Commentary

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle . . . and Refuse

Raymond Benton, Jr.1

AbstractTwo recent books, both by journalists, expose major weaknesses in marketing because of what is ignored in the standardtreatment. The marketing story tends to end with the purchase of a good or service. But what is bought is eventually discardedand what happens when goods are thrown away is part of the marketing system, too. This part of the system is largely ignored.How much we actually throw away is alarming, mostly because we are unaware of it. Some of it enters the global recycling indus-try, but the vast majority goes into the trash sector. It may or may not actually get land filled. It may just float around in the oceans.We did not get to where we are by accident. Marketing and marketers helped in a big way. Macromarketers must help us under-stand the predicament we are in, and then help get us out of it.

Keywordswaste, recycling, garbology, junk, e-waste, over consumption, critical marketing, macromarketing

‘‘The American dream is to turn goods into trash as fast as possible.’’

Russell Baker

Introduction

I recently read two disturbing books: Adam Minter’s Junkyard

Planet (2013)1 and Edward Humes’ Garbology (2012). As

books they join the likes of Strasser (2000), Royte (2005), Zimr-

ing (2005), and Rogers (2006). Both Junkyard Planet and Gar-

bology are about what we buy and, eventually, throw away. The

emphasis is on where it goes when we throw it away: into the

global recycling industry (Minter) or into landfills or freely float-

ing in our oceans (Humes). Both books are also about sustain-

ability. Alone, each tells half the story; together they get close

to the whole story, a story ignored by our 600þ page marketing

textbooks. We should be ashamed of our textbook writers!Adopting either or both of these books in our principals of mar-

keting or marketing management courses would serve our stu-

dents well by telling them, as the late American newscaster

Paul Harvey used to say, ‘‘the rest of the story.’’

How Much Do We Throw Away and WhereDo We Throw It?

Let’s get a grip on how much trash America generates and how

much gets recycled? Minter provides the following data (some

of the extensions are mine).2 In 1960 Americans diverted 5.6 mil-

lion tons of household and workplace waste away from landfills.

By 2010 that number had increased to 65 million tons. That is a

huge increase—about 1000 percent. There was also a sizable pop-

ulation increase in the United States during that period, something

Minter does not mention. The population of the U.S. grew between

1960 and 2010 from 180.7 million to 309.3 million, a 71.2 percent

increase. It stands to reason that more people will recycle more

stuff, so the per capita figures are important. On a per capita basis

we diverted 62 pounds per person away from landfills in 1960 and

420.3 pounds per person in 2010. That is a 578 percent increase in

per capita recycling, still a significant increase. As we all know,

however, any increase represents a large percentage gain when

you begin with a small base.

In 1960 I was a high school student in Denver, Colorado. I

don’t remember using or hearing the word ‘‘recycle’’. The con-

tainer in our house, into which we put our trash, was, in fact,

referred to as a waste-paper basket! Paper was not recycled;

it was burned or put in the trash. We did not do much recycling

of anything. In fact, I only recall two instances.

First, our elementary school held an annual paper drive, and

everybody understood that a paper-drive was for newspapers

(which people actually read back then). Each homeroom had

a designated space by the schoolyard fence. On the day of the

paper drive parents would help their children bring bundles of

newspapers (appropriately tied to protect them from the wind)

and pile them up by the fence. It was a contest to see which

homeroom would collect the most. I have no memory as to

what was at stake, other than bragging rights.

The second memory I have is of occasions when we filled up

the back of our father’s pickup truck with the accumulation of

1Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Raymond Benton, Jr., Loyola University Chicago, Quinlan School of Business,

1 E. Pearson St., #440, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.

Email: rbenton@LUC.edu

Journal of Macromarketing2015, Vol. 35(1) 111-122ª The Author(s) 2014Reprints and permission:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0276146714534692jmk.sagepub.com

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grass clippings, ash from the incinerator (which most houses

had and where waste paper was burned), and discarded steel

cans and glass containers like mayonnaise jars (but these, too,

were often reused as canning jars). We would then drive the

pickup truck to the county dump. We used rakes and shovels

to simply push the trash over the edge of the truck bed. We

would then drive home with the tailgate open so the wind could

blow away what remained. People without access to a truck

would empty their incinerator into a steel can (something like

a 25 gallon galvanized can) and put it out, along side the steel

(we called them tin) cans, for pick up by the trash truck that

drove either down the alley or down the street each week.

