landfills Archives

Getting Trashy

…Trashy reading, that is! (For once, I’m not editorializing: I mean books about landfills, recycling, and garbage.) “You only like to read about bummers,” says my boyfriend disapprovingly. He’s not wrong — last year’s hoarding obsession seems to have evolved into my current fixation with garbage and waste. (I even bought myself some garbage socks.) But it’s so interesting! Our modern, convenience-heavy lives create so much waste (plastic packaging, spoiled or uneaten food, cheap fashion from discount chains, and don’t get me started on e-waste), and as far as most of us are concerned, we dump it in the trash [...]

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,” [...]