Rating: WORTHY!
18 months of trash generated by Americans would form a line of full garbage trucks that would stretch to the Moon. A quarter billion tons a year - three pounds of trash per person per day - even after recycling. Half a century ago we generated less when there was no recycling (granted the population was less, though)!
That's the vein in which Derf Backderf launches his graphic novel, and he apparently knows what he's talking about, having worked as a garbage-man at one point in his life. This is both a reality-based fictional romp through the garbage and an instruction manual on what's wrong with our 'waste lots care not' society vis-à-vis our generation and disposal (or not) of our trash.
We learn a lot about the dubious joys of this line of work from the disgustingly liquid and stinking garbage of the summer to the frozen to the curb garbage of winter, as well as other issues such as the weight of the garbage, the dangers of driving a truck on icy roads, and the exhaust fumes coming out at face height on a truck supposedly designed to allow guys to ride on the outside - right behind that exhaust! The authors tells us that garbage collection has the sixth highest mortality rate, behind only logging, commercial fishing, piloting aircraft, roofing, and iron working. Yep, they beat out even policing and fire fighting!
So what's in our trash? According to the author, using an EPA survey, a third of our trash is food and yard waste, which effectively recycles itself as compost. Another third is recyclable materials such as wood, metal, plastic and glass. Less than ten percent of the plastic is recycled. And the EPA figures used here may not even be telling the whole truth.
The distressing thing is that this graphic novel itself wastes paper by having way too much white space and empty pages! In the e-version which I read, this doesn't matter of course, but it would if it went to a significant print run. In addition to assorted blank pages throughout the course of this book, and the occasional page with only one small illustration, there is a rather staggering twelve blank pages at the end of the book. That's an even number, meaning this book could have been significantly smaller and thereby used proportionately less paper in a print version. It's worth thinking about - but then so is the content of this book.
The novel is illustrated crisply and competently in black and white line drawings. The author doesn't know how to spell temperamental (tempermental? No!) or asbestos (asbestoes is not a disease you want, trust me on this!). After a while it occurred to me that this had been done deliberately, but I wasn't sure. Other than that, this is good, interesting, fun, and best of all, informative enough to make a reader think. For example, although we now have less than a quarter of the active landfills we used to have, the size of the landfills has increased. The example this author gives is of Salton, which expanded from eight acres, 45 feet deep in 2008 to 287 acres 250 feet deep in 2012. Some can dip down to four hundred feet. Some can cover more than two thousand acres, or over three square miles, such as the one outside Las Vegas. The author gets all these things across without any long and boring lectures.
On the up side, landfills can produce methane which can be captured and used as energy for up to half a century after the landfill becomes land full. On the down side, even a ten acre landfill can leak 3,000 gallons of toxic fluids into ground water every year, and the decomposition of the waste takes almost forever. Even a steel can might take half a century to disintegrate; a plastic bottle almost half a millennium, and both of them should have been recycled. Don't even get started on the yellow torpedoes - the plastic drink bottles full of urine that are tossed out by truckers who don't want to stop for a rest break. Utah, so we're told, found 30,000 of these one year!
There are over 4,000 landfills in Texas alone, both functional and defunct. This reminded me of the John Lennon contribution to the Beatles song, A Day in the life: "I read the news today, oh boy! 4,000 landfills, Texas, USA, and so the stink was rather large, and we could smell it all. Now we know how just how much stench it takes to fill the Astrodome! I have to re-cy-cuhl-uh-uhl-uh-uhl...."
I highly recommend this book as a very informative and worthy, if rather depressing, read, but get the e-version!
