WGBH Radio; The Callie Crossley Show

I'm Cally Crossley This is the Cali Crosland show. We're talking about garbage in his new book garb ology journalist Ed Hughes take severance a good look at our relationship with trash from corporate practices to household behaviors. The end result is a rethinking of the American dream and enlist an accelerating accumulation of trash. Today advertisers are telling us to get all things new and improved. Planned obsolescence is the force that gives everything meaning. And today even our waste has waste products with short shelf lives. Come with their own cumbersome disposable packaging. There are also plenty of stats that have surface thanks to our wasteful ways. In a life time the average human will likely produce 100 tonnes of trash one in every six big trucks in America is a garbage truck. And that's just the tip of the trash heap. Up next we're talking trash. First the news. From NPR News in Washington I'm Lakshmi saying five men

have been charged with trying to blow up a heavily traveled Cleveland area bridge. The FBI made the arrest last night after a seven month sting operation. Kevin Niedermeyer of member station of UK Su has details. The FBI received intelligence last October that the defendants allegedly wanted to conduct some sort of terrorist plot finally settling on blowing up the bridge. The defendants wavered between making their own explosives or trying to buy a bomb. Undercover FBI agents sold them to fake remotely detonated bombs which they placed under the bridge last night after trying to detonate the devices. They were arrested. U.S. Attorney Steven dental block they talk about making a statement against corporate America and the government as some of the motivations for their actions. Darrell Bock says the defendants are not affiliated with any group and that the public was never in danger during the sting operation. For NPR News I'm Kevin Niedermeyer in Cleveland. One day after a court ruled in favor of Planned Parenthood in Texas a federal

appeals court judge has stayed the order. NPR's Kathy Lohr reports the state wants to cut funding to the organization because it is affiliated with abortion providers. A new Texas rule forbids state agencies from providing funds to any organization associated with abortion providers. Planned Parenthood clinics that do not offer abortions sued to block the rule. The clinics claim cutting funding will stop them from providing basic health services to poor women who do not qualify for Medicaid. After ruling in their favor Monday an appeals judge today granted the state an emergency stay of that order that apparently means the state can stop reimbursing Planned Parenthood for treatment of patients in the Women's Health Program. Planned Parenthood says it centers that participate in the program are legally and financially separate from clinics that provide abortions. Kathy Lohr NPR News. Days after the public learn new Gingrich was dropping out of the race for president the former House speaker is making it official. He is formally suspending his campaign

Wednesday in a YouTube message. Gingrich thanked his supporters. We're going to continue out there in the road both closed and I'll be talking campaigning making speeches doing everything we can to help defeat Barack Obama. I hope you'll join us in this historic effort because this is still the most important election of our lifetime. Gingrich reportedly was expected to endorse Mitt Romney but his message today didn't mention the GOP presumptive nominee. Union workers at a Caterpillar manufacturing plant in Joliet Illinois are on strike they hit the picket lines this morning after rejecting the latest contract for management. About 800 workers from the plant are demanding better pay and health care benefits a spokesman for Caterpillar says a strike will not affect production. At last check on Wall Street the Dow was up 114 points. This is NPR News. And from the WGBH radio newsroom in Boston I'm Christina Quinn with some of the local stories we're following. Today is May Day celebrate a world wide as the workers holiday Occupy Boston marks the

occasion in the rain with demonstrations and rallies starting in Boston's downtown financial district this morning. The movement had largely disappeared from local news after police removed the remaining tents from the Dewey Square encampment in December. But spokeswoman Tara Frederick says that rumors of the Occupy movements death are greatly exaggerated. They're all around. We have 67 work. Groups remember people are meeting in meeting rooms they are helping sway governments to divest to local banks and credit unions. All of this takes a ton of work we have 10 meetings a day and there's anywhere from 10 to 50 people in any of these meetings and so these are the kids that come out and do the outdoor street work and there are people all over the city doing work that you don't necessarily see the mainstream press never shows up to these meetings. And so how are you even going to know we have the Occupy the economy groups we have just one of three of the 67 groups right here. In other news headlines U.S. senator Scott Brown has repeatedly spoken out against President Obama's health care law yet is using a portion of it to provide insurance for his adult daughter. The Massachusetts Republican told the Boston Globe that of course he uses a provision of the law that allows parents to keep their children on family

insurance plans up to age 26. His daughter Ayla is 23. Brown who won his seat by campaigning against the law says he still thinks it should be repealed. A New Hampshire is getting five point nine million dollars in federal grants for community health centers. Most of the money is going to an expansion project for Harber homes Incan Nashua. The grants are part of the new health care law the Affordable Care Act. In sports the Celtics are in Atlanta tonight for game two of the NBA playoffs and the Red Sox take on the Oakland A's in game two tonight with the brand on the mound for the Sox. The weather forecast for the remainder of the afternoon as a wet one with showers and patchy fog a near steady temperature in the upper 40s tonight will see cloudy chance of showers in the evening. Temperatures in the mid 40s right now it's 47 degrees in Boston. And this is WGBH. Good afternoon I'm Cally Crossley. Today we're talking about garbage about all the hundreds of tons of waste each of us produced in a lifetime and what happens to it after the garbage truck picks it up. I'm joined by Ed Humes. He's a

