elizabeth royte Archives

Garbage Land

Reduce, Reuse, Reread Author: Elizabeth Royte Garbage, recycling, yard waste: for most of us, once we dump it in a bin and maybe drag it to the curb, it vanishes from our lives and our minds. But what really happens to the stuff that we don’t want anymore? Elizabeth Royte decides to find out in Garbage Land, starting with picking through her own daily trash for a year to analyze the contents. She attempts to follow her garbage to a landfill, her recyclables to a processing facility, even (gulp) her raw sewage to a treatment plant, with mixed results — [...]

Trashy Reading: Books About Garbage and Recycling

Reducing Garbage, Recycling the Good Stuff It’s summertime and my shelf is full of trashy books — the kind that make you feel really guilty. Get your mind in the gutter: I mean literally trashy, like reading about garbage. After recently staging my semi-annual home purge and coming up with a big pile of boxes and bags to donate, I got interested in where all our unwanted stuff goes. Here in Seattle, composting is mandatory, and that’s made an embarrassingly huge difference in how many trash bags go out to the bin, but what about factors like “passive waste,” [...]