In this episode, I chat with Edward Humes about his latest book, Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World. Humes reveals the surprising depths of waste permeation in everyday life and the power we hold to rectify these issues. By reimagining waste as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, Humes provides a blueprint for collective action toward a cleaner, more responsible future.
EDWARD HUMES is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author whose sixteen previous books include Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, The Forever Witness, Mississippi Mud, and the PEN Award– winning No Matter How Loud I Shout. Ed and his family, including their rescued racing greyhounds and collie, live in Southern California.
Edward Humes
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese
The Teachers, Alexandra Robbins
Bite Toothpaste Bits
Literless.com
Jimmy Rees, The Man Who Decides Packaging
Eco Roots (Shampoo Bars)
Who Gives A Crap TP
In this episode, I chat with Edward Humes about his latest book, Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World. Humes reveals the surprising depths of waste permeation in everyday life and the power we hold to rectify these issues. By reimagining waste as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, Humes provides a blueprint for collective action toward a cleaner, more responsible future.
EDWARD HUMES is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author whose sixteen previous books include Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, The Forever Witness, Mississippi Mud, and the PEN Award– winning No Matter How Loud I Shout. Ed and his family, including their rescued racing greyhounds and collie, live in Southern California.
Edward Humes
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese
The Teachers, Alexandra Robbins
Bite Toothpaste Bits
Literless.com
Jimmy Rees, The Man Who Decides Packaging
Eco Roots (Shampoo Bars)
Who Gives A Crap TP
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with independent bookshop owners from around the globe, authors, publishing professionals and specialists in subjects dear to owners from around the globe. Authors, publishing professionals and specialists in subjects dear to my heart the environment and social justice. If you'd like to support the show, there are two ways to make that happen. One is to go to thebookshoppodcastcom, click on support the show and you can donate through Buy Me A Coffee. And the second way to support the show is by sharing it with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 247.
Speaker 1:Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose 16 previous books include Garbology, our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, the Forever Witness, mississippi Mud and the Penn Award-winning no Matter how Loud I Shout. Ed and his family, including their rescued racing greyhounds and collie, live in Southern California. His latest book is titled Total Garbage how we Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World. Hi, edward, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's great to be here, Mandy. Thank you.
Speaker 1:As you can tell by all of the sticky notes I have on nearly every page of your new book Total Garbage how we Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our world. I loved your new book. I think it's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's begin with learning about you and your life as a journalist, winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism and your interest in human stories.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that was so I started. I guess I started my writing career as a child. I was always writing stories and I never imagined it would be a livelihood. But then I got into newspaper reporting while I was still in college. I was working part-time for a local newspaper near my campus and I got the bug.
Speaker 2:I changed my course of study from a potential degree in marine biology to literature and journalism, and it turns out I prefer writing about things like that more than I do, you know, actually digging into the research of uh art that scientists have to devote their lives to. I get to move from one fascinating story and one fascinating character to another, and I have. I love it. Who could imagine you could have a job like that? And for uh, the subjects always revolve around characters who can be our access point into important stories. So I've written about juvenile court and wrongful convictions, but I've also tackled a number of environmental stories about efforts to make us less damaging to the planet, more sustainable, and where the crossroads between doing things that are good for us and doing things that are good for the planet actually meet.
Speaker 2:And that's really the heart of Total.
Speaker 1:Garbage. In essence, it sounds like your stories are character-driven.
Speaker 2:Yes, Sometimes it starts with something I'm interested in and then I find the character who becomes my guide, you know, and then the reader's guide. But sometimes it's the other way around, that I read about someone who's just fascinating. That happened with a book I wrote called Mississippi Mud. I read a story in the newspaper about a young nurse whose parents were murdered and she undertook the investigation of that crime, that terrible crime that changed her life.
Speaker 2:When the police didn't seem to be going anywhere with it and I just called her out of the blue. We had never met, never spoke. I found her number, I called her up, we ended up on the phone for three hours that night and then the next day I was booking a flight to North Carolina to, you know, immerse in this person's amazing story and life. And I'm in this town where people got away with murder until she came along. And sometimes it just happens that way and you find, you know, having that nerve to call somebody out of the blue and getting them to open up over time changes your own life as well as providing an amazing story to tell.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the courage to make that first call can be life-changing for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:In your new book Total Garbage, you discuss waste and the fact that, while it's everywhere, waste is a local problem, starting in our homes. What did you discover during your research as the key takeaway for the theme of Total Garbage?
Speaker 2:Well, one takeaway is that waste isn't just what we roll to the curb each week and put out in the trash. That's just the part we see most clearly, although even there we're usually not aware just how trashy we all are much more than we think. But waste is so deeply embedded in our daily lives and our products and everything we do that we really don't see it anymore.