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. His new book is garb ology Our Dirty Love Affair with trash and Humes welcome. KELLEY Well last night I put my garbage can out on the curb and because of you I now can't just roll it out there and forget about it. I'm my mind is whirling with all of the stuff that you've put forward in your book garb ology. So I thought as I rolled my garbage can out that I as an average American put out seven point one pounds of trash per day. One hundred and two tons of trash throughout my life time. How did we get here. Well you know we have managed in the last 50 years to embed. Epic amounts of wasted to our products in our economy daily lives to the point where it almost seems as if we are addicted to waste and in some ways we are because trash has become our leading export as a country. So when we've tied

herself to our trash in ways no society ever has. I think it's just hard for people to realize how much trash we as Americans are putting out there. So put it in a context globally if you will. Where are Americans and the USA in the context of the rest of the world in terms of trash. Well we we lead the world. We we're number one in terms of the amount of trash we make per person. As you said it's just over seven pounds a day. Compare that to Japan. About a third of that two and a half pounds of trash a day another highly developed country with a robust economy and a big consumer culture and yet they've figured out how to be a lot less wasteful than we are and then there's where we put it our go to solution for almost 70 percent of our trash is to bury it in landfills which gradually become garbage mountains. Other countries have for a variety of reasons de-emphasize

landfilling to the point where they hardly do it at all Germany has essentially zero landfill rate. They recycle 66 percent of their waste and they make energy out of the rest in NIS very modernized high tech low emissions waste energy plants. So we were lagging in every measurable way on the waste front except for the amounts we create. And is that just because as you've said we just like stuff. Or you know because when I look at the difference between US and Japan just as an example I think as you pointed out there are an industrialized nation there seems to be. You know what's the difference here. I don't understand why it is that we don't seem to sense it as much of a problem for all of us an environmental problem. Obviously they do and have taken some steps to make certain that it doesn't grow as fast as our mounds of trash do. Well one of the. You know America's been blessed with a lot

of land so it's not like we are running out of room to dig more holes to put her garbage in. The way we've always done it you know for a century. Well actually more than that but in the systematic way we do it now for about 100 years has to been to take it to remote landfills and bury it there and you know as long as we have space a lot of people say hey why fix it if it ain't broken. Other countries have more limited land resources and so they've been forced for that reason to look to other solutions but what they realized along the way is that it's not just environmental and issues there's actually economic benefits to both reducing the amount of waste that you create a lot of countries are interested in packaging reduction and they say hey if you create a wasteful product manufacture you're responsible for the waste and we're not going to subsidize that. In America we essentially subsidize our waste makers by cleaning up the mess for them. Consumers pay for it. Taxpayers pay for and so we

lack incentive in many cases to. Be less wasteful and that's costing us is because you know one of the things that your book does is sort of put all of this out in public for me anyway. I'm thinking all of this stuff I had no idea. And in our country because of the landfill situation I think primarily I don't think we think about it unless you live close to a landfill unless you work in to fill. We just don't think about it. It goes somewhere and that's the end of it. It's our magic trick out of sight out of my oh we have an amazingly efficient some public some privately run collection service that's really good at making it disappear. The example I use is you know I'm sure many of your listeners have seen or heard about these reality TV shows about hoarders who fill their their homes with possessions and trash that they just can't bear to part with in fact it's the first scene in my book as a family. Elderly couple that is literally

buried alive inside their home because they won't throw anything away. And we say oh boys net aberant. But the fact is when you measure the amount of waste in their home for that elderly couple it's exactly normal for the temperature American couple It's just that they hoarded in their home and we hoarded in landfills at us. You know we don't have to look at the consequences of our wastefulness But if we piled up our trash for a year. On our front lawn let's say for each person in your house it would be 1.3 tons. That would be horrifying not invisible but we're not we're not seeing it so it's as you say unless you happen to live next to one of these for positive Henri's of trash you. You can really not think about it at all. My guest is Ed Humes He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and his new book is garb ology Our Dirty Love Affair with trash. You can join the conversation at 8 7 7 3 0 1 8 9 seventy 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. What does

your own household trash add up to. Are you trying to cut down on how much you throw out in a world of planned obsolescence. Is it hard for you to avoid and out with the old in with the new way of living. 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70 and I'd love to hear from people who are trash collectors because you're seeing it first hand my 7.1 pounds of trash per day. Love to hear from some people who are picking it up and can tell us what they see on a regular basis. So here's the other point that I wanted to bring forward in your book. So we're talking about these huge landfills all over the place the biggest one that you spend a fair amount of time talking about is in California outside Los Angeles it literally surrounds Los Angeles it's called pointy hills. And then there is also trash under the sea and in space so we can't escape. It seems geographically. First tell