I remember on at least one occasion dad dropped off an old

car battery at the entrance to the dump. He told me that old car

batteries were full of lead and that the guy manning the

entrance to the dump could sell it for the lead it contained.

He was, in other words, recycling an old car battery.

Those are my two memories: paper drives and car batteries.

We reused some things. By ‘‘we’’ I mean everybody. Every

household produced a certain amount of organic kitchen waste.

That came with making coffee in the morning, peeling apples

in the afternoon, and peeling carrots and potatoes at night.

We called it garbage. As a boy one of my chores was to take

the kitchen waste to the garbage pail in the back yard. The gar-

bage pail was a five-gallon bucket, with a lid, that sat on top of

a platform affixed to the top of the fence that surrounded the

backyard. As I recall, two or three times a week a garbage truck

would drive the alley and collect the garbage. The truck was a

flatbed truck with short fences, or skirts, around it. And it stank;

there was no mistaking when it came by. This, of course, went

to the pig farms as slop for the pigs. Eventually piggeries went

away. This was about the same time that garbage disposals

began showing up in America’s kitchens, but the demise of pig-

geries had more to do with health issues than with new technol-

ogies. (Humes discusses the rise and fall of piggeries as a form

of waste disposal in his book.) I still remember when dad

bought an electric disposal for mom. It must have been around

1958.

Glass bottles were mostly reused rather than recycled or dis-

carded. Soda bottles went back to the grocery store, which, in

turn, sent them back to the bottlers who washed them, refilled

them, and resold them as soda pop. The soda bottles had depos-

its on them. My sister recalls it was two cents for each bottle. A

neighbor at the time (with whom I am still in contact) tells me

he remembers it was a nickel or a dime. Which ever it was, the

deposit was paid when the soda was bought and refunded when

the bottles were returned. Whether two, five or ten cents, it was

enough to keep most of them out of the trash. (In the mid-1950s

candy bars were five cents.)

Milk bottles were also returned and reused. We would put

the empty milk bottles in a milk box. Many families—and

maybe most—got their milk by home delivery a couple of

times a week. (There were bread delivery trucks, too, but they

are not part of this story.) Houses built in the 1940s and 1950s

included pass-through milk doors about a foot square. Today

these would be open invitations for burglary! I know because

when my sister and I locked ourselves out of the house I would

crawl through the milk shoot to get inside and unlock the door.

Other homes had a box with a lid on the porch. The milkman

would collect the bottles when he left the nice cold, cream-

topped milk. (By the way, this is the origin of the expression

‘‘skim-the-cream pricing.’’ Most students today are clueless

as to where the expression comes from because they have never

seen a bottle of milk with cream floating on top.) The milkman

would take the bottles back to the dairy for washing and refill-

ing. They would then be redelivered, another day to perhaps

another family, full of milk.

My point is that there was not much household recycling

going on at the time. Consequently, any increase in recycling

between 1960 and 2010 would be a significant, even huge, per-

centage increase. The 578 percent increase is huge.

For the volume of non-recycling waste generated (the trash)

in 1960 and 2010, Minter’s data do not indicate anything like

the increases for recycling. That is because they begin with a

higher base. Even with that, the amount of waste generated

tripled between 1960 and 2010. As Minter says, ‘‘Americans

were doing a better job of recycling their waste, but they were

also doing an equally fine job of generating it’’ (pp. 6-7).

Humes, like Minter, discusses the quantity of material we

throw away. ‘‘Americans make more trash than anyone else

on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per

day, 365 days a year’’ (p. 4). Humes converts this into some-

thing we can grasp. ‘‘Across a lifetime,’’ he writes, ‘‘we are

each on track to generate 102 tons of trash’’ (p. 4). How much

is 102 tons of trash? ‘‘Each of our bodies may occupy only one

cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single

person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of

1,100 graves’’ (p. 4). Wrap your brain around that!Another way to visualize the amount of trash we generate is

to consider all the big trucks we see on our highways and by

ways. You know, the trucks that haul and deliver mail, haul and

deliver furniture, haul and deliver packages, and, of course,

those that pick up the trash. Now imagine this: ‘‘One out of

every six big trucks in the U.S. is a garbage truck’’ (p. 6).

Seventeen percent of the U.S. truck fleet is devoted to hauling

away our trash (see Figure 1)! The yearly loads of these trucks

would ‘‘fill a line of trucks stretching halfway to the moon’’

(pp. 6-7). And to bring it home to a contemporary concern,

‘‘The creation of products and packaging that end up in those

trucks contributes 44 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions

that drive global warming, more than any other carbon-

spewing category’’ (p. 7).

Still another way to visualize trash is financially. In 2011

New York City spent more than $300 million ‘‘just transporting

its citizens’ trash by train and truck—12,000 tons a day—to

out-of-state landfills’’ (p. 7). How much is 12,000 tons? It is

equivalent to ‘‘sixty-two Boeing 747 jumbo jets,’’ or ‘‘8,730

new Honda Civics’’ (p. 7). And that is per day. Annually the

haul equates to 22,000 Boeing 747s and more than three mil-

lion Honda Civics. That is more Hondas then households in

New York City that own cars (NYCEDC 2012), and fifteen

times more 747s than have ever been built (Boeing 2014).

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Humes provides more data than does Minter. He has charts

indicating where the trash goes (landfills, recycling/composting,

waste-to-energy) regionally in the U.S. and internationally by

country. He has charts indicating trash content by product cate-

gory and by type of material—both before and after recycling

and composting in taken into account. He has a chart illustrating

the evolution of waste in the U.S. from 1900 to 2000.

Even with all this data it is hard to visualize how much

American’s consume and, eventually, throw away. A docu-

mentary produced by National Geographic (2008), ‘‘Human

Footprint,’’ helps. It is an hour and a half long visual assault

on the senses, a truly amazing experience by itself. And best

of all, it can we watched, online, for free.

Junkyard Planet

Minter tells the story of his own life. In a way, Junkyard Planet

is as much a travelogue (as suggested by the subtitle itself: Tra-

vels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade) and a memoir (it is

about his travels in the trash trade) as it is an account of the glo-

bal recycling and reuse industry—what we properly call

reverse channels of distribution. Minter also tells the life stories

of many of the scrap dealers he knows in China and the Chinese

scrap buyers with whom he traveled the highways and byways

of the U.S. looking for scrap to buy. He tells how scrappers buy

scrap and how these traveling buyers buy it from the scrap

yards. The story is clear: the scrap industry is a large industry

and one that works more or less backwards. Scrap is easy to sell

because there is such a demand for it. It is hard to buy. In fact,

Minter says, there is an axiom in the industry: ‘‘it’s hard to buy

scrap, and easy to sell it’’ (p. 59). He also points out that scrap-

pers make their money buying it rather than selling it. This

reminded me of a 1973 Kotler and Levy article in the Journal

of Marketing: ‘‘Buying is Marketing, Too!’’Junkyard Planet is a detailed account of an unseen market-

ing system, the kind of detailed study that the likes of Louis

D.H. Weld and other early marketing scholars produced. As

Tadajewski put it, early marketing scholars followed ‘‘products

from their point of production and manufacture, all the way

through to their distribution to the ultimate consumer’’ (2009,

p. 17; see, also, Jones and Monieson 1990). In the present case,

however, we are moving from the ultimate consumer back-

wards to the creation of raw materials. We need more studies

like this, and not just of the scrap business, but of all businesses.

As a discipline, we have become so focused on consumer beha-

vior and selling/marketing to the ultimate consumer that we

often lack a full understanding of the entire marketing system,

including the reverse channels of distribution.

Minter focuses on scrap metal because he is the son and

grandson of American scrap yard owners. The family scrap yard,

which his grandfather began, still operates in Minneapolis. Both

the family scrap yard, for which he holds fond childhood mem-

ories, and the industry inform his outlook on life ‘‘in fundamen-

tal ways’’ (p. 10). While he did not pursue the junk business,

neither did he fall far from the tree. As a journalist he covers the

Asian scrap trade for two important periodicals in the global

scrap business, Scrap and Recycling International. (Junkyard

Planet is Minter’s first book.) This and his decision a decade ago

to move to China give him unprecedented access to what he

admits, in several places, is a rather shadowy business.

Figure 1. One out of every six big trucks in the U.S. is a garbage truck.

Source: Author’s photograph taken on his street in the Chicago suburb of Palatine, Illinois.

Benton 113

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Minter is open about his love for what his grandmother

called ‘‘the junk business.’’ He tells the family history, a history

of which he is proud. It is also a history that gives a great deal of

insight as to how the scrap business is run. Is it all rosy? No, of

course not. ‘‘Believe me,’’ he writes, ‘‘I’m aware of the indus-

try’s faults . . . But for all of its problems—and they are rife—

the world would be a dirtier and less interesting place without

junkyards’’ (p. 11).

Since Junkyard Planet is largely a travelogue, understand-

ing the structure of the book is difficult. Eventually I realized

that he took, as he says, ‘‘the well-known pyramid that every

American schoolchild learns: reduce, reuse, recycle’’ (p. 6) and

treated each element in reverse order. He spends most of his

time discussing the global recycling industry, and there primar-

ily metal recycling although he does devote a chapter to plas-

tics, a chapter to e-waste, and mentions paper. From

recycling he moves on to reuse—the reuse of electric motors,

circuit boards, computer chips, and peripherals like monitor

and printers. He eventually touches on reduce; he says it is the

only real solution to the problem of waste before dismissing it

as a solution. ‘‘Alas,’’ he writes, ‘‘most people have very little

interest in reducing their consumption or reusing their goods’’

(p. 6). That is why recycling is the ‘‘worst best solution’’ (p. 6).

Minter contextualizes his argument as part of the economic

development process. He also contextualizes it as an alternative

to dumping our trash in landfills. Hence, he presents the global

trade in recyclables as a sustainable business, one driven by

entrepreneurs who have ‘‘a talent for spotting value in what

others throw away’’ (p. 5). As far as Minter is concerned, the

global trade in recyclables will continue, even if it is, as he

writes, ‘‘the third-best option’’ available (p. 6).

Minter takes on the issue of dumping. Ever since Packet and

Smith (2003) there has been a general presumption that the

West dumps its trash on less developed countries—mostly

unsuspecting Asians and, today, mostly on the Chinese. They

then work in horrid conditions at low wages to process it. Make

no mistake, he is clear that the working conditions are horrid

(but not as bad as the alternative), and the wages are low (but

not as low as the alternative). For these reasons we are not

dumping our waste on anybody. Instead, Minter argues, the

Chinese see value in what we throw away and not only do they

want it, but they need it (especially the metal). By the way, the

alternative is always presented as one of returning to rural vil-

lages, and he does not present that as much of an alternative. He

writes, ‘‘rather than spending days sorting scrap for wages, vil-

lagers spend days in fields, picking crops for subsistence’’ (p.

75), adding, in villages ‘‘the best economic opportunity

remains a life stuffing seeds into the ground for little more than

subsistence wages’’ (p. 137). He is forthright: ‘‘Is one better

than the other? I’ve never lived in either circumstance, so

I’m not about to guess’’ (p. 75). He will not guess, but he cer-

tainly has an opinion.

Minter argues that the global trade in recyclables is abso-

lutely necessary; it is a fundamental part of the globalized

world economy. It is, in fact, part of the process of economic

development, itself. He makes his case by suggesting that trade

in recyclables is not a new phenomenon, but a very old one. He

illustrates his point by telling the story of how the U.S. devel-

oped by importing some of England’s waste.

Any country striving to develop economically, he writes,

uses, to some degree, other peoples’ trash to do so. America did

it and China does it. To make his point, Minter presents two

short historical vignettes of the U.S. developmental path—one

about rags and the other about rails. They are both interesting

stories and, frankly, ones I never encountered before reading

them here.

In the early 1800s, mechanized papermaking arrived in the

U.S. There was a big market for paper, too. Americans were

increasingly educated and were reading more newspapers and

books, and writing more letters. At the time the primary raw

material from which paper was made was old rags—mostly

linen. They provided high-quality and low-cost pulp. But

Americans could not save enough rags to meet the demand for

printed material. So, as Minter puts it, ‘‘America’s enterprising

papermakers—and entrepreneurial rag traders—made a very

contemporary choice: they . . . looked abroad to the more was-

teful economies of Europe for their raw materials’’ (p. 79). In

1850 Americans imported 98 million pounds of scrap rags from

Europe. By 1875 we imported 123 million pounds, mostly from

England. And sticking with one of his themes, ‘‘nobody in

nineteenth- or early twentieth-century North America railed

against the Victorians for ‘dumping’ their ‘waste’ on the

still-developing economies of the former colonies’’ (p. 80).

We have all heard about the expansion of the railroad sys-

tem and the opening of the West but have we ever stopped to

think where all the steel for those rails came from? ‘‘The

U.S. . . . looked abroad to Europe . . . for raw materials. . . .U.S. imports of scrap iron and steel grew from 38,580 tons in

1884 to 380,744 tons in 1887’’ (p. 80). That was a ten-fold

increase! It was not until the years leading up to World War I

that we began to export steel scrap, initially to Europe and now

mostly to China.

China, today, has a voracious appetite for all sorts of metal.

Throughout Junkyard Planet Minter draws our attention to how

much of our trash China really wants and uses. Just under a half

of China’s copper supply is imported as scrap metal (p. 67) and,

he points out elsewhere, as of 2012 China accounted for 43 per-

cent of total global demand for copper. All the manufacturing

going on in China, ‘‘whether of cars or reinforced steel for new

shopping malls—is fed to a considerable degree by imported

scrap metal’’ (p. 110). Most of the buildings Minter sees rising

in the cities he visits, one of his hosts reminds him, ‘‘were

wired with metal imported as scrap, and processed locally’’

(p. 140). It is not just metal: ‘‘China needs recycled plastics

to make everything from cell phones to coffee cups’’

(p. 155). If we want to buy Chinese manufactured goods (and

we do), then we have to sell them what we produce, and we pro-

duce trash like no other country in the world.

So it seems one of Minter’s main objectives is to convince

us that, contrary to common opinion, we are not dumping our

trash on other countries. They want it; they demand it; they use

it. And they buy it! We shouldn’t feel bad about it. If we

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stopped exporting the tons of recyclable material we do, we

would have to send it to landfills. The Chinese would still go

after the resources they need for their own development. They

would mine the metals they need and cut down the world’s

remaining forests to get it. Now they mine America’s trash for

it. Hence, the global junk business is a sustainable business. As

Minter states in the introduction, and repeats at every opportu-

nity, the thousands of factories in China today ‘‘need copper [to

cite but one example] to make things like wires, power cords,

and smart phones’’ (p. 2). Chinese factories ‘‘have a choice;

they can use copper mined in far off, environmentally sensitive

places like the Brazilian Amazon’’ or they can use copper

‘‘mined from imported Christmas tree lights’’ (p. 2).

There are many interesting histories spread throughout

Junkyard Planet. Take the automobile as another example. In

the U.S., junked automobiles were a big problem in the

1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s. The problem was with those

that we wrecked but especially, with those that we abandoned

on the streets. You can drive the countryside today and look

behind most any shed or barn and frequently find abandoned

cars, trucks, and tractors. Why did we abandon them? Because

most people did not know of any other way to get rid of them

once they stopped running.

‘‘In 1969,’’ Minter writes, ‘‘seventy thousand automobiles and

trucks were abandoned by their owners on the streets of New York

City. Some of them leaked gas and oil; some of them provided

habitat for rats and mosquitoes; most were unsightly’’ (p. 162).

The problem was not exclusive to New York City. It was a prob-

lem, he suggests, because ‘‘the American automobile industry

(much less its customers) had never taken much responsibility for

the afterlife of the products that it placed on the road’’ (p. 162).

That comment, of course, could be said of virtually every industry

and product category, a point Minter does not make but we should

appreciate. Perhaps business leaders do not give much thought to

the afterlife of the products they manufacture and distribute

because we, as marketing educators, shamefully ignore it, too.

I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I remember that the urban

landscape was full of wrecking yards (see Figure 2). They were

everywhere. I also remember, in the late 1960s and early 1970s,

that people were protesting and demanding these wrecking

yards build huge fences around them so the wrecks could not

be seen from the roadways. On February 10, 1970, according

to Minter, President Nixon declared before Congress, ‘‘Few

of America’s eyesores are so unsightly as its millions of junked

automobiles’’ (p. 164). They were, indeed, an urban blight!I have not thought about these automobile junkyards for a

long time, mainly, I suppose, because I do not see them any-

more. Where did they go? Those cars now provide the struc-

tural support for shopping malls and apartment houses—

mostly in China. Somewhere around 2007 or 2008 the backlog

had been cleared out. That is when, Minter writes, the ‘‘last

scrap cars came out of the woods’’ (p. 176).

In the context of discussing junked automobiles, Minter tells

the story of the invention of the metal shredder. Today, there

are 300 of these beasts in North America (and from his descrip-

tion they are beasts) and another five hundred in the rest of the

world. ‘‘The shredder,’’ he writes, ‘‘is . . . the best and really

only solution to managing the biggest source of consumer

Figure 2. Pile of wrecked autos at Klean Steel Co., May 1972.

Source: Gene Daniels, Environmental Protection Agency via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PILE_OF_WRECKED_AUTO-S_AT_KLEAN_STEEL_CO_-_NARA_-_542656.jpg

Benton 115

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waste in the world today: the roughly 14 million American

automobiles that are junked annually’’ (p. 161). It was the

crusher and the shredder, and the backhaul to China, that

quietly and stealthily eliminated the auto junkyards.

Here is something Minter does not discuss and few of us

have probably thought much. What do we do with retired, no

longer serviceable airplanes? Several online videos describe

the process (see, for example, National Geographic n.d.). What

we do with old airplanes is not unlike what we do with old cars

and lots of other metal (Science Discovery 2013).

The recycling industry is a sustainable industry, even if it is

not about sustainability. Minter writes, ‘‘not every recycler is

an environmentalist, and not every recycling facility is the sort

of place you’d want to take kindergartners for a field trip’’

(p. 5). Recyclers are in the business because they want to make

money, and they have a knack for spotting value in what others

throw away. Minter has some reservations about it. It is a dirty

industry, one full of health and safety issues for those working

in it. This is especially the case in plastics recycling. Recycling

businesses process the worst of what they import out of sight and

mind of regulators. ‘‘Qingyuan,’’ a center for scrap recycling

established in the mid-1980s, ‘‘was remote enough to avoid scru-

tiny from environmental authorities’’ (p. 133). He says that in

Wen’an, a center for plastics recycling, he frequently saw ‘‘black

spots’’ on the ground where, he was told, ‘‘unrecyclable plastics

were burned in the night’’ (p. 145). Of Wen’an he notes the most

striking feature is that ‘‘there is nothing green. It’s a dead zone’’

(p. 145). Twenty-five years ago it was ‘‘bucolic—an agricultural

region renowned for its streams, peach trees, and simple, rolling

landscape’’ (p. 146). So much for sustainability.

He discusses how environmental and safety equipment ‘‘is

neither required nor available at the local equipment and chem-

ical dealers (we checked)’’ (p. 148), and how the quality of

some of the plastic made from some recycled trash is inferior

and does not meet U.S. and European quality standards. ‘‘Only

the Chinese, often manufacturers of last resort, will use that

stuff,’’ he writes, which, when used to make plastic bags and

the like, ‘‘are then passed off as safe for food packaging’’

(p. 149). After describing a processing facility that bathed

shredded plastic in caustic cleaning fluid before rinsing and

drying it, Minter notes:

the excess trash and cleaning fluid is gathered up, and is either

resold or tossed into a waste pit on the edge of town. Unless I’m

missing something, or visiting on the wrong day, there is no safety

equipment, no respirators, hard hats, or steel-toed boots, here; in

fact, most of the workers—including Mr. Hu—wear san-

dals . . . this is bad (p. 150).

There are health issues, too. High blood pressure and ‘‘other

‘blood diseases’ are common in the area.’’ The biggest problem

‘‘is the stress related to living in a dirty, stinky, noisy environ-

ment. It takes a physical and mental toll’’ (p. 152). More health

related issues are discussed—including pulmonary problems.

The recycling of plastics is a shadowy business. Unlike the

multibillion-dollar trade in recyclable metals, plastics are

traded in small lots. The American, European, and Japanese

scrap-plastics exporters have no idea who recycles the material

they export.