Speaker 2:Most of what we pay on our utility bills is waste not things that are lighting our house or warming our house and our cars are terrible. They waste. Four out of five dollars you spend at the pump goes to waste and only that one dollar actually moves the car. It's the nature of the beast. Our food waste is off the charts almost 40 percent of our food, and it's not just the food. Then you waste all the water, all the energy, all the chemicals, all the labor, all the effort and transportation to produce that food. It, it's all waste. And so I guess, if it boils down just about the takeaway, what we use is sure and important, but it's what we waste that's killing us.
Speaker 2:It's driving all these other environmental crises and the key is, if we start talking about them as waste, it changes the conversation. People who might be resistant or feel helpless in the face of climate change or plastic pollution. If you frame it as just a manifestation of waste, well, we all get. First of all, that's bad. Waste is a cost and a loss. But also, as you said, waste starts locally. It's also a systematic problem. But we all feel, like correctly, that waste is the one thing we can do something about and I think if we frame the conversation that way it can save the world.
Speaker 1:Yes, we need to become conscious consumers and to get out of that instant gratification mindset. And you give a great example of conscious buying in your book, and that is related to purchasing peanut butter plastic or glass containers or going to a store and using your own container for freshly ground peanut butter.
Speaker 2:Well, the glass jars are a great point because it's a perfect container, because it has no chemicals to leach into our food, which plastic containers can and do. It's got the ability to be cleaned, it's durable. And you know my friend, Anne-Marie Minow, who I write about in the book the Zero Waste Chef, also an author of a wonderful book that's how she stores her food. You know pickle jars, peanut butter jars why throw them away? Why go buy, you know, and spend money on containers when you're getting this as kind of a free bonus with your peanut butter or whatever? And they make great containers. You can freeze them, you can chill them, you can do anything with them and then wash them and use them again. So there's that economy for yourself, a healthier container than plastic, and also it's beneficial for the environment. All rolled in one, the triple wins are all over the place and they're easy to do.
Speaker 1:I like to reuse glass jars for vegetables because when I open the refrigerator it's easy to see what I have available. Let's talk about invisible pollution. What is it and where do we find it in our homes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that really gets back to this idea that the waste is embedded in you know our lives so deeply that we think it's normal. But historically we live in a very abnormally wasteful civilization the most wasteful in history and we've just been kind of marketed and, through generations of habit, gotten used to this incredible cost that we're imposing on ourselves. And it is invisible, and seeing it clearly was one of my missions in writing this book, because you have to really look at it and suddenly the switch flips and you say, oh my god, this is, this is crazy packaging and and wraps, plastic wraps that we think maybe gets recycled if we put them in the recycling bin. They never get recycled. They, they are not recyclable and yet we seem to think that it's it's normal to take this substance, this plastic the first mass-produced synthetic substance and a miracle for for durable products, I mean.
Speaker 2:We need plastics in our modern life, the ones that last, that we build things with. I have no problem with the responsible use. The key about plastic is it doesn't break down. You know, bacteria don't cause it to break down into natural elements that then can be absorbed into nature the way natural substances are. That's why, you know, our planet is ticking along really beautifully, and so you know. So we started adding all kinds of things to the environment that didn't belong there, plastic being one of them.
Speaker 2:Why would you take this substance that lasts for thousands of years and make a disposable product out of it that nature can't absorb? It's madness, and yet we think it's normal. The people who designed and invented plastic never envisioned a disposable economy growing out of it, because they were trying to build things that last with this substance. That was malleable. And you could oh you could make piano keys that aren't made from elephant ivory and billiard balls and things like that were some of the early uses of plastic, and it truly was miraculous. It saved money, it saved nature and it accomplished. It truly was miraculous. It saved money, it saved nature and it accomplished a lot of great things, but we've turned it on its head and made it a bane of our existence, so much. This is how abnormal it is that invisible waste uh is everywhere. It's in our food, it's in our air and now it's in our bodies. It's being found in newborn babies' poop.
Speaker 2:Before they even had their first suckle at the breast or the bottle. There's plastic in them, it's in our veins, in the plaque that's lining our arteries, and we are engaged in a really crazy lab experiment where we're the rats to see what's going to happen if we keep loading our diet up with tiny plastic fibers. I think that's horrifying. One study shows that we are consuming the equivalent of a plastic credit card's worth of plastic every week, and if we don't do something about it, it's going to be two credit cards in the near future.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a terrifying and sobering thought.
Speaker 2:It's unacceptable and we can't. We don't have to keep doing that. We don't need disposable plastics. If you must buy a single use container, buy something in glass. You know, get your beer in a can, whatever it is that you have in a throwaway container. There are options other than plastic that will keep the plastic chemicals from getting into your body, will keep the plastic out of the environment and, in the case of a glass container, will give you something you could use for other purposes if you wish. Aluminum infinitely recyclable In fact. If you make sure your aluminum can get into the recycling stream, using that aluminum to make something new, we'll use 1% of the energy of freshly mined aluminum 1%. The environmental impact is so radically better for that material, not so with plastic. We only do 9% of our plastics get recycled. It's pitiful.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is pitiful. Perhaps it gets down to educating every community across the country. As an example, in the book you suggest that when you have pieces of aluminum foil, that you wait until you have quite a bit enough to make like a baseball size, put it all together and then put it in the recycle bin. It's a simple idea, but it's not one that I have been doing. Not that I use that much aluminum foil, but still I didn't know about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, there's no instruction manual. The aluminum foil if you just put it in in small pieces, it gets caught in the recycling machinery and doesn't get recycled. It just creates a problem. But if you boil it up into something the size of a baseball or bigger, then no problem. You have to rinse the food off of it too, though, which is a bit of a step. Contamination is what stops most recycling, and food on stuff is the contaminants and it's a little hard.
