(such as three or four half-full cans of paint or several full containers of pesticide in just one pickup). The Garbage Project’s interpretation was that the media surrounding the collection day made people aware of the potentially hazardous commodities in their homes, but for those who missed the collection day, no other appropriate avenue of discard had been identified. As a result, some residents disposed of their hazardous wastes in the only avenue available to them—their normal refuse pickup. The same pattern was verified in subsequent studies in Phoenix and Tucson (Rathje and Wilson 1987). The lesson learned: communities that initiate hazardous waste collection days should inform residents of future collection times or of other avenues for appropriate discard.

Such counterintuitive interview/refuse patterns indicate that consumers may not be aware of how much their reported behaviors differ from their actual behaviors and that the Garbage Project is beginning to document a previously unmeasurable phenomenon between what people think is happening and what is really going on. Such studies have already led to some general principles of the differences between people’s awareness of their behavior and their actual behavior (Rathje 1996).

The Garbage Project’s contribution to a better understanding of the relationship between what people report they do and what they actually do (Rathje 1996; Rathje and Murphy 1992a) relies heavily on the use of archaeological methods and theory to quantitatively document actual behaviors from refuse. This is the grist of any archaeologist’s mill, and the validity of the Garbage Project’s data records and interpretations is based upon 100 years of previous archaeological studies that have analyzed refuse to reconstruct behavior.

For the same period of time, archaeologists have also been studying refuse in an attempt to count the number of people who lived within particular sites or regions at particular times. The Garbage Project has now done the same thing at the request of the U.S. federal government. The U.S. Census Bureau has long been aware of the criticism that its interview-survey methods lead to a significant undercounting of ethnic minorities, especially young adult males who may be undercounted by 40 percent. In 1986, the Quality Assurance Branch of the Census Bureau funded a study to answer the question, Could the Garbage Project count people based on the types and quantities of residential refuse they generate? The answer was yes (Rathje and Tani 1987). For any unit of time in any given neighborhood, the overall weight of total refuse discarded (minus yard wastes, which vary markedly between suburbs and inner cities) varies directly according to the number of resident discarders. The Garbage Project converted quantities of refuse thrown out per week to numbers of people by using “per person” generation rates documented in test areas. Overall, a series of garbage-based estimates of population were within 5 percent of the actual number of residents. The Garbage Project now stands ready to cross-verify census counts with a method that does not violate the subjects’ anonymity.

Ongoing Research

Since 1980, the Garbage Project has worked on a large number of specialized topics similar to the census study, and all of them are the focus of continuing inquiry. Landfill excavations, for example, are gauging the impact of recycling programs on the volume of wastes that reach landfills. The first reported results estimated that metropolitan Toronto’s “blue box” curbside recycling program has conserved some 20 percent of landfill space in the metropolitan area since 1982 (Tani, Rathje, Hughes, Wilson, and Coupland 1992).

The recovery of 2,425 datable, readable newspapers from the project’s excavations dramatically changed the view that biodegradation is commonplace in landfills. To better understand why biodegradation does and does not occur in landfill environments, the Garbage Project has so far conducted four cooperative digs that have involved microbiologists and environmental engineers from the University of Arizona, University of Oklahoma, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Argonne National Laboratories, and Proctor and Gamble’s Environmental Laboratory (Suflita et al. 1993). In this same