Heather Rogers’ Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (N.Y.: New Press, 2005) opens with some startling environmental facts in pursuit of the history of “garbage” in the United States. Her focus throughout this surprisingly engaging text is to make more explicit the link between “garbage” or trash and the catastrophic environmental consequences of mass consumption. Rogers’s organizing assumption throughout is that our unpalatable, somewhat monstrous “creation” of garbage is inextricably linked with our current practices of production and consumption in the United States. To present her analysis, Rogers makes consistent, coherent, and thorough use of the rapidly burgeoning body of work being made available on a wide array of environmental concerns. For example, borrowing information from Paul Goettlich (“The Sixth Basic Food Group”) and statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Rogers opens with some startling facts: “the middle of the Pacific Ocean is now six times more abundant with plastic waste than with zooplankton” (6). How could this ongoing polluting of our natural resources have begun, and why does it continue to occur at an astonishing pace? “80% of U.S. products are used once and then discarded,” she notes (6). How did we, each of us in the United States, arrive at the production of between 4.5 and 7 pounds of trash per day? And what are the social mechanisms that, historically, created conditions that allow this astounding production of “waste” to grow exponentially, despite overwhelming evidence that our planet is rapidly losing its ability to sustain the production and elimination (or neutralization) of our mass-produced cast-offs?

Rogers drops us in the “waste stream” of United States history—the carefully engineered landfills, incinerators, and recycling processes that “manage” our often single-use disposables—to pose a simple question: “What if we didn’t have so much trash to get rid of?” (26). Rogers argues, “if it’s feasible to create the kinds of facilities that handle our garbage today,” then, it “must be possible to restructure production” so that far less “waste” enters the system of consumption (27). Along the way, Rogers makes some refreshing, carefully-formulated conclusions. The corporatization of garbage itself relies on the economic bedrock of capital production and accumulation: supply and demand. This insight reveals current limitations in both the concept and practice of “recycling”: the market for recyclables and recycled items must remain consistent with the production of recyclables themselves. If supply of recyclables exceeds demand for them, as is consistently the case, bustling “sanitary” landfills, incinerators, and burgeoning pollution (and the management of trash as an increasingly well-organized capital venture) are the result. Paradoxically, too many people (producers and consumers) have too much to lose to shift our current consumption model to more sustainable production practices. And the result of this fear? Plastics continue to blanket the ocean floor far faster than zooplankton are able to reproduce.

Such disheartening effects of consumption become increasingly visible as environmental damage, and occur more frequently, despite our “best” recycling efforts—that is, despite current efforts to remain responsible for our participation in the system of consumption. Rogers asserts that the relatively recent focus on “the individual’s” recycling efforts, while a positive step, is little more than an attempt to make palatable, as well render invisible, other aspects of a complex system that inures itself from more meaningful forms of social and environmental change.

 These “other aspects” of the relation between consumption and garbage get “buried” in our everyday acts as surely as garbage disappears in our landfills. In the United States, however, we do not have to look far to see the tainted wellsprings of all this garbage. We simply need to be willing to look, to make visible our practices of production and consumption. “These effects [of environmental degradation],” Rogers writes, “are unmistakably bound with a system that produces so much trash” (7). Thus, if Rogers writes a clear and, at times, amusing history of a messy subject—trash production, processing and “containment” in the U.S.—she studiously avoids a simplistic analysis that points an accusatory “finger” at particular individuals or social groups. Like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, however, Rogers does not shy away from presenting what seem currently to be unpalatable, if realistic, conclusions: “to transform the relationship of business and manufacturing to nature requires the transformation of capitalism” (215).

Rogers does mean “transformation” rather than “eradication” here: she does not argue for the collapse of the United States (capitalist) system of valuation and the exchange value of the commodity form. Instead, she argues for a more realistic approach to change, presenting a more mediatory position: strategic government intervention in current processes of commodity production, coupled with a new breed of community activism. She notes, “industry’s inability to regulate itself must be acknowledged and replaced with enforceable environmental measures…[a]nything short of government enforcement of production regulations to protect human and environmental health will ultimately end in failure” (227, 228).

At times approaching a neo-Marxist analysis, Rogers combines Marxist critics’ attention to the dense materiality of historical facts with a championing of grassroots activism, emphasizing the historical formation and role of loosely-based coalitions of concerned citizens as a kind of makeshift but wizened proletariat-for-meaningful-change. For example, Rogers credits citizen activism and organizing with the eventual collapse of the government’s proposal of, and foundation of support for, the expansion of incineration facilities in the U.S. in the latter half of the 1980s. Rogers’ language becomes explicitly Marxist in such passages: “many of these grassroots organizations crystallized into local, regional, and nationwide networks with a broader vision,” expanding their critique to include “issues of class, race, and labor” (165). Her focus, however, is not on the alienation of labor from its own products and processes, but on the alienation of “waste” in the United States from both practices of production and the deleterious environmental effects of trash disposal.

Ultimately, her message is a positive, if urgent, one: by shifting our perception and conceptualization (as well as compartmentalization) of garbage en masse, such that our collective foci become the processes of production, we can design a far more sustainable relation between humans and the environment. The ultimate value of Rogers’ book on trash may well be her unwavering conviction that we can eliminate garbage with a groundswell of “trash talk” and the initiatives that come from the production of shared knowledge and information. That is, we can teach ourselves to “talk the talk” and “walk the walk” of socially responsible, environmentally sustainable trash—largely by eliminating the creation of trash at the socially-accepted point of its systemic production.