Speaker 1:but not that hard. No, it's not difficult. And if you're concerned about using water to clean off the aluminum foil, which you should be, recycle your used water from something else you've used, maybe washing dishes, or keep a bucket of shower water handy. Let's move on to Australian comedian Jimmy Reese and his skits on the Guy who Decides Packaging. He is a funny guy.
Speaker 2:He is hilarious.
Speaker 1:Yes, he is. So while the skits are funny, the message is loud and clear. Packaging is overkill. Most packaging is marked non-recyclable or recyclable with the adage quote, but only in certain areas. Even organic fruit and veggies are often wrapped in plastic. While we can grow our food and shop at farmers markets, we still need daily staples, for example rice and lentils, etc. Which are sold with non-recyclable packaging. What did you learn about this topic while strolling around supermarkets with trash genius Jenna Jambach? I'm guessing going to supermarkets with Jenna was a pretty interesting field trip.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think she's the one that turned me on to Jimmy Reese too. I watched his YouTube and I was just sitting there laughing at the screen. Well, he and Jenna Janbeck come at the same problem from different directions. I mean, he's poking fun at the ridiculous and unnecessary variety of packaging to sell the same thing over and over again, so that basically, what you're selling is the packaging and the contents that are irrelevant because they're all the same price. There's only a few basic types that you find in the supermarket, but yet there's dozens of different packages for the same thing and he pokes fun of it.
Speaker 2:Jenna jambeck, uh, who is a trash genius because she literally won the macarthur genius award for being the scientist who first quantified how much plastic pollution is going into our oceans and and rivers. It was much more than was imagined and it's and it's continuing to go up. She does work with communities around the world, really from the Philippines to I believe she has done some work in Australia, all over the US, helping them deal with this problem that she quantified the plastic pollution, because every location has a different source and different strategies you can use to keep plastic from getting into our water and our soil and our environment. One of the things she does is survey supermarkets, which in many communities is the starting point for things that become plastic pollution. And she took me along with what she was doing in the town of Tifton, georgia, and she warned me, going in, that some people kind of cry when they do this with me or they say I can never go shopping and not feel bad about it again. And so I'm just warning you and I said, sure, jennifer, I'm a hard journalist, I can do it, don't worry.
Speaker 2:But you know, we were walking down the rice aisle and she challenged me to find the most sustainable packaging and the healthiest product on that aisle and I couldn't really do it because it's impossible, because the information on the packaging is so poor, because the healthiest stuff tends to come in unrecyclable plastic pouches that are made of different kinds of plastics, which is immediately a non-starter, can't recycle that, everything has to be by itself. But of course they don't make it that way because no packaging and plastics manufacturers are really thinking about the end of life of their products. They just want somebody to buy it and then, hey, somebody else's problem, which is of course the problem. The most sustainable packaging, a plain cardboard box had the least healthy material in it, the really highly processed, salty-flavored, chemically heavy rice products the instant kind of stuff and that came in the most recyclable container but it was the least healthy choice to buy to eat. So I ended up sort of taking the Jimmy Reese route in my book and making a little fun of that. But it's not funny, it's tragic.
Speaker 2:And Jenna is a real eco-warrior in trying to counter that, both helping at the community level but also advocating for broader policies that shift the way we are packaging and the materials that we're using to a more sustainable direction.
Speaker 2:And he points out that the burden of this plastic waste and dealing with it falls heaviest on the poorest communities because think of the shopping options for people on a very low income they tend not to have access to all the shopping options and in some communities the dollar stores may be the best choice available because everything's really cheap there. But if you look at how you buy things, from dish detergent to potato chips to any other kind of food, it's all packaging the tiniest amount of actual contents in it, because it's really cheap to do that and cheap to buy. That way short term. In the long term you're spending much more money for much less, and that's the packaging trap that we're in, and communities with the least resources to deal with the pollution and the litter and the plastics and the recycling burden that comes out of that are getting stuck with the biggest mess to clean up. So it's a vicious cycle that we have to figure out a way to overturn.
Speaker 1:Yes, we do, but listening to you speak reminds me of the phrase vote with your wallet.
Speaker 2:That works.
