The garbage project
When I was growing up we had a dump in town. The dump was an enormous pit. People would back their station wagons up to the edge and toss their bags of trash into the hole. One time I saw an old lady back over the edge and her car was at the bottom, on top of the trash, pointing up.
This is how people have been getting rid of waste since they had waste to get rid of. Just find a patch of ground and pile it up. Or find a hole and pitch it in. Problem solved.
Those old New England dumps are all gone now.
Well they are still there, but they aren’t dumps. They are large, grassy hills that burp methane. They have been replaced by the meek sounding “Transfer Station”. You drop your bags at the transfer station and the get transferred somewhere else. Typically a big furnace.
There was a trash crisis back in the 80’s. At least that’s what the media called it. And with all good crisis they first priority was to look for someone to blame. In the 80’s they blamed fast food wrappers and disposable packaging. And disposable diapers.
If we didn’t do something soon we’d all be up to our armpits in fast food wrappers and disposable diapers!
Well what really takes up all the room in the old landfills? It won’t surprise you that we have an answer.
We have an answer because of the garbage project.
What, you may ask, is the garbage project? Well a team of archeologist at the University of Arizona back in 1973 decide to treat the old dumps like archeological digs. The objective was to apply the techniques and tools of their science to the study of modern civilization by analyzing its garbage.
This project has expanded across many sites nationwide and into Canada.
They found some interesting things. They could date the garbage by the layers they found it in. This way they could correlate the type and quantity of garbage with specific years and events. They basically dug a section of the garbage form the top to the bottom.
So are Diapers and fast food wrappers the culprits? Nope. Turns out 40% of all the garbage stacked up in the nation is paper. Yup. Paper. The common assumption was that the paper would decompose. And sometimes it does. It depends on howe wet the conditions are. We’ll come back to that wetness thing.
40% paper. In fact 13% of that is just newspapers. So we already solved that problem by putting all the newspapers out of business in the last 20 years.
What was the second biggest contributor? Construction debris. Diapers didn’t’ make a dent after all.
They also estimated that the city of new York is 30 feet higher than it started at because of all the refuse piling up.
Why doesn’t’ the paper biodegrade? In most cases the stuff is packed together so tightly that a) the sun can’t get to it, and b) it’d an anerobic environment. The little beasties that eat the trash can’t live.
The other thing we talked about is moisture. Most of these dumps have been sealed. Either with a liner under them or over them. Which shrink wraps in that dry, anerobic environment. Without sun, water and oxygen the trash is preserved in stasis. And indeed there are lots of fun Garbage Project stories about 50 year old hot dogs no different than when they were tossed in the trash.
And the big thesis of are we going to run out of room seems to be unjustified. We create far less trash by volume now than we used to. You’d be quick to assume that this is from our great recycling push. You’d be wrong. It’s because the packaging engineers have made everything thinner and smaller. New stuff takes up less room.
They also found some interesting correlations to things we’ve always suspected about humans. One fun trick is to have people self-report what they discard. Then they measure what was discarded. And of course, they find that people will report, for instance that they don’t waste food. But the actual food waste was about 15% more than reported.
They also found that when local municipalities ran recycling programs, like hazardous waste day, the hazardous waste content would spike. They figured that people would get their hazardous waste out, miss the collection day, and just toss it with the rest of the trash.
Same pattern exists over time with shortages. Like some of the meat shortages in the media. They find the content of meat in the garbage spikes during a shortage. Does that make sense? Of course it does. People panic buy whatever the shortage item is and end up throwing it away because they don’t need it.
Modern trash is a lovely and lively social science.
But I like the old trash. And the old privies. So do archeologists. There’s nothing better than finding an old outhouse to dig through. We’ve been pooping in holes for thousands of years. Archeologists can then go dig through that poop and learn all about the people who were there.
They know what they ate. And they know about their health. One interesting thing is that ancient privies tell us about how the one-percenters lived. The top of society. Why is that? Because up until very recently in the archeological record only rich people had toilets.
It gives you something to be grateful for. I’m guessing you don’t’ have to poop in the woods like a dog. So there’s that. Overwhelmingly these rich folk from the medieval times had worms. Lots of worms. Until recently people had all kinds of worms living in them. We know this because we looked through their poop. I suppose there’s some karma there and another reason to be thakful.
I have two favorite privy stories from the past couple years. The first one was from the privy of a brothel in Brooklyn. They found all sorts of interesting stuff. It seems these ladies were quite concerned with their health and cleanliness and beauty. There were combs and creams and ointments and syringes for personal hygiene.
The second is a privy in New York City in what was the Italian section. They were surprised to find bones that looked like human bones. This would have been a great murder mystery. But they weren’t human bones they were monkey bones from an organ grinder’s monkey.
So there ya go. From the lowliest and most soiled places can be harvested a treasure trove of information about the society of man. And that shouldn’t surprise any of us.