RUBBISH! The Archaeology of Garbage. By William Rathje and Cullen Murphy. Illustrated. 250 pp. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $23.
SINCE 1973, a group of anthropologists at the University of Arizona has been conducting a series of systematic archeological digs, minutely sifting, classifying and recording the contents of more than 14 tons of excavated material. The site of their investigation, however, has not been ancient burial grounds or prehistoric settlements, but urban landfills -- in other words, garbage dumps.
The result of their work is documented in "Rubbish!" which, despite its sensational exclamation point, is neither a harangue on the environmental perils of a throwaway society nor a tongue-in-cheek history of trash. William Rathje, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and director of the university's garbage project, and Cullen Murphy, the managing editor of The Atlantic, have written a lucid and provocative book that steers well clear of self-righteousness -- and bad jokes -- and takes aim at several sacred cows along the way.
The garbage project is based on an arresting premise: "That what people have owned -- and thrown away -- can speak more eloquently, informatively, and truthfully about the lives they lead than they themselves ever may." The idea that garbage is a useful source of cultural information about the past is hardly novel; after all, middens, the sites of many archeological digs, are rubbish heaps under another name, and the pottery shards and flint scraps that we look at in museums are really just very old garbage. But can we actually learn something useful about the modern world by scrutinizing its rubbish?
Garbage doesn't lie. The evidence of junk-food wrappers, liquor bottles and girlie magazines often flies in the face of what we tell ourselves -- and what we tell others -- about what we do. By comparing the results of surveys of food consumption with the contents of the respondents' trash containers, the garbage project discovered a phenomenon they called the Lean Cuisine syndrome -- people consistently underreport the quantity of junk food they eat, and overreport the amount of fruit and diet soda they consume. Most people also underreport their consumption of alcohol by 40 to 60 percent; on the other hand, heads of households regularly exaggerate the amount of food their families consume -- the Good Provider syndrome. "What people claim in interviews to have bought and consumed, to have eaten and drunk, to have recycled and thrown away," the authors write, "almost never corresponds directly or even very closely to the actual remnants of material culture in their Glad or Hefty bags."
If we are deluded about our own patterns of consumption, it follows that we might also hold mistaken notions about garbage in general. Most people believe, for example, that expanded polystyrene foam -- which is used in fast-food packaging, coffee cups, packing "peanuts" and the molded forms that come around stereo equipment -- constitutes a major proportion of our garbage and represents a serious strain on the capacity of landfills. But the garbage project found that expanded polystyrene foam accounted for less than one percent of the volume of garbage dumped in landfills between 1980 and 1989. And what about the 16 billion disposable diapers that Americans use every year? They constituted an average of no more than 1.4 percent, by volume, of the average landfill's total solid-waste contents during 1980-89.
What, then, makes up the biggest portion of garbage? Not surprisingly -- in an information age -- it is paper, which takes up over 40 percent of the contents of landfills by volume. (The two runners-up are construction debris and yard waste, which consists of grass clippings and leaves.) Newspapers alone constitute about a third of the volume of discarded paper; a year's worth of The New York Times takes up about 1.5 cubic yards, as much space as 18,660 crushed aluminum cans or 14,969 crushed Big Mac clamshells would require.
But, surely, paper is biodegradable? Well, yes and no. The garbage project regularly uses newspapers to date garbage layers precisely because, even after several decades, they remain intact and perfectly legible. The problem, the authors say, is that, landfills "are not vast composters; rather, they are vast mummifiers." There is biodegradation, but its pace is measured in centuries, not decades. Even organic materials, such as food scraps, remain unchanged after 30 or 40 years. Mr. Rathje and Mr. Murphy cite an account of an excavation of an ancient Roman garbage dump in which the smell of putrefaction remained unbearable even after 2,000 years.
As the authors point out, there has always been garbage, and almost always a lot of it. They quote an estimate that the street level of the ancient city of Troy rose almost five feet per century as a result of debris accumulation. Present-day street levels on the island of Manhattan are typically 6 to 15 feet higher than they were in the 17th century; it wasn't until 1895 that the city undertook systematic garbage removal.
The focus of the final chapters of "Rubbish!" is the so-called garbage crisis. "So-called" because, as the authors document, Americans' per capita production of garbage has been remarkably stable over the last century (there is now more paper and plastic, but considerably less coal ash and horse manure). Likewise contrary to popular wisdom, Americans do not produce more garbage than everyone else. A comparative study of several United States cities and Mexico City found that although American households generated more packaging waste, on average they produced one third less garbage than their Mexican counterparts, whose fresh (unpackaged) food resulted in much more food waste.
There is no cause for alarm, but neither is there reason for complacency. (Indeed, the authors suggest several policies that could effectively reduce the amount of waste generated, including charging families for garbage removal by volume, as has been successfully done in the city of Seattle.) We should all learn to reduce our production of waste and encourage efforts at recycling, but the chief lesson of this far-ranging and provocative book may be the discovery that what we think we know about garbage is often based on half-truths, misperceptions and incomplete knowledge.