Speaker 1:Yes, it does. Right now, it's critical that we consider every item we purchase, and I think this is a perfect segue into my next question, because on page 48, you write about the Keep America Beautiful campaign, specifically the crying Indian commercial that debuted on Earth Day campaign, specifically the Crying Indian commercial that debuted on Earth Day, April 22, 1971. What went on behind the camera leads to a larger conversation about the truths behind the commercial Keep America Beautiful.
Speaker 2:Who are they? Well, for those of you who are not familiar with the Crying Indian commercial, to this day people look at it on YouTube and find it one of the most powerful environmental call to arms in history, and it's very evocative. So what's depicted is someone who is supposed to be a Native American in traditional indigenous garb. Neither of those things is actually true, but OK, you know actors and tv. Uh, let's, let's put that aside for for now. The message is man in a traditional canoe paddling down a river in a beautiful natural setting. And then suddenly he's paddling down a pollution choked river filled with litter and debris, and he pulls up on a beach equally trashy. As the music swells, there's a close-up of his face and there's a tear, one single tear, running down his cheek. Thus it became the chronic Indian ad. And then the narration and the message is people start pollution. People can stop it. There was an anti-litter message and it spawned, with the help of Keep America Beautiful, the creators of this ad, an entire movement against litter to do beach cleanups and park cleanups, to get volunteers and scout troops and schools to participate in this and to convince everybody that it was our fault.
Speaker 2:All this stuff, all this mess, the disposable packaging and containers everywhere was the fault of the consumer, which is not true, because the fault is with the beverage and packaging companies who, you know, in the years leading up to that ad switched from a model that went back to America's colonial days and the first glassworks, in which beverage and food sellers took responsibility for their packaging. They wanted it back so they could reuse it, and even in the 1700s we're charging small deposits to customers so they would get their containers back. That was the business model, and it's pure capitalism. Oh, we get to keep our profits, but we also have to pay our costs for dealing with our packaging. That's our responsibility, that's our business model, and that persisted for centuries. That's how things worked. And then the invention of the first plastic bottle, made out of the same stuff polyester clothes are made out of, but it was the first time they were able to put a carbonated beverage into a plastic bottle that didn't explode.
Speaker 1:It contained the pressure.
Speaker 2:That was the key. It was a tough problem and somebody looked it in the lab and suddenly the beverage companies Coca-Cola leading the charge said hmm, here's a way we can not have to take our packaging back and just kind of say, here, take it, it's very convenient, you don't have to bring it back to us Like that was a good thing.
Speaker 2:But the problem is that's what super supercharged litter? Because nobody knew what to do with these things and they ended up everywhere. There was no recycling infrastructure for them. The companies weren't interested in doing that, so they built this impossible product that we have nothing to do with after it's used up, except throw it away somewhere after it's used up, except throw it away somewhere. And it became the taxpayers' and consumers' responsibility to create a recycling infrastructure and to deal with this material. That always in the past was the cost borne by manufacturers and bottlers and merchants.
Speaker 2:And the crying Indian was part of the campaign to beat back the literally thousands of laws that were proposed from the federal government to local communities, to states, to return to a system where containers and bottles and such were brought back to the manufacturers everything from milk bottles to beer bottles, to soda bottles. And this was part of a lobbying campaign to defeat those laws. And it succeeded because this message that it's our fault really got traction. People bought it and it was propaganda, it was greenwashing, and the Keep American Beautiful campaign was financed by the very same beverage and container makers who were opposing these laws. That was its true intent. Who were opposing these laws. That was its true intent and it was the most successful ad campaign in history, with the goal of sticking us with waste under the guise of keeping America beautiful.
Speaker 2:And it's only now that we're starting to say wake up and say, wait a minute. We've been subsidizing waste that we shouldn't be responsible for and one of the storylines in Total Garbage is what's happening to finally say, hey, that crying Indian was no Indian, it was an actor whose stage name was Iron Eyes Cody. It was cultural appropriation. Finally, keep America Beautiful has given up the rights to those images and that message and returned it to. I believe it's the National Congress of American Indians, an organization that now has custody of that ad and has retired it. But it's really confused us and persuaded us that this unrecyclable packaging was okay and normal, if only we tried to recycle better. And the problem is that material is not designed to be recycled. It never was, still isn't.
Speaker 1:And, as you point out in the book, none of the litter in the Crying Indian commercial has any names whatsoever on any packaging.
Speaker 2:It was curated.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I can just imagine how hard the art department worked, you know, turning all of those bits of litter over. So there were no company names on any of the trash, and I can tell you from experience what goes on behind the scenes is way more interesting than any commercial, you'll see.
Speaker 2:There's nothing authentic in any aspect of that commercial that was so effective.
