The Hidden Life of Garbage: Heather Rogers BBS 1st Year Patterns for College Writing

 

The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers (page 161)

About the Essayist

Heather Rogers is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker known for her work on environmental and social issues. She is best recognized for her book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (2005), which explores the history and environmental impact of waste and consumer culture in the United States. Rogers has written for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Harper's. Her work often focuses on the intersection of capitalism, environmental sustainability, and public policy.

The Main Theme of the Essay

In her essay “The Hidden Life of Garbage,” Heather Rogers explores how modern consumer culture creates an illusion of cleanliness and order through waste management, while hiding the true environmental impact of garbage. She reveals that trash does not simply disappear once discarded but instead becomes part of a complex system that profits from waste rather than reducing it. Rogers critiques the way society encourages over-consumption, with recycling and landfills serving more as distractions than real solutions. Through her investigation, she challenges readers to question the sustainability of their lifestyles and to recognize that meaningful change must come from reducing production and consumption at the source.

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Summary of the Essay

Every day, early morning, heavy steel garbage trucks chug and creep along neighbourhood collection routes. A worker empties the contents of each household’s waste bin into the truck’s rear compaction unit. Hydraulic compressors scoop up and crush the dross, cramming it into the enclosed structure. When the rig is full, the collector heads to a garbage depot called a “transfer station” to unload. From there the rejectamenta is taken to a recycling centre, an incinerator or, most often, to what’s called a “sanitary landfill.” Land dumping has long been the favored disposal method in the U.S. as it is a relatively low cost to bury.

The great majority of castoff go to landfills, these places are not meant to see by the public. Today’s garbage graveyards are isolated, guarded, masked. They are also high-tech, and, increasingly, located in rural areas that receive much of their rubbish from urban centers that no longer bury their wastes. Rogers explains reasons why landfills are tucked away, on the edge of town, in otherwise untraveled terrain. If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench (stink), witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions. Waste Management Inc. (WMI), the largest rubbish handling corporation in the world, operates its Geological Reclamation Operations and Waste Systems (GROWS) landfill just outside Morrisville, Pennsylvania — Up here is where the dumping takes place; it is referred to as the fill’s “working face.”

Masses of trailer trucks, yellow earthmovers, compacting machines, crushes, and water tankers populate this bizarre, thirty-acre nightmare. Mixing in slow motion through the surreal landscape, these machines are remaking the earth in the image of garbage. Scores of seagulls hover overhead then suddenly drop into the rotting piles. The ground underfoot is torn from the metal treads of the equipment. Potato chip wrappers, tattered plastic bags, and old shoes poke through the dirt as if floating to the surface. The smell is sickly and sour. GROWS  uses many methods of removing trash. One of the methods it uses is a state-of the-art method. This method is used to prevent contamination of groundwater. GROWS is one of the new breed of waste burial sites referred to as “mega-fills.”

This has made the environment much better in comparison to the traditional system of disposing of garbage, but this is not a 100% solution. This can work for only 20-30 years. The main point being dealt with is the issue that the U.S.A. has a problem with trash, lacking the importance of recycling. Since most people don’t recycle, the amount of garbage in the U.S. is getting higher at a rapid rate, causing problems to our environment, health, and society. Although the methods of waste disposal have improved over time, getting rid of garbage is quickly becoming a big problem because our methods of waste disposal are only a temporary solution. The waste that cannot decompose naturally just sits there and begins to build up. Incineration (burning) is another method used in waste disposal, however, this poses another problem because it fills the air we breathe with dense smoke, which is toxic to our environment.

The composition also talks about how the major waste disposal corporations try to keep the problem hidden from the general public. The recycling industry gives people the impression that everything is OK. That "something is being down" and stops people from questioning why so much stuff is produced in the first place. Why don't we have reusable bottles? Why do we need disposable razors? Rogers argues that the technique used by GROWS are less dangerous than those used by previous generations. But the fact remains that these systems are short-term solutions to the garbage problem.

