October 9, 2025
“Book Takes a Look at What Our Trash Is Doing to the Rest of the World ”
Robert Woltman
What we discard— and how we get rid of it— is sometimes as significant as what we save. But since our waste is “gone tomorrow” we generally don’t think too much about it. What happens, for instance, to those grocery bags we all have way too many of?
Sure, we conscientiously try to recycle them, re-use them for all sorts of things, but consider the billions of them per year that now plague countries all over the world.
In China, they’re known as “white pollution”. South Africans call them “the national flower.” India’s sacred cattle choke on them in the streets and in the fields. And grocery bags make up but a tiny fraction of the plastic problem that has made the mid-Pacific six times more abundant with plastic waste than with zooplankton.
If this kind of information about garbage is to you more treasure than trash, you’ll love this book “Gone Tomorrow.” Author Heather Rogers offers a sobering glimpse at the present global garbage crisis and then slogs through the history of waste and sanitation since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (such as an account of how roving pigs were used to clean up city streets).
Rogers then digs into mega-landfills operated by cutthroat, mob-controlled cartels and an exposé of how huge garbage corporations make big business out of importing our waste to Third World countries. It turns out that American jobs aren’t all that is being outsourced these days. Though some small victories have been achieved by recycling programs, much of the problem lies in our rampant consumer culture.
Government and industry continue to justify more disposable commodities, growing mountains of trash and the accompanying environmental destruction as necessary for a robust economy that creates more jobs and a higher standard of living. But with the growing gap in income inequality, Rogers questions who in our throw-away society is really benefiting from all this. In her view, it’s those at the top of the heap.