102 Tons Symbol Analysis

On May 24, 2010, rescue workers donned impermeable hazardous materials suits, then burrowed into the creaking, dangerous confines of a ruined South Side Chicago home, searching for the elderly couple trapped inside.

One hundred thirty million tons: Such a number is hard to grasp. Here’s one way to picture it: If Puente Hills were an elephant burial ground, its tonnage would represent about 15 million deceased pachyderms—equivalent to every living elephant on earth, times twenty. If it were an automobile burial ground, it could hold every car produced in America for the past fifteen years.

It is, quite literally, a mountain of garbage.

“There is no other place like it, and no other job like it, either,” Big Mike says, gazing fondly at his dusty, noisy workplace. This observation is accompanied by a sigh of satisfaction tinged with regret, because soon, Big Mike knows, it will end. Soon the mountain will be finished, though not gone, of course—a landfill is never gone. It’s the question of what’s next that has not yet been resolved, that L.A. and the rest of the country are trying to puzzle out, and that will have lasting consequences no matter how it’s answered: Is it time to dump the dump as the centerpiece of waste? Or time to hedge our bets once again and find even bigger dumps to take their place?

But finding these big pieces of ocean trash was not the main source of Crowley’s mounting despair, though she has known these waters for nearly forty years and sailed here back when they were truly blank and pristine and breathtaking. She knows this sort of trash is a huge problem, entangling and killing more than one hundred thousand marine mammals and an even larger number of seabirds—no one knows for sure how many. But what really alarmed her this day wasn’t the trash she could see. It was what she couldn’t see that troubled her, after the bottles, cups and other bobbing trash had been hauled out, and the mirror of water and foam appeared deep blue and clear, flashing by beneath sun and pale sky as she stared down from the railing.

Plastic has gone so fast from zero to omnipresent that it’s slipped beneath conscious perception.

At fifty years old, Pritchard was a natural for Trash Track. He’d been working to green himself for years, knocking his personal trash footprint way below the 102-ton legacy. He pegs his trash output at a single paper grocery bagful a month, recyclables included, though he qualifies this achievement by saying he’s single and travels often for work, which cuts down his trips to the home trash can and recycling bin.

Garbology makes it possible for a student to go beyond thinking about saving the world, and actually doing it. It’s within their power to make a difference.

Prior to that moment, he had not thought of those handy-dandy filmy white grocery bags as any sort of problem. They were so thin, so light, he hadn’t really given them a thought. But their footprint seemed magnified now by their dramatic presence in the landfill.

For all his advocacy for waste-to-energy, Nickolas Themelis believes that the most intelligent, most-likely-to-succeed, long-term solution to waste is far simpler than any giant trash-burning generator, and far less costly, yet so much more difficult to achieve: a changed culture.

That’s when Bea Johnson finally got it: There’s power in putting things down instead of putting them in your shopping cart. There’s power in saying no—the power to change a family’s life and fortune. Maybe a community’s. Maybe a whole country’s.

Johnson and her zero-waste crusade are a whole different animal. She has identified a problem not on a campus or a beach but inside everyone’s home and lifestyle. And her family has responded by transforming itself in a dramatic way, becoming happier and more prosperous by rejecting the consumer economy and lifestyle most Americans live and breathe. Is there any wonder why this angers so many people? Agreeing with the Johnsons’ views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change.

When this book was conceived, I intended to write about our 64-ton lifetime trash legacy, not the 102 tons it turns out to be. This original, smaller calculation was based on the widely accepted and official data point produced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which asserts that the average American produced 4.5 pounds of trash a day. When I discovered midway through this project that these numbers were wrong, that Americans were actually churning out an average of 7.1 pounds a day and sending twice as much trash to the landfill as we were being led to believe, it did more than change the central metaphor of a book about garbage.

It meant our trash problem—our trash addiction—already the biggest on the planet, is way, way worse than we’ve been told.

Waste-cutting is the secret to sustainability, security and prosperity. That 102-ton legacy doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It’s in everyone’s power to make it the starting point instead.