Starred Review We the people of America are "living in an official state of garbage denial," Humes, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author (Eco Barons, 2009), informs us, for we seem totally unaware that each of us, over the course of a lifetime, will generate 102 tons of trash. Zestful in his curiosity and irrepressible in his vivid chronicling, Humes takes us on a garbage tour, beginning with a hoarders' home, where an elderly couple were trapped and nearly killed by accumulated trash, and moving on to Puentes Hills, where a monumental Southern California landfill has become a garbage mountain. As Humes describes the complex and constant operations there, he swings into a fascinating history of trash, from ancient Athens and the first municipal dump to the "legendary filth" of nineteenth-century New York City to the crux of today's challenges, the "plasticization of America." The plague of plastic bags and bottles and mindless, credit-card-fueled consumerism has many dire consequences, the worst of which is the trashing of the oceans, which have become poisonous "plastic chowder." Then there arethe toxic politics and big business of garbage. But Humes finds hope in the innovative work of dedicated garbologists, trash trackers, and activists who are intent on exposing the hazards and travesties of excessive trash and pointing the way to the "low-waste path."

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Humes (Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart's Green Revolution, 2011, etc.) examines how wastefulness is built into the American way of life. The author shines a spotlight on every aspect of the economy, from corporate practices to the habits of individual families, to substantiate his thesis that "the American Dream is inextricably linked to an endless, accelerating accumulation of trash." Marketing encourages wastefulness, he writes; planned obsolescence is built in to manufactured products, and purchasing the new rather than repairing the old has become the order of the day. The products "all come packaged in instant trash [and] what's inside that packaging is destined to break, become obsolete, get used up or become unfashionable in a few years, months or even days." Humes offers plenty of surprising, even shocking, statistics--e.g., one in every six big trucks in America is a garbage truck; according to the EPA, from 1980 to 2000, "the average American daily trash load increased by a third." This is more than 50 percent higher than in other countries with a similar standard of living. Humes discusses the problem of pollution caused by the proliferation of trash, specifically hazardous, nonbiodegradable waste. He uses the example of Coca-Cola's mid-1960s substitution of plastic for reusable glass bottles to show how companies have cheapened their cost of production at the expense of the environment. The author also writes about families who have enthusiastically adopted more frugal lifestyles to protect the environment, taking simple measures such as downsizing their living accommodations, buying in bulk and not wasting food. He looks at the case of Ireland, where the government has introduced a tax on plastic bags; a similar proposal in San Francisco was blocked. An important addition to the environmentalist bookshelf.