Garbology

Americans generate more trash per person than any other nation on earth — 102 tons over a lifetime, enough to fill three Statues of Liberty. Humes spent years following the full arc of American garbage: the landfills that are the largest man-made structures on earth, the recycling myth, the ocean gyres of plastic, the zero-waste families who have figured out how to produce almost none of it, the cities redesigning their systems from the ground up. The most readable and most complete account of what American consumption actually produces — not as an environmental lecture but as a portrait of a culture through its most honest self-disclosure. What we throw away tells the truth about who we are in a way that nothing else does.