Review of Garbology by Edward Humes Chapter 8

In this chapter, Edward Humes presents a vast amount of information based on an archaeologist named Bill Rathje and how he became the founder of the Garbage Project. In the beginning of the chapter, he mentions a bucket auger, which is utilized to dig out and retract anything within 100 ft down. For instance, it is utilized to retract trash within the landfills. The Garbage Project began in the early 1970s at University of Arizona, where two students came up with the idea of making comparisons of two families to another set of two families(poor) in the way they dispose trash. An interesting claim that Humes mentions,caught my attention: "What we say about ourselves, observes Rathje, is never as honest or as revealing as what we throw away." (page 161). I found Humes' claim to be true in which one person could say he/she is recycling, but what about the other ways we need to dispose trash? Within the project, there has been research that discover a lot of food waste. Some items we think are biodegradable, which is true, but there are many food items that still left behind. Also, many of us tend to purchase items in the grocery store, for instance meat, because we feel it's a necessity to have food stocked up in our refrigerators. Turns out, that the meat ends up in the trash because of bad cooking or pass the expiration date. It's just sad to think that there are many people all over the world that are starving, yet we throw away mass amounts of leftover food. Another interesting fact is how soldiers in World War II, that knew about marketing, analyzed their trash (mainly food) and managed to save 2.5 million pounds of wasted food.
Furthermore, Rathje also believes that the day after a toxic is collected,  the regular trash stream had twice as much hazardous waste. Rathje presents both the positive and negative outcomes of it: goods news it just sits there in the landfills, but the bad news is contamination and there's so much of it. He also believed that if we were given a larger trash can, the more we will waste (Parkinson's Law of Garbage). What I found interesting is how the disposal of trash is affected by our behaviors, which maybe the reason. The interesting part of this project was how they focused on the gender, age, income, etc. which affects what we dispose. Ratje utilized pre-classic era, Classic Period, and Classic Maya as a way to express distinction between waste and wastefulness. Although the project did not reach it's full potential, one of Ratje's students, Sheli Smith, has helped our younger generation realize how much we dispose and how we can control it. Now, children are becoming more involved and comprehend America's trash epidemic because of archaeologist Bill Rathje, there maybe a chance that the next generation could make a change.