dreams, I peruse an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report entitled Characterization of Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 1995 Update (Franklin Associates 1996).

My visions of archaeology, as diverse as they appear, have always been the same: to come to understand some basic threads in the fabric of humanity—which our ancestors wove into us and which we are likewise weaving into our descendants—by touching as a person and by measuring as a scientist the artifacts humans make and leave behind. With this personal preamble as background, I now attempt to describe what I can of the history, nature, and public benefits of a type of archaeology called garbology, which I believe is currently adding one small piece of understanding to solve the puzzle of the human enigma.

“buried alive: The Garbage Glut” was the cover headline of Newsweek, 27 November 1989, and “Are We Throwing Away Our Future with Our Trash?” had been the title of the “American Agenda” segment of ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings on 2 December 1988. In the late 1980s, the amount of garbage the United States generated had reached crisis proportions for the media and the public. The vast majority of refuse was sent to landfills, and those landfills were filling up and closing down. Where was the garbage to go?

Concerned citizens, convinced that action had to be taken without delay, quickly identified the garbage culprits among the discards that visibly shocked them everyday—litter. Edit Times, echoed popular perceptions that fast-food packaging, disposable diapers, and plastic grocery bags were singularly responsible for “straining” our landfills, and public officials in communities nationwide proposed banning the accused perpetrators. In the meantime, into what kinds of holders were responsible folks to put their unwanted burgers, hot coffee, and groceries? Oddly enough, the answer was not clear because in all the commotion there had been few facts presented about what actually was in the garbage and thus the landfills. It was at this point that a new kind of archaeologist, a garbologist, one who studies fresh garbage, was able to unearth a few relevant facts that began to fill the information vacuum that surrounded our discards.

Workers around the country were regularly digging into landfills to install methane vents, but no one paid much attention to the refuse that was exhumed in the process. After all, it was just smelly, disgusting garbage. The smell and look of discards were not deterrents to archaeologists, who always expect to get their hands dirty, and in fact, to archaeologists, contemporary garbage is a gold mine of information. No society on earth has ever discarded such rich refuse, much of it packaging that identifies the contents it once held by brand, type, cost, quantity, ingredients, nutrient content, and more. Yielding to this temptation, between 1987 and 1997 archaeologists from the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona systematically excavated, hand-sorted, weighed, measured for volume, and recorded thirty-five tons of material from sixteen landfills located across North America—from California to Toronto and from the deserts of Arizona to the Everglades of Florida. The information that resulted from these digs was unexpected (see Rathje 1986, 1991, 1996; Rathje and Murphy 1992a, 1992b).

In contrast to all of the concern directed at fast-food packaging and disposable diapers, the archaeological data demonstrated that both items together accounted for less than 2 percent of landfill volume in refuse deposited over the previous ten years. Even more surprisingly, because of industry-wide “light-weighting”—that is, making the same form of an item but with less resin—plastic grocery bags had become thinner and more crushable to the point that 100 plastic bags consumed less space inside a landfill than 20 paper bags. If all three items at the center of public concern had been banned and were not replaced by anything, the garbage archaeologists were certain that landfill managers would not have noticed the difference.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of contents were materials that occupied large portions of landfill space but received little public attention. Construction/demolition debris (C/D) was one. Because of definitional issues, C/D was not even included in the EPA’s national