This Week's Reads

Put differently, we're indicted by our own shit. "No wonder we prefer opaque garbage bags," Royte writes—we want to hide the contents in "the culture of shame" of garbage. That's one reason most landfills are closed to public viewing. Of course, as Royte notes of the age of pigs in the street and rag-and-bone pickers, there was once no such thing as landfills and no such word as garbage. Her increasingly obsessive quest leads her to the philosophy of Zero Waste and "closing the loop" and even a zealot in Berkeley, Calif., who unhooks his house from the sewer line. (Yes, there's a filtering pond out back. But still.)

Though New York–centric in many ways (garbage haulers call the maggots that spill from bags "disco rice"), Royte's worries ought to find a lot of resonance in Seattle's green-obsessed, liberal-guilt culture. Even if our city has a high diversion rate from landfills (San Francisco's 50 percent is tops), she finds a very disturbing statistic: Of all the garbage in the U.S., municipal solid waste—which we obsessively sort and recycle—represents only 2 percent of the total! We don't see the other 98 percent, the ecological-economic "footprint" behind our consumer choices, because it's industrial: the processes that make our cars, our housing materials, our clothes, our Styrofoam coffee cups, even our tiny beloved iPods. Which makes Andie MacDowell's depression seem justified—the garbage is winning. (Remember the energy costs for those trucks that rumble around to get your empty Snapple bottles each week.)

David Bender

Bender returns for Bumbershoot.

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Despite this, though she offers no new insights or profound solutions in her very readable account, Royte still finds recycling to be "a moral act." Even if her book lacks the impact of Fast Food Nation or Super Size Me, it'll get you thinking about the dreaded checkout line query at the grocery store, not that it ultimately matters how you answer: Paper or plastic? BRIAN MILLER