General Editor Carl A. Zimring is assistant professor of social science at Roosevelt University's Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies, where he co-founded the school's sustainability studies program in 2010. He is an environmental historian who has published on several topics relating to waste and urban environments, including the history of municipal smoke control efforts in the early 20th century and the unintended consequences of shredding junked automobiles. His book, Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America, investigates changing ideas about material reuse from colonial times to the end of the 20th century. Zimring earned his B. A. in history from the University of California at Santa Cruz, his M.A. in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in history from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results Fellow and a scholar-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institute Libraries. He received the 2010 American Society for Environmental History Samuel P. Hays Research Fellowship and serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Recycling Coalition.

Consulting Editor William L. Rathje is the founder and director of the Garbage Project, which conducts archaeological studies of modern refuse. Rathje received his B.A. from the University of Arizona in 1967 and his Ph.D., which focused on the archaeology of the ancient Maya, from Harvard University in 1971; he is currently professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and a consulting professor at Stanford University.

Since 1973, the Garbage Project has studied fresh refuse to document household-level food waste, diet and nutrition, recycling, and discard of hazardous wastes; in addition, since 1987, the project has excavated 21 landfills across North America to record the quantities of various types of buried refuse and what happens to these materials over time. Garbology, the term coined to describe Rathje's research, is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1991, Rathje won the prestigious AAAS/Westinghouse Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology, and in 1992 he received the AAA Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology.