In looking at waste as an entirely modern, man-made idea, I stopped viewing garbage as garbage, and instead slowly started viewing it as a commodity. A commodity with some very unique characteristics: it has negative or very low value (typically people pay to dispose of it), it is always a by-product of some other function, it is all around us, it is created in almost every part of our lives, and there is a tremendous amount of it […].
—Tom Szaky, Revolution in a Bottle, p. 113.
The world is full of garbage. When deciding what to do about that garbage, it is worth taking a moment to think deeper about the nature of garbage itself. Most of the stuff we buy, own, inherit, and receive eventually ends up in a landfill or recycling center. The aim here is to explore the concept of garbage.
The Nature of Garbage
Many people think of garbage in descriptive terms: stuff that gets tossed and forgotten. But that prompts the question of what makes something garbage to begin with. It may seem obvious the answer to that question is that if something is discarded, it must be garbage. However, such an answer is too quick and too crude to really do the question justice. Indeed, the nature of garbage is interesting from a philosophical perspective for a couple of reasons. First, it is something that many philosophers haven’t thought much about—we often focus on questions related more to the meaning of life, right and wrong, or whether God exists. Second, many people believe that they know what garbage is—the job of the philosopher to challenge what we (wrongly) believe we know about the world. What is garbage? Let’s begin with an answer given in an episode of Seinfeld:
JERRY: So lemme get this straight: you find yourself in the kitchen. You see an éclair, in the receptacle. And you think to yourself, "What the hell, I'll just eat some trash."
GEORGE: No, no. No, no, no. It was not trash!
JERRY: Was it in the trash?
GEORGE: Yes.
JERRY: Then it was trash.
GEORGE: It wasn't down in, it was sort of on top.
JERRY: But it was in the cylinder!
GEORGE: Above the rim.
JERRY: Adjacent to refuse, is refuse.
GEORGE: It was on a magazine! And it still had the doily on.
JERRY: Was it eaten?
GEORGE: One little bite.
JERRY: Well, that's garbage.
From ‘The Gymnast’ (Seinfeld, Season 6, Episode 6)
It should be clear that Jerry takes a first stab at specifying the nature of garbage: whatever lands in the garbage can is garbage. That seems clear, right? Not really. One can imagine accidentally tossing front row seats to a concert in the garbage by accident, and we clearly wouldn’t think of the tickets as garbage. This was George’s implicit point: if something is salvageable, then it isn’t garbage. However, consider the principle that Jerry employs in his argument with George. We will call it Jerry’s principle:
Jerry’s Principle: Whatever is ‘adjacent to refuse, is refuse’
This principle is initially intuitive: if one wanted to find garbage quickly, then Jerry’s principle could be useful. However, the principle is puzzling if we think about it a bit. It doesn’t really answer the demarcation question: what separates garbage from stuff that isn’t garbage? If everything were garbage or nothing were garbage, then we wouldn’t need to distinguish them. Because we do need to, though, we need a better principle—Jerry’s Principle fails to distinguish garbage from resources. There must be a way to demarcate garbage from resources.
There is a broader problem with Jerry’s Principle: read too strongly, it would mean everything is garbage. And that cannot be true. If we start with the assumption that whatever is spatially next to garbage is garbage, then on Jerry’s Principle, everything near the garbage can would itself be garbage—on this reading, Jerry would be correct that George ate ‘trash’. However, it would also mean that next to the garbage was itself garbage. If the stuff next to the garbage is itself garbage, the stuff next to that would also be garbage, and so on indefinitely. If stuff became garbage due to its proximity to garbage, the stuff nearby would contaminate still more stuff, until everything is garbage. Here the demarcation issue—where garbage ends, and the rest of the world begins—would cease to make sense. Jerry’s principle is therefore too broad: by appealing to proximity, the principle count stuff as garbage that is instead a resource—e.g. tossing a new Rolex in the garbage can wouldn’t render it garbage. Perhaps George has a better criterion: something isn’t garbage if someone values it. Here an economic approach could clarify the issue.
The Economic Conception of Garbage
The post began by asking what counted as garbage. Jerry Seinfeld took a stab at the answer: to be garbage is to be adjacent to garbage. Humor aside, this criteria really answer our question—despite Jerry’s implicit point that eating from the garbage is gross—because the principle was overly broad in application. And George had an (implicit) point: garbage, like beauty, look like it is decided by the individual. What counts as garbage to thee, may not count as garbage to me. Perhaps, then, it would be better to construe the nature of garbage in economic terms. Often one can tell what others genuinely believe—versus what they say they believe—based on what they are willing to pay for something—e.g., if something genuinely believes their prediction that the future of the economy is bright, we would expect them to act accordingly via their financial activity. This insight is the bedrock of a classic economics joke: two economists are walking past a Porsche showroom with a fiery red sports car visible through the window. The first economist opines that he really wants the car. The second economist replies that he obviously doesn’t want the car, otherwise he would already own it. This joke suggests a test for whether something is garbage or a resource. As the economist, Michael Munger, explains:
There is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource (something valuable) or just garbage (something you want to dispose of at the lowest possible cost, including costs to the environment). If someone will pay you for the item, it’s a resource. Or, if you can use the item to make something else people want, and do it at lower price or higher quality than you could without that item, then the item is also a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, or if other things made with that item cost more or have lower quality, then the item is garbage. If yard waste were a resource, then trucks would drive up and down streets in your neighborhood, bidding up the price of your bagged grass clippings. That doesn’t happen. Ipso facto, yard waste is garbage. No amount of wishful thinking, or worship of nature as a goddess, can change this basic calculus[1].
And elsewhere:
I once proposed a guessing game to determine whether something is a resource or just garbage, to be disposed of at the lowest possible cost, including costs to the environment. The answer comes down to price. If someone will pay you for the item, it’s a resource. Or, if you can use the item to make something else people want, and do it at lower price or higher quality than you could without that item, then the item is also a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take it, then the item is garbage[2].
Here we cannot say whether George would have paid anything for the donut sitting atop the garbage pile, but the owner of the house didn’t have to pay George to haul it away. The fact that George spent the time and trouble to eat the slightly used donut is some evidence, from the test above, that George valued it. This suggests an element of individuality in the economic view of what counts as garbage: it is whatever no one wants enough to haul away free. And part of the insight from economics is that something free is not really free. Even items left on the street with a ’free’ sign on them aren’t free—hauling something ‘free’ away requires time and energy, two resources in short supply. The ‘free’ couch on the side of the road may qualify as garbage, even to someone who would otherwise value it, once the cost of time and gas is factored in.
The same logic holds in the reverse: we may think something is garbage, when if we knew more about it, we would realize it is actually a resource worth hauling away or even buying—even better would be if something could take garbage and cheaply and easily turn it into a resource. Luckily, there are such (biological) machines: cows, sheep, and goats.
Grazing Land and Turning Garbage into Food
Imagine a machine that turned what would otherwise be garbage into food. There are such creatures fortuitously: animals like cows and sheep do exactly that. They excel at digesting sources of calories inedible to humans—leaves, grass, corn husks, plant remains from harvested fields—transforming them into resources like meat, milk, and wool. These incredible animals transform what would otherwise be garbage into resources. We would have things like grass, leaves, and crop remnants regardless, so it would be better to use them to feed animals like cows and sheep.
The fact cattle thrive eating what would be garbage to humans is often obscured by the widely disseminated, and overly simplistic, claim that cows are inefficient at converting plant calories to meat calories, specifically that: it takes twenty pounds of feed to produce one pound of beef. And if we think about the time, energy, and resources it takes to produce beef, compared to how much more efficient it would be to grow food for people, beef looks like a bad deal—the opportunity costs are too high. Perhaps it would be better to grow food directly for human consumption, instead of feeding cows food humans can eat. On this approach, we would be better able to feed people using less land, water, and whatnot.
However, claims like this use the word ‘feed’ ambiguously: if we mean things like grain that can be fed to cattle and humans, then the assessment is correct—it would be an inefficient use of grain to feed it directly to cows. However, if on the other hand, the word ‘feed’ refers to stuff inedible to humans—crop residues, grass, leaves—this statistic is false[3]. And if we look at the composition of livestock feed, specifically for animals like cows and sheep, we find that almost ninety percent of livestock feed is inedible for human consumption. The beauty here is that cattle and sheep transform what would otherwise be garbage into a resource: protein-dense food fit for humans. But cattle do more than eat inedible stuff that we would otherwise have to toss: they can be used to clear a field after harvest, and fertilize the fields, reducing the need for fertilizers made with fossil fuels.
Credit: TONY CRADDOCK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Circling Back to the Garbage Question
On the economic conception, we have reason to side with George over Jerry: someone was willing to ‘haul’ away the donut atop the garbage for free. However, this speaks to the individualistic nature of garbage: the donut is garbage to Jerry, but not to George. The same applies to grazing lands, leaves, and grass clippings: garbage to humans, a resource to cattle and sheep. These striking animals transform what would otherwise be garbage into a resource with environmental bonuses, e.g. fertilizing newly harvested fields while they clear brush, reducing the need for fossil fuel-based fertilizers. So we end here by revisiting the question at the start: is this post garbage? You took the time and trouble to read the post. So you tell me.
[1] Michael Munger (2007). Think Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling. The Library of Economics and Liberty; accessed at: https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Mungerrecycling.html (my emphasis).
[2] Michael Munger (2013). Recycling: Can It Be Wrong, When It Feels So Right? The Political Economy of Recycling; accessed at: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/06/03/michael-c-munger/recycling-can-it-be-wrong-when-it-feels-so-right (my emphasis).
[3] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Nutrient Requirements for Beef Cattle, 8th Revised Edition (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2016).