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Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Garbology, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Hidden Costs of Waste
Consumerism vs. Conservation
The Power of Individuals
Money and Politics
Summary
Analysis
One of the big problems with trash is that it is so difficult to track. The supply chain of how products get made is easy to follow, but the “removal chain” is much less trackable. One lab at MIT decided to experiment with “smart trash” by inserting GPS software into normal trash to see where it went.
The very idea of “smart trash” shows how mysterious and impenetrable trash has become in the United States, even for experts with university resources at their disposal.
Themes
In 2009, Tim Pritchard was a Seattle native who heard that MIT’s Trash Track was seeking volunteers. Pritchard joined and helped show the MIT team around Seattle. Some of the trash tracking was high-tech, using the guts of old cell phones to create custom trackers. These were attached to various pieces of trash using a durable epoxy foam. The researchers tried to hide the tracking devices, in order to keep them from being purposely or accidentally removed.
Like Crowley and Goldstein before him, Pritchard shows what just one motivated individual can do to affect the garbage crisis. As someone with no previous experience, Pritchard shows how truly democratic the process of fighting back against waste can be. Then again, perhaps Pritchard also shows how seemingly ordinary people are actually experts in certain things, particularly related to their own communities, and how this expertise will play a vital role in solving the garbage crisis.
Themes
During summer and fall of 2009, the Trash Track team released their trackers into the wild. Weeks later, they checked back on the results and found some surprising things: for example, an old sneaker that traveled 337 miles from Seattle to Oregon. One consistent finding was that electronics and hazardous waste often traveled much further, sometimes being loaded onto ships and taken out of cell reception.
Individually, the details of these pieces of trash are perhaps surprising but not particularly noteworthy. Taken together, however, they tell a story of what a tremendously complicated system American garbage disposal has become and how these complications have helped obscure what’s happening on a large scale.
Themes
The MIT team hoped getting regular citizens involved would help increase awareness about the impact of trash. In particular, the study helped confirm that while recycling sounds good on paper, because trash gets moved around so much, generating excess waste from transport, this offsets the gains from recycling and makes things more complicated. The real solution will be to cut down on trash in general. Smart trash, however, was just the first step in tracking where all the trash goes.
The MIT project helped provide some hard evidence of what many people already suspected: that solving the trash crisis will involve a culture-wide shift. The program’s reliance on volunteers helps emphasize the idea that solving the issue of waste will require communal solutions.
Themes
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