Speaker 1:Yes, it worked. It sucked everybody in. After reading your chapter about chef Christopher Galaza, I couldn't help but think of the similarities between the documentary who Killed the Electric Car and induction stoves displayed at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Every fellow cook I've spoken with who owns an electric kitchen, specifically an induction stove, says they're fantastic and that the change from gas to electricity was easy. Fellow cook I've spoken with who owns an electric kitchen, specifically an induction stove, says they're fantastic and that the change from gas to electricity was easy and they've saved a lot of money on their gas bill. On page 84, you quote a congressman as saying if the maniacs from the White House come from my gas stove, they can pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Another quote is God guns gas stoves. Oh my goodness, from where does this fear of going from gas to electricity derive?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's how crazy things have gotten. You know, people are creatures of habit and we have been convinced again over generations that cooking with gas well, it's even a mean, now you're cooking with gas, things are going great.
Speaker 2:Another successful ad campaign. It's becoming better than our psyches. But again, this is the kind of thing where you have to really open your eyes and see things with fresh eyes. Eyes because think about what you're doing with your gas stove. You are setting fire to fossil fuels in the heart of your home, in the middle of your home, without ventilation. Even if you have those range hoods, most of us don't turn them on, and if you do, most of them just blow the air back into the house and they're ineffective anyway. You know it's like running your car in the house, except the very real pollution coming out of your stove isn't as obvious. There is a 42% increased risk of childhood asthma and other respiratory ailments in homes with gas stoves.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:I have a son who grew up with childhood asthma. I did not know that then. He's an adult, he's healthy, he's fine now, but he would get these attacks and we would never know what triggered it.
Speaker 2:We thought it was allergies. We ripped all the carpets out of our house. We did everything. I would have ripped that gas stove out in a heartbeat if I had known what the industry knew back then, when my son was little and didn't tell us If for no other reason, if you don't care about the environment, if you don't care about saving money because it's much cheaper to have an induction stove than a gas stove that you take fire hazards out of your house. The kitchen is the number one source of home fires in america. That all goes away with an induction stove because the stove doesn't actually get hot. It's a miracle the way you can cook with this device. If none of that appeals to you, keeping your kids healthy should Keeping vulnerable adults with respiratory issues in your home. It's expensive. Not everybody can afford to do it in their own homes If they live in an apartment if they're renting they can't do it.
Speaker 2:You know what you can do very inexpensively is get a little countertop induction cooker, one or two burners. You can get them for well under a hundred bucks. There's several really great product review websites that can point you to the very best value in this. Between that and a little toaster oven or a slow cooker, you can do most of your cooking and save your gas stove for the big feasts. But otherwise keep it shut off. You'll all be healthier. And when you do use it, open the windows, shut your kids' doors so the indoor pollution stays out of their rooms and do what you got to do.
Speaker 2:But you are better off if you don't use natural gas, which itself is like a greenwashing term. Yeah, sure, the gas that you cook with comes from a source in nature sort of volcanoes, you know so you don't want them in your home. Natural gas is not a good thing to have in your home. It constantly leaks methane into the environment. Our gas infrastructure is very old in most of our cities and it leaks constantly, and it is 88 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon emissions. It's terrible for the environment, it's terrible to breathe in, it's trouble having your home and the blue flames that we're all infatuated with. They don't cook anything, it's just a light show. It's invisible infrared radiation, otherwise known as heat, that does the cooking. And that heat is the same for any source, whether it's a fire, whether it's gas or whether it's electric.
Speaker 1:It's just heat, it's all the same, it's another invisible pollutant, as we were talking about earlier Invisible waste.
Speaker 2:Gas stoves are like our energy system in general. Two-thirds of the energy a gas stove consumes by burning the gas is wasted, because think of how hot a stove gets, how hot it makes the room. That's all energy that's going out into your indoor environment without cooking the food, so only a certain percentage of it actually cooks the food. With an induction stove, over 90% of the energy is directed into the pot or the pan where your food is, so it's so much more efficient. You use less energy.
Speaker 1:Instapots are great for that too. I mean, they're so fast.
Speaker 2:They are, they are.
Speaker 1:One thing I want to mention about your book is that, even though we talk about all this, you know awful stuff very depressing environmental concerns. Your book is about stories stories of everyday intelligent people doing outstanding work in the recycling industry, such as Ryan Metzer and his son Owen, and BlockPower founder Donald Baird. Here in California we have strict building codes and permitting takes months and months. How do we get up to par with countries like Australia regarding streamlining the permitting and inspection process and using green building materials?
Speaker 2:Yeah, australia has really been excellent in getting ramping up rooftop solar and making it a very easy process. Yeah, I mean that's. The building codes here are local in nature often and there's a web of laws and it's complex and it changes slowly and that really needs to be a higher priority. There's so many simple things that we know how to do that would save us money and save energy. Requiring real insulation of our homes and our windows to keep the heat and the cool in would make a huge difference.
Speaker 2:There's a type of construction I write about in the book called passive homes, where basically you have homes that are sealable and have a ventilation system and a filtration system to bring in fresh air. You can open it up when the weather's nice, but otherwise you can seal it. Why is that important? Particularly in places like California, but really all over the country, now that wildfires are becoming more common, and for air quality. These homes stay cool or stay warm and keep fresh air in the house even under those conditions of wildfire smoke in the air and they save money because you don't need to expend a lot of energy to keep them cool or keep them warm when you need it. To it only adds a relatively small amount to the construction cost maybe five to 10% for a home and larger scale buildings like apartment buildings, it's negligible.
