Some Myths Thrown Out With the Trash

Trash does not lie, said archeologist William L. Rathje, a professor who gives his students academic credit for digging up garbage.

People say that they do not drink much alcohol, but they do, and that they eat a lot of healthy foods, but they do not, he has concluded.

Although the truth is in the trash, Rathje said few people hold their breath long enough to dig for the evidence.

Rathje has some of his students at the University of Arizona learning more than they might want to know about garbage.

“We do run across some bad stuff, but you just put on your gloves, hold your nose and get through it as fast as you can,” said Rathje, speaking at a conference of the Ohio Alliance for the Environment.

‘You Can’t Smell It Anymore’

“The first half-hour or so it smells pretty bad,” he said. “After that, you can’t smell it anymore.”

Rathje and his students sift through curbside trash in Tucson and dig into landfills around the country to get the true picture of modern society, or as Rathje puts it, “to see the American life style from the back end.”

They have buried a few myths along the way.

- Americans eat everything on their plates. Wrong. Ten percent of all waste in landfills is edible, Rathje said. “The average household throws out 15% of the food it buys. In Tucson, that is 950 tons of edible food a year.”

- Landfills are overflowing with fast-food wrappers. Not so. They amount to one-quarter of 1%. Newspapers take up 15% of the space in the nation’s dumps, more than any other single item.

“And the sad thing about that is they are the easiest to recycle,” he said.

- Burying garbage causes it to decompose quickly.

“We dug up a T-bone steak from 1970 that, I swear, if we brushed the dirt off and cooked it, you would eat it,” Rathje said. They know it was 1970 by newspapers and other dated items nearby.

In spite of their faults, this country will never be without landfills, Rathje said.