me about pointy hills how large it is how much and why I think it is you know a metaphor for how our trash is gotten out of control now. Oh well it actually is the perfect place if you want to look at the history of waste in America because it started out in one thousand fifty years as a dairy form. It was a canyon. Actually it was below sea level and it started out as a small private dump and it was purchased by the county in flux of waste in serious amounts began and the cows were gone. And it's funny because the setting atop the canyon are three natural peaks and the highest one was a high point over the Los Angeles basin and that's where the Air Force put a Nike missile installation so it could over look. Protect the city from attack during the Cold War. It was it was an aircraft missile battery. Now fast forward

that canyon has filled to the point where the trash now is a mountain higher than the missile station and radars for it and it contains one hundred and thirty million tons of waste there whose putrified innards put out so much methane that the portion of which that gas that can be captured Jenner is used in generators and it can power as much as seventy thousand homes that so much waste gas is coming off this this monument of trash. And if you look at what's inside it you think oh it's just all garbage it's all things that have no value and that's not true at all the biggest component of our landfills is packaging paper in plastic packaging in containers that could be recycled but isn't that's the single biggest thing we we throw away and don't recycle. And it's. We pay for it and it becomes instant trash and yet it's made out of these incredibly durable materials plastics that never go away. So we're making our trash out of

things that are essentially eternal. And that's creating a whole set of other problems. I want to get back to that paper trash in just a minute but first I want you just if you would speak about the trash that's under the sea. And then I want to talk a little bit about the trash that's in space and this is all coming from us we should be clear. So under the sea first if you would. Well that that's actually a huge problem and it's gotten a lot of attention but basically a lot of our trash gets away from us particularly plastic and it makes its way into our waterways and drainage and ultimately to the sea so that you have these areas of the ocean huge areas that are getting plasticized turned into a kind of chowder of plastic particles where. There's concentrations of little bits of plastic because all the place doesn't decompose it does break down into smaller pieces over time so it's not a problem of a big floating landfill out there in the ocean it's all these little particles about the size of plankton. Well guess what.

The little organisms that little fish that eat plankton can't really tell the difference and they swell the plastic along with it and that enters the food chain along with all kinds of toxic compounds that cling to the plastic and bigger fish eat the smaller fish and ultimately it works it works its way up to the part of the food chain that we eat. So it's a huge problem. And and this is a good way to visualize it. The amount of plastic believed to be entering the ocean is the way to equivalent of losing that 40 Navy super aircraft carriers at sea a year. That's how much plastic we're losing track of in contaminating the ocean and it's wreaking havoc that we're only just beginning to measure. The reason I want you to articulate just the breadth and depth of the problem is so that we can put to rest right away that this is not a. Sort of feel good. I'm a green guy. I mean I'm a green gal you're a green guy kind of think this is really button line issues. It's

happening to all of us. This trash it really side from Think about this plastic entering to the food chain and think about where that transitions up out in the landfills. I mean this is really beyond plastic bags it is plastic bags but it's bad. It's much more and really it's and it's just as much an economic and resources issue. Let's put aside the protect the planet concerns you don't have to be green to care about waste because waste is. It's not just useless material that we need to get out of sight. Waste is the physical manifestation of our wasteful ness. You know we're losing things that have incredible value by wasting so much material and the energy that goes into making these wasteful products. The best example I have I think is junk mail. Now we make so much junk mail that out of every hundred pounds of stuff that goes into landfills a pound of that is junk mail you know 85 billion pieces of junk mail last year. That's

more than half the U.S. mail now. Can you imagine at the age of e-mail and half our mail is junk mail and we're subsidizing it. The people who are receiving the junk mail you and I are paying for it because the junk mail is get an artificially low rate way less than what you know the stamps we have to buy to stick on to the check we send to the phone company so we're paying to receive this junk mail that nobody wants. And then we pay for the second time because the jumpers are responsible for this tidal wave of waste they're creating. We are we have to pay to have it all the way. And then the kicker is it's not even getting recycled more than half of it ends up stuck in landfills. Why have we created an economy where unwanted incredibly wasteful products are being subsidized and the makers of it have an incentive to make it. That's the crazy perversity to cause the South's us to have this world leading a wasteful economy no other country does that. We were the only ones. So we talked about land and sea I. I want to wrap up in

this moment with space because not only did I read about it in your book but just yesterday fabulous piece in the in the Boston Globe about Raytheon coming up with a space since because they want to try to cut a chorale the amount of space that's full and the amount of garbage that's floating around in space which is causing accidents. The piece in part says the orbiting field of stellar garbage represents a growing threat to the International Space Station. A multitude of orbiting satellites and future space explorers and said some of the stuff lost in space travels 10 times faster than a bullet. Even a speck of a rocket ship paint or an errant screw could wreck a spacecraft. So they've come up with this this is called an electronic net of radar signals to try to monitor figure out where the stuff is so that people who are traveling in space can least try to avoid it. No way to corral it physically as we would think of corralling it but it's a way to began and this is what Raytheon is doing the pieces by Michael feral in the Boston Globe yesterday.