Speaker 2:We can build this way in Europe. They're doing it all the time. And if you add solar energy to that sort of home construction and they don't look futuristic, they look like regular homes. They're just built better With better materials. There's a couple in Maine who have a passive house for their family with solar panels. They pay nothing for energy.
Speaker 2:I mean just the connection fee $13 a month for electricity. Maine is going crazy over heat pumps, which is a type of heat and cooling that doesn't actually burn anything or consume much energy, and it's saving them huge amounts of money. Because many people up there have oil burnery furnaces and they're spending $600 a month to keep their houses warm during very cold winters, and that goes down to next to nothing with a heat pump. It's a no brainer to make these kinds of changes in how we build and just getting that permit process streamlined. Unfortunately, it's also the bottleneck for large-scale solar energy projects.
Speaker 2:In America there's billions and billions of solar energy and wind products backlogged because of the slowness of permitting products. Backlogged because of the slowness of permitting and because of our grid and things that connect these resources to the places that need the power that the sun and wind can provide us is so old. Some parts of our grid date back to the Kennedy administration. It's crazy. So there's a regulatory bottleneck with that too. That needs to be overcome and streamlined. There's a regulatory bottleneck with that too. That needs to be overcome and streamlined. And that's again the invisible waste we don't really see or understand. That's the waste that's killing us.
Speaker 1:From invisible waste we're going to move on to waste that is visible and in our face 24-7. For many years I was involved in the fashion industry. I adore the creative aspect of fashion, specifically vintage fashion. I'm excited to see what young designers are doing with Trashin Fashion, making it fashionable to bring vintage used clothing to runways around the world. And this leads me to a story I've been following for a couple of years about a landfill pile of clothing at El Paseo de la Mula in Chile. Did you get a chance to read the article I sent you, ed?
Speaker 2:I did. It's horrifying.
Speaker 1:Yes, it definitely is. The article I'm referring to is titled A Mountain of Used Clothes Appeared in Chile's Desert, then it Went Up in Flames, and that article was in Wired, published January 13th 2024. And I'll make sure to put links to everything we've talked about on the show today in the show notes. I'm hoping that the more people who read these articles about discarded clothing will reconsider every piece of clothing they purchase, because we need to start thinking about where clothing goes to dye. Most clothing is made with some sort of synthetic and if it's a natural fabric, chances are it has a synthetic zipper or synthetic buttons attached. Synthetic fabrics and materials do not compost. Discarded clothing gets exported to countries such as Kenya, chile, india and Ghana. So let's talk about clothing, designers, fashion and trash and fashion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, of course, this is the manifestation of the fast fashion which is literally a waste by design. It's this clothes that the manufacturers know are going to end up in the landfill, that are going to wear out quickly, that they over manufacture, so that as much as a third of a line of fast fashion shirts or whatever ends up getting thrown away without even going to market. It is a crazy way to get people to think about clothes. And also, one thing many people don't understand is that one of the major markets for recycled plastic bottles you know when they do get recycled is the clothing industry, and those soda bottles turn into polyester. It's a one-way trip.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, you can get recycled once, but then it never gets recycled once it's a piece of plastic clothing, so it's phony recycling. It's still going to end up in the environment and those clothes shed fibers of plastic in the washing machine, into the environment, into our water. That's one of the main sources of plastic pollution, in addition to our packaging. And there's only one country in the world that requires washing machine makers to put filters on their washing machines, which is a potential fix for this problem, and that's France. Nobody else has the vision or courage to tell the industry to stop doing this.
Speaker 1:Not only is that insane, but it sounds archaic yeah.
Speaker 2:I know it's crazy. You know it's funny because we're talking about all this depressing stuff and actually the main focus of my book is on solving these things and I don't want people to feel hopeless because there's so much we can do. And let's talk about that in the fashion industry. Did you know that the largest growth sector in the apparel industry right now, worldwide and in America, is used clothing, the reuse economy, thrifting. That is a very positive thing and a joyous thing. There's thrifting clubs now and young people are really into it. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. Now, In 2022, over half of American consumers bought some article of used clothing. It's not like a sort of you skulk into these musty, dusty, old thrift stores anymore. It's a whole different experience. It's great value. It's great for the environment, both buying that way and donating that way to organizations like Goodwill that take your donations and they've upped their game. Their places look like a Marshall's or a Nordstrom rack now. It's not thrifting the way it used to be.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's definitely changed. This kind of fashion has become hip, clean and eclectic. I love it.
Speaker 2:Yes, one of the best things you can do for any consumer good is to buy something used, or I talk about adding a few R's to our three R's in the book. Let's repair things, let's reuse in the book.
