As all archaeologists will attest, archaeology (studying human culture through material remains) often means we are digging through the garbage of the ancient past.
Fifty years ago, William Rathje and his students began asking questions: What could we learn about ourselves if we studied the garbage of the recent past?
And how can we truly understand ancient garbage if we don’t truly recognize how humans deal with waste in general?
Spurred on by his students’ questions and enthusiasm, Rathje in 1973 began the groundbreaking University of Arizona study known as The Garbage Project.
The first part of the study had students and volunteers collect census and survey data of households in Tucson.
The garbage from those areas was then rerouted to a lab to be weighed, sorted, recorded and analyzed.
What they discovered when they analyzed the results was that there were serious differences between what the respondents said they did with their trash as opposed to what they actually did with their garbage.
Participants’ survey responses stated they were very rational with their consuming and disposing of refuse; however, the analysis of the actual trash showed very different, very irrational behaviours.
Middle income homes typically wasted more than richer or poorer ones.
People reported that they ate significantly healthier than they actually did, drank less alcohol than they actually did (by 40 to 60 per cent) and recycled more than they actually did.
During periods of economic stress, households tended to buy more perishable goods to get the cheaper, bulk pricing.
However, much of this extra food spoiled before it was eaten and was ultimately thrown away.
For example, during a beef shortage in the spring of 1973, the project documented the highest rate of edible beef waste they had noted throughout the survey.
By analyzing the data, they found consumers had responded to the much-publicized shortage by purchasing more beef when it was available, but in typically cheaper and unfamiliar cuts.
Lack of experience with how to store and prepare these cuts were large factors in what caused the waste of beef and contributed to the continuing shortages.
The Garbage Project expanded throughout different cities in North America and continued to ask new research questions.
A study of three Metro Toronto landfills in 1991 revealed curbside recycling had saved 20 per cent of those landfill spaces since the program began in 1982. Rathje also focused on what was happening with environmental factors in the landfills.
It was a common assumption that items in landfills would degrade fairly quickly.
It quickly became apparent this was not the case. Biodegradable items, such as 50-year-old newspapers, hot dogs and several types of vegetables were found and looked like they had been just thrown out the day before. More than 900 students and volunteers worked on The Garbage Project over the years.
Rathje created an entirely new subdiscipline of archaeology now known as “garbology.”
The discipline has prompted change in many fields, including hazardous waste disposal (from hospital waste to nuclear waste), recycling, nutrition, diet and food loss, biodegradation and methane generation.
Perhaps one of the most important principles garbology has proven is that the greater the technological achievement, the greater the amount of waste we generate.
However, it has also established that we are capable of breaking this link through consumer awareness and education, as well as reduction in packaging materials used by industrial suppliers.
Archaeology has proven that we can learn a lot about ourselves through what we discarded in the distant and not so distant past — and that by studying it, we can make positive changes to improve the future.
Buffy Johnson is a Kamloops-based archaeologist.