So right on time here you are talking about garbage in the sea on land and now also in space and yours what Raytheon's trying to do. Well I know you know there's a lot of expense and effort and time spent trying to track the trash that has accumulated in orbit from various space missions and broken satellites and all but it's you know we. Every activity that humans engage in whether it's in space or in the ocean or on land generates ways that living itself waste is an essential part in fact it's one of the you know it's one of the defining characteristics of living organisms that they make some waste words. What's different now is that we are making so much more of it and making it out of materials that don't occur in nature and putting them in places where they're not supposed to be in the ocean and in space. And you can see it creates a multitude of of of dangers and economic

challenges that are entirely avoidable. And but we haven't put our minds or innovation towards doing that to the degree that we're capable of. Well much more trash talk wears New England and in the country's collection of trash and how we manage our trash what is found in those huge landfills and in terms of stuff that we throw away and what does it say about us we're talking about garbage about how much waste we produce and what happens to it after after we've thrown it away. I'm speaking with Pulitzer Prize winning writer Ed Humes. His new book is garb ology Our Dirty Love Affair with trash. Join us at 8 7 7 3 0 1 8 9 seventy 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. You can write to our Facebook page or send us a tweet at Kalak cross-link You're listening to WGBH Boston Public Radio. WGBH programs exist because of you and Wind River environmental

providing septic grease and brain cleaning services that can help keep your home and your business running smoothly. Your septic and grease pumping service experts w our environmental dot com. And celebrity series of Boston it's for people who don't want to consume artistic junk food. Jack Wright director of marketing and communications. It's the kind of thing that makes you when you pull into the driveway makes you stay in the car longer than you planned on. That's the kind of thing we want communicated that we represent. GBH is helping us to present to this audience to learn more visit WGBH dot org slash sponsorship. Workers from Mali made a good living in Libya. Then came Libya civil war and the Mali and fled for their lives. I won for Libya. I come to my lead again. I don't know where I would run to hide myself with my family. Some now live as refugees in their own hometowns. Others have brought back weapons and war. How the Libyan conflict brought misery to Mali. That's next time on the world.

Coming up at 3:00 here on eighty nine point seven WGBH. I'm Brian McRae from WGN. Has classical movies. Normally think of summer as kind of a drag. So how would you like to escape to the clean crisp air of the Swiss Alps for six days of great food sightseeing and incredible live classical music with plenty of time left over for shopping or just relaxing. Then join us for a classical New England learning tour through the Swiss Alps August 25th through September 2nd. Space is limited and time is running out. Each year you secure your spot at WGBH dot org slash learning tours. When you're curious about technology. Knowing what miniaturization means. I saw that we were all going to be blaring the wind explore a world of ideas at the WGBH forum network WGBH dot org slash forum. Welcome back to the Calla Crossley Show. If you're just tuning in we're talking about garbage about all the trash we produce and what actually happens to that waste. My guest is Pulitzer

Prize winning writer at Hume's. His latest book is garb ology Our Dirty Love Affair with trash. You can join the conversation at 8 7 7 3 0 1 8 9 seventy 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. You can write to our Facebook page or send us a tweet. So here's a Facebook comment from Kate. Lots of recycling companies don't take higher number of plastics six and seven which look like styrofoam but aren't really. Also our apartment community doesn't offer recycling so we lug all of our recycling to the rental house we own and recycle it there. Needless to say we are not renewing our lease at the apartment and also let me take a call right now. Diane from Holliston Go ahead please you're on the Kelly Crossley Show. Eighty nine point seven WGBH Diane. Hi can you hear me. Yes the e-mail comment. Very close to what I was going to say. There seems to be a lot of disparity among municipalities in Massachusetts between what can and what can't be recycled. Some still you've been Think

frame but I'm wondering if a way to keep the amount that goes into the landfill now and to encourage people to recycle by making it as idiot proof as possible. Just put it into the single stream recycling bin. Why does it matter. She said take some initiative and require that I mean it. How do you think a single stream recycling. And you want to respond. Well thanks for calling. The you know there's so many obstacles to recycling and we're also pinning so much hope on recycling that it is actually a whole whole plethora of things people need to understand that most of our trash to could be recycled is not being recycled. And part of it is a lack of convenience. Part of it is because the materials that we're encouraged to put in our recycling bins actually won't be recycled because most municipalities don't have the facilities to recycle certain kinds of plastic kinds of plastic that are mixed you know