Speaker 2:Let's repair things, let's reuse things and let's rethink things number one is rethinking how we can avoid wasteful ways with choices that are actually easy, or save us money, like thrifting does, uh, or do something better the way induction stoves do they're just better to cook on. You can teach your kid to cook on induction stoves because if he puts his hand on induction burner which isn't a burner, it's just a magnet. Nothing happens to him or her. There's no burn, there's no danger. It's just a better thing to have in your home. The other big takeaway in my book is that when you think about fixing waste and all the environmental problems it causes, it's almost always not about giving up something you love, but about upgrading to something you love better. Whether it's what you drive or what you cook on, or the containers you purchase and use in your home, the upgrades are wonderful.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's for sure they are Okay. Now for the good fun stuff. Let's talk about green changes that we can all make at home, and let's start with the bathroom Starting to bother. Well, let's do it.
Speaker 2:Oh God, there's so many things you can have, of course, recycled TP. That's not a big deal, or made out of things like bamboo that are environmentally more sustainable than wood pulp type products, which are more common. That's just one of the obvious things. But you can have low flow fixtures that reduce water consumption. Low flow fixtures that reduce water consumption. You can get the aerosol cans and plastic bottle products. Al, I've been trying all kinds of things. I'm really into toothpaste tablets now.
Speaker 1:They are next on my list. Now, how are you finding them? They're great. Is there a particular brand you favor?
Speaker 2:Well, the one I'm using now. You know there's many great brands. I want to do an average size, but the product I'm using now is called Bite P-I-T-E. It comes in with fluoride or without, depending on your preference. It tastes great. You just crunch one of these in your mouth and then brush away. And there's no plastic tube, there's none of the chemicals, and you know, there and there's no plastic tube, there's none of the chemicals. And there's all kinds of weird stuff in most store-bought toothpaste that you really don't want in your mouth. I've been trying shampoo and conditioner bars. Pretty good, go back to bar soap instead of liquid soap. I mean, come on. First of all, it's way cheaper, it does the same thing and there's no plastic waste left.
Speaker 1:Most farmer's markets now have soap that is made locally, which is fabulous.
Speaker 2:Yes, farmer's market, okay. And there's a website I want to commend, called litterlesscom, called litterlesscom, and what it can do for you is help you locate a zero waste or refill store near you where you can bring your container and get bulk shampoo, bulk dish detergent, bulk laundry detergent, take it home in your own container. Everything deodorant, uh, if you. If you love liquid soap, fine. You want liquid shampoo, fine. All the waste goes away. And I write about a, a store in maine called go go refill. Uh, you know I went all over looking for these stories. I mean, these stores are everywhere, but you can actually go in there and get many of these products for less than they cost at the supermarket by bringing your own container and buying them in bulk Food co-ops a little out of the bathroom. But they are also in many communities, bulk where you get.
Speaker 2:You know the old-fashioned way, the way you know general stores used to work in the old days, where there'd be a bin of stuff and you put a measured amount in your own container. You know they, they weigh it, you pay for it and you bring it home and then you bring your container back and it's just, it's. It's a kind of commerce and consumption. That makes more sense and should be the norm instead of kind of the outlier, because it used to be the norm and we've gotten away from the what made sense for consumption and for the environment and for the economy and we now have a system that only works for the people who create the waste they're cleaning up because we're paying for that waste.
Speaker 2:Everybody else has higher costs than we need to have by buying things the way we do now and there are other options, and the more we seek them out and shop at a place like GoGo, refill or the Zero Waste Store or Refill Store near you, the more they will grow and the more options like that will be apparent and other countries are again way ahead of America on this that it's a much more common way to buy things in other countries, from wine and beard and milk to you know anything else. We are the packaging waste kings of the world. We use more plastic packaging than per capita the world. Uh, we use more plastic packaging than per capita, not just, but, but than any other country. Um, and I, you know americans hate to love to hear that we're number one, you know, but we're not this is not a good thing to be.
Speaker 2:Number one plastic waste. And yet we are um, and we can do better, and, and we should do better, and we can do better and we we'll enjoy it and we'll enjoy it. Yes, we'll feel good, you know, and it'll be a real feeling good, not the fake good of putting plastic in a recycling bin and then learning later it's not getting recycled, you know we can actually benefit from all this and save the planet at the same time. We can.
Speaker 1:Yes, we can, and I'm going to give a shout out to composting, because we are big composters in our family. Our food scraps create incredible soil oh God, it's so good. You can see all the worms and it's just fantastic. And from that we grow incredible produce fruit and veg and let me tell you there is nothing better than the taste of homegrown fruit and veggies. I'm giving a big shout out for growing your food at home.
Speaker 2:Yes, oh, I'm glad you mentioned that. This is really. This is the best thing you can do for the environment and for your health and for your enjoyment, and you don't have to have a big yard. It could be a couple of pots on your apartment balcony or in the windowsill. Can I tell them about CropSwap LA?
