The reputation of the Garbage Project, which began as something of an oddity that newspapers and local TV broadcasts delighted in treating tongue-in-cheek, and that initially was a source of embarrassment in the academic community, gradually was transformed. Yes, the word “garbology” may have originated as a sort of joke, first used in the 1960s by municipal dustmen in New Zealand and Britain to make their job title sound loftier. But that began to change. The next edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
defined “garbology” as Rathje did: “the study of a community or culture by analyzing its waste.” Rathje’s papers on trash were being accepted at major scientific journals. The Smithsonian Institution wanted to put together a garbology exhibit. This wasn’t a joke after all—there was real science to be done here, and real revelations coming out of it.

Then Hollywood got in on the act, having discovered one of Rathje’s first garbage sorters, a student named Sheli Smith, who worked six semesters with the Garbage Project. Smith, now with the Past Foundation in Ohio, went on to an illustrious archaeological career of her own, including the 1982 excavation of a colonial sailing vessel from 1710 that was found ten feet below the surface of Water Street in Manhattan’s financial district, which—you guessed it—is in large measure built on landfill consisting mainly of eighteenth-century garbage. Smith was invited to appear on a popular television game show called
What’s My Line?,
in which people with unusual careers attempted to stump a panel of celebrities. Smith won, having cleverly gotten a manicure and an orangey fake tan atop her real desert tan just before the show; the celebrity judges concluded that no one with nails that gorgeous could possibly be a professional garbage sorter.

Next thing Rathje knew, representatives of the U.S. Census were on the horn, looking for help. They were having a terrible time trying to calculate the number of households in poor communities, and in particular, the number of two-parent households. Census leaders were smarting at the revelation that they had a 40 percent margin of error when it came to determining whether or not there was a father present in inner-city and immigrant neighborhoods. This, it turned out, was a crucial question, and not just as a matter of academic interest. These figures would determine all sorts of government policies, from the shape of state and federal voting districts, to the amount of child welfare payments allocated (which is why the Census was having trouble: some residents feared being counted and losing benefits they relied on to live), to the budgeting and placement of social services for schools, daycare, single moms and needy kids. Forty percent error rates just would not cut it. Could the Garbage Project help? Could Rathje’s unusual insights into trash demographics be used to determine the age and gender of residents in a given neighborhood based on what they throw away?

It turned out that they could. The Garbage Project had studied in detail the food and garbage patterns of two hundred households for five weeks, painstakingly sorting and weighing all their trash, then subtracting yard waste because it varied too much between urban, suburban and rural locations and so could skew the results. These households were active participants in the study, answering extensive questionnaires, so the Garbage Project knew the exact population, gender and ages of all the family members involved. Rathje was then able to construct an equation: x households multiplied by y residents equals z pounds of garbage. As long as you knew the value of two of those numbers, you could figure out the third. The Garbage Project had produced what Rathje called the “magic number” to plug into a population equation. Multiplying that magic number by the number of households in a given neighborhood would tell you with surprising accuracy how many people lived there. This held true across geographic regions and income levels. Subsequent tests of the equation, according to Rathje, showed it had an accuracy of plus or minus 2.5 percent, which was better than the Census Bureau had managed in many areas of the country.

Figuring out the second part the Census wanted—gender—turned out to be more difficult, however. This is because there are few distinctly “male” pieces of trash—both men and women can use the same sorts of razors and shaving cream, for instance, and not even the presence of male contraceptives would establish actual residency. Those items that are exclusively male, or close enough—men’s underwear, or cigar butts, for example—occur with such infrequency in the waste stream as to be useless as data points. The researchers got around this in the end by figuring out the markers for everyone but men. They developed equations for the number of infants (diaper counts), the number of children (discarded toys, toy packaging, children’s clothes and their packaging) and women (discarded female-hygiene products, cosmetics and women’s apparel), from which they could extrapolate the number of men from the total neighborhood population count. The mystery of the uncounted fathers residing in some neighborhoods could at last be solved, and the Census could cure its chronic undercount. The plan was to apply this new technique in time for the 1990 Census.