how. Shampoo bottle have a little ring of plastic at the top that's different they create all kinds of problems for recycling if something isn't clean. If it's food particles in it if it hasn't been rinsed by the consumer it often won't be recycled because it's considered contaminated and all that raises the cost of trying to reclaim those materials and a lot of places just won't do it. So we have this to our consciences that oh it's OK if we drink you know hundreds of bottles of water a year in our household it'll be recycled Well maybe it will maybe it won't recycling is actually a lousy solution it's just better than nothing. There's so many better ways to deal with waste. But right now it's what we've pinned our hopes on single stream is something that I believe Boston is looking at. I don't know if it's implemented yet the report I saw said it was in the planning stages but it's interesting because they recently renamed. Their sanitation department into the Bureau of waste reduction. If I'm not mistaken and there you begin to see a new

way of thinking Hey you know it's not enough to just collect the stuff or recycle the stuff how can we reduce this stuff and when that's the animating principle then you see that recycling is probably what you want to do less of and producing a lot more of so in and in fact where energy can be most you know get the most bang for our buck and use the thing that struck me about your book. Thanks very much for the call Diane. Because her recycling question and the Facebook commenters recycling question all fall under a whole category I would call a dress in your book about either in adequate policies to address this issue or ones that just don't fit the problem. So one hand as in don't know what the other hand is doing. I was particularly struck because today here at WGBH we had a free recycle where you turn in some electronic equipment that hazardous waste kind of stuff that you don't want to just leave around. And you say in your book that that policy in many places

actually has worked to make that recycling worse because people hide it. If they miss the time when they can can do. It was just to get in the regular trash you know. I was shocked by that I have to say. Well you could understand what happens people are busy they find out oh darn I missed it and I have this big pile of batteries or paint cans or whatever it is that we're supposed to take special care with. And so they miss that day and they want to clean out their garage. But they might have just let it sit there some more because they forgot about it but then they then this special day comes along and they say oh I'm just going to get rid of it and throw it in their regular recycling bin or the regular trash. So that speaks to bad policies not understanding the behavior and addressing the policy in a way that is practical for people such as Diane's point about is can we do single stream can't we you know make this work a little bit better. You know why does there have to be a special day why can't you be a convenient place just to bring this

kind of special you know dangerous material to drop off and communities that have done that have found that that solves the problem. OK. Right. This is a simple solution. OK Ray from eastward Go ahead please you're on the Cali Crossley Show WGBH eighty nine point seven. Well thank you Mr. Hume and Cali for having me on the show I think that the food chain of responsibility for the the fair product bit obligated and difficult to manage and expensive to deal with whether it's financial or environmental to be shifted to the source. There are some countries in Europe that consider a storage space toss of the industry reducing the waste they need responsibility for producing it which is the first step towards really did you know that having as much of a problem. And but the onus on. Those that produced it. I think that's a good way. My native point of view

on it is that it damages the environment damages everyone within it and that you know we have a pretty myopic view about if you throw it away then it's away and you never have to think about it again. There it will be there it continues to be there to everybody's detriment and to make the consumer the responsible party or by proxy the government service and interest you. Well Ray I think that's the point that Ed is making about our inability in America to do that thank you so much for the call. And that's what you're saying is that you know other countries make the producers of this these waste products. At least take some responsibility for disposing of them properly. Yeah and it's this idea of product stewardship and consumers you know are not guilt free on their we make a lot of wasteful choices as consumers that we ought to be responsible for but that doesn't mean that I. The producers of wasteful products should elude any responsibility for

their role and it's kind of like we need to spread around the responsibility more than we do so in our economy because right now we're basically creating incentives for manufacturers to be wasteful rather than to avoid waste and why not use a little of this market magic we're always talking about in America to create incentives for less wasteful products. You know I know companies who are doing that and think of the Patagonia outdoor where a company says hey when you're done with their products send it back to us. Doesn't matter if it's worn out you're tired of it you know like a game or whatever. Send it back we'll make something else out of it. And that's that's a great policy. I mean that's accepting responsibility for what your products are leaving behind in the world and ultimately they can make things out of it so it's not like this material is useless to them. So they're kind of thinking is. Very productive.