Speaker 1:I would love it if you would do that.
Speaker 2:This former financier, now an urban farmer, named Jemima Hargens, started this company called CropSwap LA. It's a nonprofit and what he does is he turns people's lawns into these beautiful urban micro farms. He can get out of a thousand square feet of grass, turn that into a powerhouse farm just a thousand square feet that can deliver fruits and vegetables fresh to 25 households a week and use 8% of the water that the grass you know grass is a totally unproductive crop. It's, of all the cultivated crops in America, our grass uses the most water. It's an insane waste that does nothing for us. It's an ecological desert.
Speaker 2:You notice you? You know pollinators like bees and all. It's like flying over the sahara desert to them because there's nothing in grass for them. And jemima has shown people how you can turn that into these aesthetically beautiful solar-powered, water-saving farms that are delivered food that's not only organic and regenerative and chemical-free. It's actually more nutritious than the stuff you buy in the supermarket. A supermarket tomato today can have up to 70% less vitamins and minerals than a traditionally farmed or backyard tomato gives you.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't you know they taste like they're.
Speaker 2:They're designed not to not to to uh get damaged during shipping, and they feel that way too, and that's a that's a convenience for for shippers. It's not a good thing for uh, for our diets or for our nourishment or for our enjoyment of food growth. So, yes, growing your own, your own vegetables, even if it's one pot, is one of the best things you can do for the environment and for yourself.
Speaker 1:Before we go, I'd like to talk about the potato. You can grab one and leave it on your kitchen bench and after a few days you'll notice what we call chits coming out from the top. They're like little rooty things. Once they've gotten to a certain size, you can put them in soil anywhere, and about 60 days later you are going to have a harvest of potatoes. You pop them in boiling water with a little bit of fresh mint. Oh, they are delicious, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:There's no comparison. We've forgotten what food should taste like. Why mow your yard when you can eat your yard?
Speaker 1:That's what I'm saying. Oh, my goodness, If we could just do something about the gophers. But I must say I've got a cat that takes pretty good care of him. Okay, now I have kept you talking for way too long. I apologize, but I've just got one last question. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:Oh well, I've got two books going right now. One is an audio book, it's the Covenant of Water. I'm a little late to the game there, but Abraham Verghese reads that so beautifully and I just get lost in this amazing book. And then I'm also reading the Teachers by Alexandra Robbins, and it's a wonderful work of narrative nonfiction about the lives of teachers today. And you know, the subtitle is kind of like what the most important job in America, which it is, but ironically it's not the best compensated by far job in America. And these stories are eye-opening and enchanting and horrifying and for anyone who thinks they know what a teacher's life is like, read this book and find out what else is going on. It's really great.
Speaker 1:I need to read that book. I mean, I taught for quite a few years and I think I probably made minimum wage and worked maybe 60, 65 hours a week. It's grueling work. I mean I loved it but, gee, it took its toll on me emotionally and physically. One last thing I would like to bring up for our listeners, and that is I appreciate the way you wrote this book. One of the reasons I read so much fiction and promote so much fiction is because I believe well-written fiction teaches us empathy. It puts us in another character's shoes and point of view. We feel what they are feeling. And the way you wrote your book and probably the way you've written most of your books is in that style is an element of fiction, because you're using stories to explain what's going on. It's not all in-your-face scientific data. While it's necessary in certain books, it's a little difficult to digest, whereas the style of your writing is fantastic. So I wanted to thank you for writing in the style that you write in.
Speaker 2:Thank you, maddie. So I teach narrative nonfiction just one class a week.
Speaker 1:Where are you teaching?
Speaker 2:Right now I'm doing an undergraduate class at Chapman, but I also have been teaching at summer sessions at USC. But I like to tell them that narrative nonfiction is like journalism with a heart. It's kind of what you're talking about. Non-fiction is like journalism with a heart. It's kind of what you're talking about where you're not just telling people what happened or what the issue is, but why they should care, and it has to be the kind of writing that you were talking about, and it's the bridge between non-fiction and fiction. I think that tries to sort of have a little, have a bit of both, some of the same storytelling that we love in our novels, but married to a very specific and hopefully important story that sounds like a fantastic class and, as I said to you earlier, friends and family members, you will be getting total garbage for your presence this year.
Speaker 2:Total garbage. You just warn them that the book's not getting total garbage for your presence this year Total garbage. Warn them that the book's not really total garbage.
Speaker 1:please, I will. For sure, ed. It's been great chatting with you. I love your book. Thank you for taking the time out to be on the show and I look forward to chatting with you about your next book.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, mandy. It's been great talking to you. I love your podcast and what you do, and it's so nice to talk to someone who's like, really read the book deeply, which isn't always the case, and I understand why that is, and it's fine, but it's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with the author, edward Humes about his new book Total Garbage how we can fix our waste and heal our world. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, adrian Otterhan, and graphic design by Frances Farala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Thank you.