But it never happened, Rathje laments. The then-director of the Census’s Center for Survey Methods Research decided that it would be bad public relations to hire someone to analyze people’s trash. They’d just have to live with the undercount.

Nevertheless, this work showed a new and more powerful side of the Garbage Project, as it moved beyond simply sorting trash and into comparing its real-world footprint with the results of surveys and polls. It became very clear that trash provided potent, unique clues about the inner working of society and country that could be found nowhere else. It also began to show why trash was such a social, environmental and fiscal problem: Most people had no idea what was really in their garbage (or, for that matter, in their closets, refrigerators, cupboards and shopping carts).

The Garbage Project was tackling a big piece of the second question that must be answered in order to shrink the 102-ton legacy, namely why we are also so obviously clueless about the true size and nature of our waste. Rathje was exposing our trash mythology: what we know versus what we think we know about garbage.

Rathje and his students soon documented how average Americans overestimated their intake of healthy foods, claiming, for example, to eat three times as much cottage cheese as they actually purchased (based on the number of containers found in their garbage). And they vastly underestimated their less healthy eating habits. Potato chips, for instance, were reported to be eaten in quantities 81 percent smaller than the crumpled chip bags in the trash actually documented. Rathje calls this the “Lean Cuisine syndrome.” This kind of data is psychologically unsurprising, as most people chronically overestimate their “good” habits and underestimate the “bad.” But it also suggested that the focus groups and consumer preference surveys that so many business decisions are based on are practically worthless.

Alcohol consumption was among the most dramatic deviations between survey and trash can, with a vast disparity between what people claimed to have imbibed, and what the empties in the wastebasket indicated. About three-quarters of households reported zero alcoholic beverage intake during a typical week, while 20 percent reported seven or fewer beers consumed, with a handful owning up to drinking more than that. The trash reality check turned all this on its head: Only one-quarter of households had no evidence of alcohol in its week’s worth of trash. Another quarter showed one to seven beers consumed. And fully half the households had consumed eight or more beers in a week. And this was after the garbage sorters excluded the debris from data-skewing parties (discerned by the presence of soggy paper plates, large numbers of disposable cups and the telltale presence of cigarette butts in partially empty beer bottles).

Interestingly, while people tend to underestimate their own drinking by 40 to 60 percent, in households where one or more adults are teetotalers, they tend to be uncannily accurate in their estimates of the drinking habits of other family members, within an error rate of 10 percent or less. Rathje calls this the “surrogate syndrome,” although others have suggested “town gossip complex” might more accurately describe this phenomenon.

As far as the type of alcoholic beverages consumed, the Garbage Project found a broad disparity across neighborhoods and income levels. The alcohol-related trash from low-income areas was dominated by beer bottles, with a smattering of hard-liquor containers mixed in. Middle-income neighborhoods had booze-related trash that spanned the entire spectrum of spirits: beer (mostly in cans), wine and liquor. Upper-income households showed more expensive wine bottles than their middle-income counterparts, but somewhat less prestigious hard-liquor brands.

None of this is very surprising, Rathje says, but the interesting part is that eighteen years of data show that the actual alcohol content delivered by these various beverage choices is consistent across all income groups. Regardless of income, Rathje says, everyone on average gets the same buzz on.

TRASHY DELUSIONS

From a Garbage Project study for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on the Lean Cuisine syndrome (how people overestimate and underestimate their consumption of certain foods based on whether they are fattening or not):

O
NE DAY,
after some sixteen years of trash sorting and household consumer surveys, Rathje and a colleague were discussing the Garbage Project’s latest findings. The other archaeologist heartily congratulated Rathje for all the fine work, but then made a pithy observation. “That’s great and all, but where’s the dirt, Bill? If there’s no dirt, it’s not archaeology.”

Rathje was brought up short by this. His colleague was right: Archaeologists dig. If they wanted to do real archaeology, garbologists would have to dig, too. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? It was time to stop bringing the garbage home, and start bringing their project to the garbage.