That's called having it just to hold a vision about how to how to handle all this stuff. I want to bring on the line a Robert Gauguin he's in charge of recycling on the Harvard University campus. He helps oversee Harvard University's annual stuff sale. You mention in your book as one of the largest yard sales in the world. Robert go going welcome. Well thanks for having me Kelly. Tell us about the biggest yard sale and this is a way of Harvard University engaging in a different kind of recycling is not just plastic bottles if you will but but a bigger initiative. That's right it's really reuse and not recycling. It came about between the three areas of operations which is my area back in the early 1990s I just saw this tidal wave of useful stuff coming out of the dormitories. And then there was the office of sustainability and

our interest in having a more responsible way of managing our midst our materials. We came under Can considerable criticism from the neighbors in the city of Cambridge when a truck would pull up to doing that. Need to clean out its bike storage cage and 10 or 15 abandoned bikes or go into the trash. And it really caught the eye of the Cambridge assistant city manager and he said he didn't have nice things to say about Harvard. The next time he spoke about us in public and then the other thing is that we had student charities they were looking to raise money. One of them being Harvard Habitat for Humanity. The student chapter of the national organization that builds housing for the needy and between those three interests starting in the mid 90s. We started to recover more and more material which even though it was garbage in

May it was gold in September and we were able to demonstrate that we could manage to pull it off. Leave a warehouse swept clean at the end of September and a good chunk of change in the Habitat for Humanity coffers. I want you to describe for people how much we're talking about I don't want people to think there's like five deaths out there and you know three three chairs. This is it. We have a campus of about 10000 residents in the Cambridge campus Cambridge and Allston campuses and about another 20000 staff faculty researchers contractors full time equivalent day students or evening students and we ended up recovering the last year about two hundred twenty moving truckloads in terms of weights. It's at least 200 tons. Probably more like

400 tons. We had to scale away 22 tons of clothes last year eight tons of textbooks. And by the way the textbooks even in this age of e-books and tablet readers textbooks are still the biggest money maker. So it's. Whole lot of stuff it fills completely filled to overflowing. A 20000 square foot warehouse. And so if you think about the logical extension of this is before you did this. This stuff was just going really to waste adding to stuff piling up everywhere that people could not use and yet this is a this is certainly a reuse situation you know waiting to be had on on all fronts both for charity and both for people who can use the products that are out there. Absolutely and you know it's it's a good it kind of leads directly to the statement that waste is nothing

more than materials in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because a futon is in the way of cleaning out the dorms in May perfectly good. No bed books in there we checked. And in Sept.. Number of students willing to pay one hundred twenty five bucks to put it in their room. So what really we really need to do and this is true of our entire materials management economy is we need to find out how to get a lot smarter about recovering goods that still have a lot of useful life and getting them from the people who find them to be in their way at that time and get them to people who need them. Absolutely. Let me take a call and on the road you're on the Cali Crossley Show eighty nine point seven WGBH go ahead. I let me. Yeah that's you.

I just want to talk about how one thing leads to another and great chain reaction last year in the fall I decided to cut out early that same problem with the amount of sugar intake we have in our lives 100 pounds a year something to process food. And I started eliminating process food from March to my own shelves. And what I found was as I went through this. Office in the supermarket. My trash was dwindling. I went down that road a little further I found that if I used the rule of thumb where I bought nothing with a label I know it sounds insane. I bought nothing with a label on it. I could reduce my trash tenfold and what I basically found out was I shop more and produce stuff involved meat. Bought. Things. Just involved whenever I could. I got to the point where I was making my own dog food which actually turned out to be cheaper for me and more healthy for my dog. I got a little crazy with it and now I'm at the point where I'm making my own ketchup because I don't want that jar in

my refrigerator. But the bottom line was these things were fine for me and more and more interesting to me than anything else that wasn't done on some kind of a mission for the environment. But I found it was fun but I also have one bag of garbage in six weeks rather than one every week. I think I can get that down to next to nothing and all my garbage would be recyclable at that point. My next project is to make Juande detergent myself which is very simple extremely well and and let me let. We let our hero who's author of garb ology respond. Is he the role model that you'd like to see happening for many Americans it has discovered the secret of being less wasteful and that is the kinds of products that you are forsaking are in fact the most wasteful ones it's you know cleaning products are a great example not just laundry detergent but you know you look under your sink and if you've got a window cleaner tile

cleaner glass cleaner furniture cleaner you don't really need all it's products in all those containers. We've sort of a condition to think you have to but you know the family I write about has taken many of the same steps that it is talking about. Also they clean everything with vinegar and castille soap and they buy a big bottles of it and they mix it together in different proportions depending on what they have to clean and that's all they need. So think of all the money they save. Yeah well now that Romney is definitely that's an economic incentive. And on the road how much time does it take you because I can hear people thinking OK well that's great and I'd like to do it but I don't have time to do it and on the road is doing all right. Next in there no. Go ahead. I mean it's not all but 30 minutes a week approximately to make my laundry detergent and my dog food. Wow it's amazing because it's just while you're cooking anyway you do the dog OK. You're going to eat the stuff I make my dog and the laundry detergent was