While they may not seem toxic now, all those underground cells packed with plastics, solvents, paints, batteries and other dangerous materials will someday create problems and they have to be treated well because the cells will not last forever. Most of the cells are expected to last somewhere between thirty and fifty years. There is an easily seen problem in waste management. The lavish resources used to destroy the used commodities look wonderful but they are not environmentally friendly and they do not provide a permanent solution to the problem.

Comprehension

a.      According to Rogers, why are landfills "tucked away, on the edge of town, in otherwise untravelled terrain" (3)?

Rogers says that landfills are tucked away to avoid people asking difficult questions about the sights they see.

b.     What is the landfill's "working face" (4)? How does it compare with other parts of the landfill?

The landfill's "working face" is where waste is dumped, then spread and compacted. This is the active part of the landfill; most of what remains is previously processed trash.

c.  Why does Rogers think that the GROWS landfill is "aptly named" (5)? What connotations do you think Waste Management Inc. intended the name GROWS to have? What connotations does Rogers think the name has?

Rogers thinks that "GROWS" is a fitting name because of the way landfills rapidly grow as a result of our overproduction of trash. Waste Management Inc. likely intended the name to have positive connotations. GROWS is a "mega-fill", which is considered fairly high tech. Possibly, the company intended to allude to the idea of growth through progress. Rogers, on the other hand, believes that the name alludes to the growth of a problem.

d.     What are the dangers of the "new state-of-the-art landfills"? What point does Rogers make about liners being "expected to last somewhere between thirty and fifty years"?

Seeping into the soil and contaminating the groundwater. These liners, however, have a life expectancy of only 30-50 years, after which the landfill operators are no longer liable for problems caused by their landfills. According to Rogers, what is the "repressed question" that is not being asked?

e.      The "repressed question" is "What if we didn't have so much trash to get rid of?" She wants us as a society to be more conscious of our waste production.

Purpose and Audience

a.      At what point in the essay does Rogers state her thesis? Why do you think she places the thesis where she does?

Rogers states her thesis in the third paragraph: "If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions." She places the thesis near the beginning of the essay so that the reader knows what to expect; the reader is prepared for the process Rogers is about to describe to horrific. Because she suggests that people might "start asking difficult questions" if they were familiar with this process, the reader becomes prepared to ask themselves questions and to think about what Rogers offers in the rest of the essay with a critical eye.

b.   What dominant impression does Rogers try to create in her description? Is she successful?

Rogers tries to create a dominant impression of the vastness of the problem with the ways she references the landfills' physical scale as well as the potential they have for environmental destruction. She does this successfully.

c.      What is Rogers's attitude toward waste disposal in general - and disposal companies like Waste Management Inc. in particular? Do you share her feelings?

Rogers feels negatively toward waste disposal in general; she believes that the more technology created to help dispose of waste, the more the problem of waste production is pushed to the side. Rogers feels even more negatively toward companies like Waste Management Inc., however, than she does about waste management as a whole. This is because of the way they function; they can make use of solutions that they know are ineffective in the long term but can avoid liability because of how these agencies are regulated. After reading her arguments, I share Rogers' feelings.

Style and Structure

a.      Rogers begins her essay with a description of garbage trucks collecting trash. a. What specific things does she describe? How does this description establish the context for the rest of the essay?

In Rogers' introduction, she describes the trash collection in a way that feels familiar; she mentions the "dark chill of early morning", and how the trash is collected and compressed in the truck. This description feels familiar, the reader has almost certainly witnessed what she is describing before. One of Rogers' main ideas is that even though we as individuals produce a large amount of waste, we don't often think about what happens to it. Rogers helps make the experience feel like a personal and relevant one by creating a scenario the reader can recognize their role at the start of the essay.

b.     What determines the order in which details are arranged in Rogers's essay?

Rogers structures the details by moving step-by-step through the waste disposal process, starting with the collection of trash to the "capping" of a cell, ending with a reflection on the implications of this process. Is this essay a subjective or objective description of the landfill? Explain. Her description of the landfill, while she does have opinions about it, is objective. She describes the process using concrete descriptions of how these facilities function, including statistics regarding capacity and daily trash intake.

 

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