Follow the refuse: Elizabeth Royte's weirdly informative investigation of what happens to our trash.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: On Political Books - Garbage Land On the Secret Trail of Trash - Book Review

Garbage Land On the Secret Trail of Trash By Elizabeth Royte Little, Brown, $24.95

Garbage has found its poet, and her name is Elizabeth Royte. In her new book, Garbage Land, America's trash trucks, waste treatment facilities, landfills, and compost heaps, as well as her san men, haulers, bureaucrats, suspiciously taciturn landfill operators, and oddly evangelistic environmentalists, are lavished with the attention of a thorough, perceptive, graceful, and often witty writer. It is a book that will leave you feeling vaguely nauseated, guilty, and overwhelmed. That's not criticism.

The book is predicated on Royte's impulse to follow her own personal waste--her trash, her recyclables, her own individual biological byproducts, her contribution to the approximately 232 million tons of municipal solid waste (the EPA, 2003) that's produced in America--to their final resting places. Royte's various explorations do seem to fit a certain pattern: encounters with various people who live la vida garbage; the forbidding realization that almost everything in the waste disposal process, from the dog peed-upon trash bag on our sidewalks to the combustible landfills to the large municipal composting operations, involves materials, locations, and most especially odors that make most of us feel something between icky and twitchy; and finally the dismal realization that whatever we think we're doing with our waste products, the processes are less neat, less tidy, less sanitary, and less sound than we think.

Now, very little of what Royte reports in this book may come as news to attentive waste policy experts, no doubt many of whom are readers of this magazine. But to the reader who considers himself a waste management expert if he can remember what days are trash days (me), the book is full of revelations. Nothing appears to work the way we'd like it to. Though landfills cost $210,000 an acre to build, they aren't a permanent answer. The plastic liners that separate the tons of trash from Mother Earth are susceptible to cracking, and one day all the terrible chemicals that lurk in the residue of household cleaners and hair dye and disposable batteries will seep into the ground and then into the water supply and then into mother's milk. (Yes, babies will be drinking Windex and Prell!)

Cities can build huge sewage treatment plants, but the old sewer drain systems can be easily overwhelmed, and during big rain storms, as much as 40 percent of a city's sewage can...