simply boiling for the most part. And the one thing that you know I don't know what the three ingredients the next it's boiling. All right well Ed you've given us a lot of motivation thank you so much for the call. And Humes let me just say that I wonder if the end on the road represents that New England thrist that we have heard about so much and I wanted you to speak to where New England was where Massachusetts is in the whole trash garbage situation. Are we worse than other places better on our way to being better what how would you describe us. Well it depends on how you measure it of course but if you look at mail it's trash going to landfills. New England is the leader in avoiding that in diverting material from landfills. So that's that's pretty good. Only 31 percent of the New England regions municipal waste ends up in landfills vs. the at the bottom of the

list as the Rocky Mountain region where 88 percent of the. Trash goes to landfills. The reason the big pick up for New England isn't so much that it recycles more it's just a little bit above the national average. And by the way Boston is below the national average. Oh that's good. No it's not good all right. Cycles less then I get to worry about that. But it's waste to energy plants where really it's the only region in the US that is look at doing that in serious quantities. Are the New England states and particularly Connecticut although Massachusetts probably is second to Connecticut in New England region. And what they're doing is diverting materials from landfills recycling what can be recycled and then burning the rest in these plants that create electricity and that that's a technology that has advanced quite a bit in

recent years to the point where you think burning trash would be really bad for the environment actually has it. The modern plants have lower greenhouse gas emissions than landfills to go figure. So we're ahead on something. Yeah yeah you definitely are a diversion from landfill. That region that leads in actual amounts of recycling the west primarily because of California they have the highest percentage of material recycled but relatively little waste energy. OK Robert Goldman before I let you go overseer of Harvard University's annual stuff sale one of the largest yard sales in the world what would be your advice to incoming students about beginning their year in managing so that at the end of the year maybe they don't have so much to put out in the yard sale. Well what I what I tell the students that they don't necessarily follow this advice is. Get up with the

sun and go to sleep with the birds you know. Don't stay up late. Don't you know then you don't need a desk lamp and a task lamp in a room lamp you know. You will look at what a nice midnight snack because you will have had the chance to get up and gone to breakfast and you know come to campus with what you can carry a suitcase. And if you need more stuff well the stuff sales there for that. But don't you know get in the car with your parents and drive out to a Wal-Mart or Ikea and load up on 900. Things that you don't even really know what you're going to use as a student. You know one of the things we think we find in the stuff sale goods donated at the end of the year is boxes and boxes of games and puzzles that are little used or unopened because they have a very unrealistic idea of how little time they'll have to do anything other than study.

So you know take it slow bring bring clothes you'll really wear and you know maybe plan to rent microwave and mini fridge when you get here but wait and see how well the dining hall serves your food needs. And it's pretty well and the food here and I'm sure at Hampshire College too is way too way better. And we remember back in the old Sarka service station. Alright well thank you very much for that advice and I know folks will be looking forward to the the big stuff sale later on. Robert thank you so much for talking about the security more with Humes and we're still talking garbage about how much waste we produce and what happens to it after we've thrown it away. I'm speaking with Pulitzer Prize winning writer Ed Humes. His new book is garb ology Our Dirty Love Affair with trash. Join us at 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 seventy eight 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. You can write to

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On the next FRESH AIR we mark the one year anniversary of the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. Journalist Peter Bergen produced the first TV interview with bin Laden back in 1997 and has written about him ever since. Bergen's new book is called Manhunt The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad. Join us. This afternoon at 2:00 here on eighty nine point seven. WGBH. It's time for the forty seventh annual WGBH auction. It's your chance to take advantage of some great deals on home furnishings electronics jewelry fine dining unforgettable getaways. And even a brand new Toyota Prius donated by your New England Toyota team and every winning bid supports the programs you depend on from WGBH radio and television. Bid high bid offer keep coming back daily features. It's all online at auction to WGBH dot org. Great question and it's a great question and it's a great question. It's a great question.

Rick great question on fresh air you'll hear unexpected questions and unexpected answers this afternoon at 2 here on eighty nine point seven WGBH. Welcome back to the Calla Crossley Show. If you're just tuning in we're talking about garbage and how in extra he linked the human experiences to the never ending cycle of consumption and waste. My guest today is Ed Humes. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist His latest book is garb ology Our Dirty Love Affair with trash. So Ed one of the things that your book also gets to is just uncovering what is found in a lot of these landfills what people throw away and examining actually what it means and let me quote one of our great philosophers the late great George Carlin. Comedian who has a classic routine call stuff. And here's just a part of it he says the whole meaning of life is trying to find a place for your stuff.

