Reviewed by Frederick Reimers

In Garbage Land, author Elizabeth Royte seeks to combat the dangers of out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude that Americans adopt toward their garbage—not only kitchen scraps, but also what we flush down the toilet and what happens to our obsolete electronics. The Brooklyn-based writer follows her household trash to each of its ultimate destinations, meeting interesting characters like her gruff neighborhood “san men,” a manager whose business is converting the feces of New York City’s masses into fertilizer, and a young female kingpin of the scrap metal industry. Probably more interesting are the machines and processes she sees—a Prolerizer, the giant machine that shreds steel with knives like some apocalyptic Ginsu mutation, and a factory where plastic is pressed into durable two-by-fours.

While this solidly written and even sometimes humorous narrative never lacks for interest, it is also appropriately depressing. The news that landfills generate toxic leechate that may or may not get into nearby water supplies shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but Royte also discovers that toxic heavy metals like nickel and cadmium are retrieved from defunct cell phones and computers by impoverished rural Chinese who smash the devices with rocks and then dump them into open vats of acid.

What keeps Garbage Land from real greatness, though, is a sense that in each of her separate investigations, Royte doesn’t go quite far enough. We always have a sense of further wrongdoing lurking below the surface of each waste stream. Royte tantalizes us by digging after the foul scents like a bloodhound after a corpse, but then seems to stop when the going gets inconvenient. Obviously, a complete exposé of these industries is outside of the scope of her project, but that shallow approach leaves the reader just aggravated enough at our disposable culture to be depressed but without enough conviction to do anything about it.