Free Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash by Edward Humes

hundreds or thousands of years to turn mundane pieces of broken crockery into valuable artifacts. The more immediate process, the one Big Mike sees every day, is the one where treasures, our treasures of today, are used to construct a trash mountain.
    Working there has changed him, he says, compelling him to think about how he and his family live, what they buy, what they waste. So many people buy so many things that they just throw away a year or two later—things that look great on a TV commercial, that promise to make life better or easier or more fun. Then those must-have products break or wear out, or simply wear out their welcome, and they enter Big Mike’s domain.
    The irony is that Big Mike’s domain, with its unrivaled ability to hide seamlessly all that waste, empowers even more wasting. The landfill solution to garbage took away the slimy stench of the old throw-it-in-the-streets disposal, the smoking pall of the old incinerators, the noisome piggeries, the noxious reduction plants spewing out garbage grease, the ugly, seeping open dumps. It took away the obvious consequences of waste and eliminated the best incentives to be less wasteful. The rise of places like Puente Hills turned garbage from an ugly canker staring everyone in the face into a nearly invisible tumor, so easy to forget even as it swelled beneath the surface.
    “It’s such a waste,” Big Mike observes. “More people should see what I see here, where everything that’s advertised on TV ends up, sooner or later, and a lot sooner than most people think.”
    T HE GOLDEN age of television and mass media marketing has been alternately celebrated and condemned for the last half a century for its unprecedented impact on society and culture. Yet one of its most enduring effects—helping bring about an American trash tsunami—is rarely put on the list of mass media goods and evils.
    Not that the connection is disputed: Leaders of the industry during its earliest days admitted as much, describing their mission in life as persuading American men, women and children to throw away perfectly good things in order to buy replacements promoted as bigger, bolder and better. The senior editor of Sales Management magazine chronicled this when he wrote in 1960 that American companies and media outlets were working together to “create a brand new breed of super customers.” A popular media journal of the day, Printers Ink , went further, suggesting the mission of marketers had to be centered on the fact that “wearing things out does not produce prosperity, but buying things does … Any plan that increases consumption is justifiable.” Even President Eisenhower was caught up in the fervor, suggesting that shopping was tantamount to a patriotic act. When asked at a press conference what he thought people should buy to bolster the economy during a brief, mild recession, the president responded, “Buy anything.”
    And what a vehicle had emerged to persuade Americans to adopt this buy-more mission. For the first time ever, visually compelling moving, talking images were being beamed directly into their homes, free of charge, though not free of commercial messages—a transformative moment that rapidly shifted American popular culture into a round-the-clock tool for selling things. A new marketing industry began speaking about television viewers as a “captive audience” in whom it could instill “artificial” and “induced” needs—those are the terms they casually tossed about—for products no one had ever before considered a necessity. Their tirelessly upbeat portrait of American prosperity, the good life and “progress” made it quite clear that the American Dream was best achieved through buying the latest and greatest cars (preferably several per household), toothpaste and gadgets of all sorts.
    This was the moment in which the Depression-era version of the American Dream—which held that hard work, diligent saving and conserving resources