All House is is a pile of stuff with a cover on it and he goes on to say that all you have is a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff and we know from your book now that what happens there is a lot of that stuff turns into waste and into garbage and into problems. One of the parts of your book that I thought was fascinating was one of the early Gar biologist if you will a gentleman from the University of Arizona who excavated trance sites the way that others excavate anxious tombs sites and looked at what was in there what people threw away and ascertain what it meant. Speak to what does our tracks say about us. Well one of the fascinating things he learned is how unaware we truly are of our waste habits. He would do two things they go and they examine what people were throwing away and then interview them about what their habits were. So for instance the first lady you

heard was that people claim to drink a lot less alcohol beverages than they their trash actually show that you know all those six pack cartons and so forth tended to belie their own claims where is they vastly overestimated the amount of healthy food they consumed because of the Somehow this packages of cottage cheese and whole grain cereal just weren't there. So people had a very poor idea of how much and what kind of waste they were generating. Ironically though if you ask them about their neighbors they say they nailed how much alcohol they drank. And it matched up really quite nicely so the psychology of waste disposal is very subjective and that's why people really find it hard to believe that we're making seven pounds of trash a day. And then he could see that actually the kind of waste. If you examine the

demographics of it. Income is really doesn't determine the amount of waste overall that we make although some areas affluent areas tend to have a higher concentration of gardening product related waste and lower income areas. You see more things related to painting and home maintenance. Do it yourself kind of stuff that kind of waste gets in the trash but by and large the quantity is. Doesn't doesn't seem to vary that much on income levels but I do get back what Bob was talking about about the kinds of stuff that Harvard throws away be remiss if I suggest we suggested that Harvard was an outlier on this because the thing about if you hang out a landfill it what you see is it's not all useless stuff its treasures come there every day on the our couches beds furniture furniture is the biggest single category of a type of trash you see landfills and it's not all broken down something seems perfectly good.

I would see truckloads of food not spoiled food just dumped there fresh from the market. Melons produce. You can understand the kinds of things that are being thrown away because either it's just convenient to do so or nobody thinks that there might be a way to reuse this material. Well some hard right about food with corporations throwing away food it's a liability question there been many people in the fight some right here in Boston to try to get corporations to say look wave that thing there are too many people hungry and to for you to throw out. You know very good food. And yet that's a significant portion of what's going into landfills it's not even being composted and that's the thing at least you could do something useful. Yes but if by a large that's not happening either. Well I mentioned in the early on in the show about the paper waste that we create and you talked about how much we do it and you have an amazing story of a woman who is a billionaire as a result of collecting paper waste and

recycling it really to her advantage smartly as a business person. Tell us about that if you would. QUEEN OF TRASH. She emigrated to America and early 90s from China and began a scavenging business. It's what we used to call our trash collectors who were actually you know a hundred years ago they were scavengers which was a very different definition of what they did because what they were doing is finding useful things that people were thrown away and cleaned. Well she was doing it with in Los Angeles or collecting paper that had been taken to landfills and disposed of rather than recycled. And she knew what apparently had eluded most other people which is that China was desperate for paper. They have had this expanding manufacturing base they had cut down all their own trees to to make cardboard and paper for all the things they were manufacturing. And Shanks figured out that all

those cargo containers that were coming over full from China were going back empty to China to be filled up again and she could collect enough paper she could pay next to nothing to use some of those empty containers to get her recyclable paper back. And she did and she became China's first billionaire doing this. That's what trade he is now America's leading exporter. That's amazing. She sends out more cargo containers of product trash than anybody else in the country. Can you believe it. I can believe it. Now that I've read your book with little time to go I want you if you would to give us the critical things that we can do individually to reduce if it makes sense to recycle what can we do to start you know get back to you. Basically if you will. Well you know there really is a way back this is the one thing that we can all do something about. And even if we just do what we're comfortable with you know we heard from a caller who is taking a

lot of steps but some of those things make sense for for everybody cutting down on wasteful products like bottled water which you know you can use your own bottle in your own tap water and get the same quality and pay much less. And without creating all those wasteful bottles you know bulk is a great way to buy things because it's more economical you can use your own containers or you simply get one larger container of shampoo or vinegar or whatever it is you're buying instead of a lot of small ones that cuts down on waste and saves you money. Bring your own bag to the market plastic bags are very difficult to recycle. They get in the ocean. They're containing the environment. We use 500 of them a year the average American and we're bag monsters as Andy Keller the founder of the go bag disposable. Brother re-usable bad company says and he calls plastic bags the gateway drug to waste and he could begin by eliminating that it can lead to other good things down the line so there's a lot of simple straightforward things to do buying and re purposing things like the kinds of

furniture that you can buy at the stuff sale in Harvard Yard. You know like buying a refurbished electronics instead of new sorts of choices that are economical and environmentally good practice. Well we appreciate it because you depress me I have to tell you at the beginning and toward the end I did feel a little bit more hopeful So thank you. We've been talking about your consumption and waste with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ed Humes. His latest book is garb ology Our Dirty Love Affair with trash. You can keep on top of the Calla Crossley Show at WGBH dot org slash Calla Crossley follow us on Twitter. Become a fan of the Calla Crossley Show on Facebook today show was engineered by Antonio all the art produced by Chelsea mergers and Abbey Ruzicka. We are a production of WGBH Boston Public Radio.