An eye-opening, illustrated look at something we often take for granted—our trash, and the systems in place that make it disappear (or not) In a world of mass consumption and busy schedules, taking the time to understand our own trash habits can be daunting. In Trash Talk , the ever-curious and talented Iris Gottlieb pulls back the curtain on the intricacies of the global trash production system and its contribution to climate change. From the history of the mafia’s rule of the New York sanitation system to orbital debris (space trash) to the myth of recycling, Gottlieb will help readers see trash in a whole new way.     Complete with beautiful illustrations and several landfills’ worth of research, Trash Talk shines a much-needed light on a system that has been broken for far too long, providing readers with surprising, disgusting, and insightful information to better understand how we affect garbage and how it affects us. "A must-read for anyone who cares about understanding how the Earth got 'trashed.'" --Kirkus “Gottlieb’s candor and willing­ness to call out these painful truths make Trash Talk a book readers will remember and share.” --BookPage "As this sprightly book makes clear, it's hard to throw something 'away' because a finite planet doesn't really have an away--not even in orbit, where space junk is piling up. So we better start thinking through some new approaches!" --Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature " Trash Talk is a brilliant, revelatory delight to read. It is an anthropological whodunit that thoroughly describes how much we extract from the living world and transform it into the dead world. Who thought a book on trash could be a page-turner. Think again!" --Paul Hawken, author of Drawdown and Regeneration   “Like all of Iris Gottlieb's books, Trash Talk is a marvel of fascinating information, relatable insights, and laugh-out-loud hilarious illustrations and commentary. You'll be engrossed, entertained, and horrified by all the waste-related facts packed into the book, along with genuinely useful details about the world of trash that most of us know so little about. Everyone should read this book!” --Margaret (Mei) and Irene Li, authors of Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking Iris Gottlieb is an illustrator and author who works to make information more accessible through her content. They have illustrated for the New York Times , Smithsonian magazine, NPR, and Good Company , among others, and they have collaborated with museums around the country. Their previous books include Seeing Science , Seeing Gender , Natural Attraction , and Everything Is Temporary . Introduction So, What Is Trash? By generic definition, trash is anything worthless, unwanted, or discarded. But what we deem trash can be drastically different from how our neighbors, other cities or towns, or countries across the world value those same objects. The classic (and overused) adage “one man’s trash is another’s treasure” is applicable beyond making yard art from scrap metal or scoring big on Antiques Roadshow from a thrifted painting. It’s relevant on a personal, global, and economic scale. It illuminates that trash is not always unanimously categorized or similarly managed across the board; for some it’s a treasure, for others it’s invisible, and for more it’s an enor- mous human and biological hazard. Humans don’t agree on what makes trash trash . The way we individually and collectively determine worth and value is lacking consensus. Our discord is a reflection of the global shift in wealth, labor, skill, and resourcefulness. Depending on who we are and where we live, our definitions of worthless , unwanted , or discarded might vary wildly. In highly consumeristic cultures, the amount of trash produced is much greater, in part because of access to products, disposable income, and single-use cradle-to-grave production. The United States is, no surprise, the world’s biggest generator of household trash. Each American generates 1.38 tons of waste annually, contributing to the global trash production of 4.5 trillion pounds per year. For context, that is 22.5 billion blue whales. Or if you were to stack it, it’d be 782,608 Great Pyramids of Egypt. Or 42 times the total number of humans that have existed in the history of Earth (if each person was a pound of trash). Every year . The production of trash is unfathomable, and yet our exposure to the amount of waste we generate is mostly from our own homes (or on the curb if you live in New York City) when we put it in a bin or toss it down the chute to be taken away in units of tied-up bags. We see what we create on a moment-to-moment basis, but not the cumulative effect of our neighbors, our cities, our countries. I see a bag of kitchen garbage fill up over the course of two weeks, add my bathroom trash to it, put it in the big trash can, and start over. I don’t think a