So much of our stuff lacks worth or merit. That, at least, is what we assume and establish with our routines. Every day, we put unwanted material in toilets and garbage bins, regularly flushing it away or taking it out in bags to be transported far away from our homes by others. The names we give this material—waste, garbage, refuse, trash, rubbish—have pejorative definitions. Worthless. Rejected and useless matter of any kind. Unimportant.

This material is certainly rejected by someone, but it is far from unimportant. What we classify and dispose of as wastes provides rich insight into our behavior, social structures, and treatment of our environment. In the 1966 book Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas stated that dirt is matter that is out of place and that a common thread in all human societies is the development of taboos to regulate waste and establish order from chaos. Over the half-century since that book was published, social scientists have challenged and advanced theories of waste and value, using observed behavior and the materials humans leave behind as evidence. Archaeologists have long studied artifacts of refuse from the distant past as a portal into ancient civilizations lacking written testaments, but examining what we throw away today tells a story in real time and becomes an important and useful tool for academic study. Our trash is a testament; what we throw away says much about our values, our habits, and our lives.

Sometimes what we throw away is uncomfortably revealing, as Bob Dylan found out in 1971. The singer had moved to New York's Greenwich Village when he found fanatic A. J. Weberman rifling through his garbage can in search of clues about Dylan's life. (What Weberman found were bills, receipts, correspondence, coffee grounds and diapers—evidence of a young family and a mind in need of stimulation.) Weberman called his investigations into Dylan's discards “garbagology,” claiming his research would provide insight into the songwriter's art.

Weberman's research method and findings may have strained credulity, but his attention to the value of garbage did not. In the early 1970s, substantial developments in the social sciences advanced our [Page xxvi]understandings of waste in the modern world. Historians deepened their investigations of public health and pollution; in particular, Joel Tarr analyzed the political and technological systems that societies developed to find appropriate sinks for sewage, garbage, and industrial wastes. Young archaeologist William Rathje began an excavation of a landfill in Tuscon, Arizona, in 1973 in order to analyze the waste stream of that community. His research became known as the Garbage Project and spawned concerted examination of the record modern societies leave in the trash.

Close examination of waste practices reveals rich complexities. While dictionary definitions of garbage describe it as “filth” and “worthless,” scholars are careful to note that perceptions of waste and the value of material are neither static nor universally shared. Discarded objects may become antiques, embarking on a journey from valued new object to disvalued old object to newly valued vintage object. Beverage companies take old cans and bottles removed from households to make new cans and bottles. Material from demolished buildings is used to construct new ones. Even human excrement, widely feared and flushed away to prevent disease, is collected to fertilize fields. (If filth is one definition of waste, another definition is “the inefficient squandering of resources.”) One man's trash may be another man's treasure; how and why both parties classify the material is a subject of ample study.

We do not know what Bob Dylan thinks of this research field, but he certainly protested Weber-man snooping through what the singer felt was his private property. Whatever questions Weberman's research method and findings raised, they did not, at least in a legal sense, invade Dylan's privacy. Waste as property was the subject of the 1988 legal decision California v. Greenwood, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a person should have no reasonable expectation of privacy concerning any material that person knowingly threw away. Given the billions of dollars spent by municipalities each year to landfill, incinerate, recycle, or otherwise handle waste, the question of who owns these discards is not trivial. The industries and public programs devoted to waste around the world range from sophisticated technology capturing methane from landfills to open pits where workers risk their health harvesting precious metals by burning old computers shipped from thousands of miles away. In a globalized economy, waste is a truly global commodity—and a global burden. At the same time, the burdens of waste management often are local, with municipal governments responsible for making sure the streets are free of waste. When they fail to perform this task, as the Italian city of Naples infamously did in 2008, the results include physical dangers to the community and widespread ridicule of local political leaders. Effective waste management is an expectation of modern society.

Today, academic investigations into garbage range widely in method, geographic scope, and chronology. Excavations at landfills join close examination of municipal waste management systems, policy history, industrial research, marketing, design, and psychology. All of these approaches allow us to better understand the complexities of our consumption and waste, complexities regularly on display in our minds, our homes, and our communities.

Mine is no exception. I live in a village located just west of Chicago that prides itself on its progressive values. The residents enjoy curbside recycling services, tree-lined streets, and several parks. Seasonal farmers' markets allow residents to purchase locally grown organic produce. While many suburbanites have to drive to work in the city, we can commute via two Chicago Transit Authority train lines that run through the village, reducing carbon emissions we might otherwise produce with automobiles.

In 2010, the elevated line nearest where I live painted several panels on its viaducts with images promoting the international “http://350.org” campaign. Established by environmental scholar Bill McKibben in 2007, the campaign attempts to get carbon consumption under 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in order to combat global climate change before it produces devastating effects on the atmosphere, oceans, disease vectors, food sources, coastlines and myriad other entities vital to life on Earth. A successful campaign requires substantial reforms to the consumption of energy, packaging, food, and materials in the industrialized world, and the village's embrace of the 350 campaign demonstrates a hopeful awareness of the challenges ahead.

One walks less than a block from the westernmost train station with a http://350.org panel before [Page xxvii]encountering an upscale boutique with a sign in its window promising “inner peace through impulse purchasing.” A joke, to be sure, but one that resonates as an uncomfortable truth. We seek fulfillment through the goods and services we acquire, consume, and dispose of, often blurring the line between needs and wants. Throughout the village, plastic bags carrying goods manufactured all over the world are regularly bought and sold. (But not, ultimately, disposed of locally. Garbage and recyclables leave the village on trucks hauling them to waste management facilities in poorer communities many miles away.) The proximity of the impulse-purchasing sign to images promoting the 350 campaign indicates the complexity of our challenges in the early 21st century: We consume to fulfill our needs and wants, yet our consumption has effects that may be terribly consequential to the land, air, water, other species, other people, and ourselves.

The tensions in my village are ones found across the planet. Consumption and its concomitant waste are defining aspects of our societies. What we consume, why we consume it, and what we do with the remnants of that consumption reveal how we organize our landscapes, our economies, our social structures, and our values. The wastes we leave behind, in the form of landfills, atmospheric pollution, estate inventories, and the ruins of civilization, are sources for social scientists to interpret.

Even attempts to erase our wastes are revealing. After the terrorist Osama bin Laden was found and killed in a residential neighborhood in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after years in hiding, neighbors remarked that the most unusual aspect of his compound was that its residents never put trash out for collection. Instead, bin Laden had all waste incinerated on site so as not to leave clues to his whereabouts. The absence of a waste stream aroused suspicion, just as the presence of particular items tell us about the habits of the consumers who generate a waste stream. Our trash is part of us, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.

In the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste, you will read the perspectives of anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, philosophers, policy analysts, and sociologists, just to name a few. The interdisciplinary lens of the volume reveals the complexity of our relationship to the world of goods, services, and wastes. This is evident whether you read every entry alphabetically, or follow the listings of related entries from one to another. Contributing editor William Rathje initially planned the encyclopedia, apparent in the array of entries on garbage archaeology and his appendix “Garbology 101.” I then became general editor, and readers may find evidence of my background as an environmental historian present in the organization of individual entries and the encyclopedia as a whole. Our goal was to bring together scholars working on waste from many perspectives, so that we all may better understand the dynamics of consumption and waste that affect our households, cities such as Shanghai, nations such as Brazil, the garbage patch growing in the Pacific, and the ecosystems around the world that we pollute every day. Entries on each of these topics await you. Whether you find this encyclopedia in a library or satiated an impulse to purchase it, we hope it encourages conversation about the patterns and consequences of our consumption.