Garbology Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash Chapter 2 Summary

“Put-downs, Pickups and the Power of No” is the twelfth chapter of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash by Edward Humes. The chapter talks about living a lifestyle that is almost waste free and how you can easily start today within your own home. Most of the waste consumed from your home is from the packaging from goods that you buy, eliminating that can save money and give you less waste.

The chapter starts out with a woman named Bea Johnson who lives in California with her husband and two sons. The Johnsons had recently moved into a new town in an apartment that was less than half the size of their old home. Bea then discovered how much less space and items were actually needed in her home compared to a lot of the junk she had in

storage from her old home. She figured out that there is a power in putting things down rather than buying them, the power of saying no that can change a family’s life and save them tons of money. The family lived by the four R’s--recycle, reduce, reuse, and refuse--meaning saying no to buying things you do not actually need or buying items that comes with packaging.
In the past years, Bea spent hours cleaning up messes throughout the house and extra dishes in the sink. Now, she just spends five minutes cleaning up, which is more convenient for her since it gives her more free time. The Johnsons preferred living this simplicity lifestyle, making them happier in a less cluttered home. After just one year, the Johnsons’ trash-items that could not be recycled, given away, or reused in anyway-could all fit in a single mason jar. This saved the family money for vacations, a hybrid car, and a college fund for the kids.
Living waste free is not all that complicated, you can start by making your own stuff with everyday household items. For example, you can make your own household cleaner with just water, castile soup, and vinegar, and you can also make your own toothpaste from baking soda and a little bit of herbal sweetener. For groceries and food, Bea would buy produce at the market using reusable bags and then would bring tons of empty jars to her local grocery store that sells items in bulk. In her home, she stores food in mason jars located in the cabinets. More than ten percent of the cost of good lies in the packaging, which over time can add up and which makes you not only throwing away that packaging, but also throwing away money.
Bea only shopped for clothes twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

She has a small wardrobe which is enough for her since she used to have a large wardrobe and did not wear most of the clothes she had. She loved going to secondhand and thrift stores, saving money on her whole family’s wardrobe. There has been complications in trying to live waste free, like for example, when you constantly get junk mail, which gets recycled. Bea also gets DVDs from Netflix that comes with paper and plastic strips that are on the mailing envelops, so she sends the trash back to the company so they can dispose of it. For the kids’ lunches, sandwiches are wrapped in a cloth napkin that can become a place mat during eating and then a napkin. Everything is rolled up into a compact parcel so it uses no paper, bags, or

wraps.
Two years into a no waste lifestyle, Bea made a blog about her experiences, titled “The Zero Waste Home”, giving people tips and tricks on how to use the four R’s.

Her blog interested lots of people and even inspired them to help make a difference in the environment. Many people critiqued Bea harshly, giving her negative comments about her lifestyle, calling her delusional or mentally ill. Bea commented back, saying they are not perfect and they like to use some stuff that requires packaging. She despises waste and how it has been a problem in our environment and believes that we can all help the environment by changing the things that we buy and the stuff in our home. She also thinks the American Dream used to be having a nice large house with a big SUV and lots of stuff, but instead she is actually living the real dream with her waste less lifestyle. Bea remains optimistic no matter what criticism she receives and believes that there are many advantages to a waste less lifestyle including a forty percent of savings on the household budget that her and her family can use.

The chapter continues with a man named Rob Gogan who also decided to make an impact on our environment. Rob is an associate manager of recycling and waste services at Harvard University and turned the waste at the university into an example of repurposing and reuse. At Harvard, it used to be when students would leave for summer break, the furniture would be left behind and thus would get thrown away. Rob decided

to launch a yard sale in Harvard Yard, making it one of America’s largest yard sales. Rob saved the items a trip to the landfill and drew in buyers from all over the place at low prices.
Another person against waste is Kim Masoner, she has decided to pick up trash instead of putting it down. She is also testing the wisdom that waste and pollution are too big for any one person’s efforts to matter. In the past ten years, Kim has picked up trash in many of California’s beaches, setting up a group of volunteers to the plastic filled beaches. Kim has been picking up trash since she was a young child but officially got started in 1999 with her husband and brought a trash bag with them on their walks on the beach daily. Eventually, other people began to ask the Masoners if they had extra bags so they could join in and help, creating a beach cleanup group. After that started, Kim was a former director of the Seal Beach Chamber of Commerce and now spends most of her time running a nonprofit group called Save Our Beach, in which they would meet up monthly to clean up beaches in Southern California. The group was pretty successful, drawing in about a thousand volunteers each time and picking up more than two hundred tons of waste and plastic debris just from the Southern California beaches alone. Kim also teaches a class for corporations in which she shows them how to crotchet plastic bags into bedrolls and yoga mats for the homeless and teaches high school students on how to make bracelets and purses out of trash.
Both Rob Gogan and Kim Masoner have been admired and praised by lots of people for their hard work against waste and Kim has received multiple awards for what she has done. The chapter ends by talking about how Bea Johnson and her zero waste life is on another level of helping out the environment since she has changed her life dramatically from within her home rejecting the consumer economy and lifestyle that most Americans live by. Most Americans think that helping to pick up trash makes us feel good about helping the environment but not such a good feeling about admitting we live wasteful lives that can be changed like Bea’s.
“Put-downs, Pickups and the Power of No” is a good and informative chapter in Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash. It gives readers an inside look on how changing how you buy your produce making your own household items can help the environment by sending less waste into the landfills. The author went into detail about how Bea Johnson and her family lived the waste free life, giving examples on how they did it so readers can also start living the lifestyle. For instance, at the very end of the chapter, the author put in Bea Johnson’s list of ways to get started on a low waste life which gives readers ideas on how to help the environment even if they are just taking baby steps.
The author’s writing style is easy to read and the whole book would be perfect for anyone of any age. For example, with Bea Johnson, that could have been targeted for anyone willing to change their lifestyle from within their own home, and for Rob Gogan, appeals to college students or anyone that works at a university that wants to make a difference in the waste that a college campus produces. Edward Humes uses rhetorical devices in the chapter to try and persuade readers to make a change in the world and to help decrease the amount of waste filling up landfills.
Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash is must read for everyone and perfect for any age. Not many Americans are educated enough about the problem in our landfills until this book came out, making it a success. Most of the waste we consume comes from the packaging on things we buy and if we eliminate that, we can save money each year while helping the environment out.