Sam Lane

Garbage Land

Business and the environment

Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte is a compelling book that magnifies the idea of our trash being out of sight and out of mind. It exposes the real paths our trash takes and where it will remain forever. The book reaches out to knowledgeable individuals who shed light on what goes into our trash and how certain items are truly hazardous for both the world we live in and us as humans. We are all at risk of the issues covered in this book and equally responsible as we are in danger. The book begins with Hoyte’s curiosity in the path her trash takes after she throws it out. She was on an Earth day canoe trip with some of her friends when the thought originally popped in her head; so she went even further to see exactly how it all works. After seeing the amount of garbage turning up in the raw sewage, Hoyte was appalled and felt compelled to do something. What Hoyte realized was that most of this trash was coming straight from up the hill in her very own Brooklyn neighborhood. Hoyte decided to work by the side of the city’s garbage collectors to see first hand what was actually occurring in the process of trash disposal. She found that many of these waste facilities were coincidentally in the poorer neighborhoods of a given area. Her journey leads to Pennsylvania, a state that imports tens of millions of tons of trash from neighboring states. Royte explains that Tullytown, Pennsylvania has earned forty eight million dollars for importing trash, in only 15 years. This revenue being put towards necessary town facilities may sound like a favorable idea, until Royte came to find areas neighboring Tullytown are stricken with lower property value and serious hazards due to run off from all the disposal facilities. Royte also considered that not only landfill leakage was an environmentally hazardous action, but also what it takes to fill the landfill. With four hundred and fifty trucks frequenting a landfill in a day all from New York City, leads to roughly 135,000 miles of truck traveling. With these trucks averaging 3 miles to a gallon, the carbon dioxide output becomes unimaginably large. In the chapter Satan’s Resin, Royte exposes the path of recyclables, where she quickly found was not recycled and the whole process becomes something we do to feel good about our waste, but not really changing a thing. In the chapter, Royte even touches