Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

From The New Yorker
Royte is a journalist with a nose for the "sordid afterlife" of trash, thoroughly at home in the putrid world of "Coney Island whitefish" (used condoms); "disco rice" (maggots); and—the darling of American consumer culture and the nemesis of waste activists—"Satan's resin" (plastic). Her book takes the form of a quest for the surprising final resting places of her yogurt cups, beer bottles, personal computer, and organic-fig-cookie packaging, and leads to an impassioned attack on overconsumption in America. If Royte does not quite demonstrate the muckraking skills of an Eric Schlosser in "Fast Food Nation," she does expose the feculent underside of our appetite for things and challenges her readers to disprove the resigned assessment of a former New York sanitation commissioner: "In the end, the garbage will win."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Don't miss Author Elizabeth Royte will speak next week in Chicago.

July 19, 2008
Elizabeth Royte @ Chicago Public Library

Journalist and author Elizabeth Royte will read from and sign her book, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, at the Budlong Woods Library, 5630 N. Lincoln Ave., at 1pm today as part of the "Chicago Matters: Growing Forward" series.