[They] sell to brokers and other middlemen who sell to Chinese

importers, often near ports, who then resell the scrap plastics to

small traders of the sort that transport the plastics to Wen’an. Once

they arrive at Wen’an, they’re sold again [to family enterprises]

that will actually separate and recycle it (Minter 2013, p. 147 ).

One thing is absolutely certain: ‘‘foreigners aren’t welcome

unless they’re here on business’’ (p. 147).

Minter celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the

junk business. ‘‘If my travels in global recycling have taught

me anything,’’ he writes, ‘‘its that somebody in the developing

world can usually find a use for what Americans can’t recycle

profitably’’ (pp. 144-145). The business, itself, is ‘‘a profession

for outsiders’’ such as immigrants (pp. 31-32). The immigrants

can be from other countries (as was the case in the U.S.) or

immigrants from rural areas (as is the case for China). Minter’s

comment that his outlook on life reflects the family business

and the industry is certainly tied up with the entrepreneurialism

he sees in the junk business—an entrepreneurialism, as he dis-

cusses it, that is as much a product of circumstances as it is of

opportunity—and the fact that his grandfather was an immi-

grant to the U.S. Minter would make Milton Friedman proud

by the way he waxes over how the undirected market coordi-

nates the global movement of trash, moving it from those that

produce it (and see no value in it) to those that consume it

(because they do see the value in it).

But most of all, Junkyard Planet is a book about how the

scrap industry functions, told from an insiders point of view,

from scavenging to buying, shipping, disassembling, refurbish-

ing, reselling, and recycling. It is about channels of distribu-

tion; more precisely, it is about reverse channels of

distribution, the most neglected—indeed, ignored—of all chan-

nels. Scrap is a $500 billion industry that employs more people

than any industry in the world except agriculture. It is time we

paid attention to it.

Garbology

If we add refuse to the well-known pyramid of reduce, reuse,

and recycle we have Humes’ book. Humes, also a journalist,

writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Los

Angeles Magazine, and Sierra. He has written several books

on a variety of topics, all having something to do with social

issues. Two of his most recent books touch on environmental

topics: Eco Barons: The New Heroes of Environmental Acti-

vism (2010) and Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-

Mart’s Green Revolution (2011). To these add Garbology

(2012).

Garbology’s theme is clear from its subtitle: Our Dirty Love

Affair with Trash. His focus is on the amount of junk and trash

we generate and on how much of it is not recycled. Each week

we dutifully put our trash out for collection (see Figure 3). The

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trash truck then picks it up and takes it away. Actually, the trash

truck comes by after the scavengers, who look for—and take—

large pieces of metal. To most of us that is the end of the issue.

The problem is solved—the trash went away. Humes suggests,

as did Kirkpartrick Sale (1980, p. 243) so many years ago,

‘‘There’s one fundamental thing wrong with [a ‘throwaway’

society], . . . There is no ‘away’.’’ Our trash goes somewhere;

most of us just don’t know where. ‘‘Away’’ is someplace and

that someplace is the concern of Garbology.

Humes does mention recycling. ‘‘Somehow,’’ he writes,

‘‘without ballot or poll or any explicit decision by presidents

or legislators or voters to do so, America, a country that once

built things for the rest of the world, has transformed itself into

China’s trash compactor’’ (p. 11). And he provides corroborat-

ing data to Minter’s. However, the vast bulk of what we throw

away does not go into recycling and, therefore, recycling is not

his primary concern. His concern is refuse, not recycling.

Humes contextualizes his presentation differently than does

Minter. Rather than discussing our waste in terms of economic

development or trade and markets, he casts his discussion in

terms of hoarders and hoarding. He opens with the story of Jesse

and Thelma Gaston, a chemist and a retired teacher. Living on

the south side of Chicago, they became a news sensation because

they were ‘‘trapped by trash’’ inside their own home. They were

hoarders. ‘‘They hoarded until goods and trash consumed their

home and almost their lives’’ (p. 2). Extreme hoarding like this

is often viewed as an aberration, but it is surprisingly common.

Somewhere between 3 to 6 million Americans are thought to be

compulsive hoarders. Two popular television programs follow

them: A&E’s Hoarders and TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive.

The condition, some argue, should be a distinct mental ill-

ness. One proposed name for it is disposophobia. At the time

Humes was writing it was just one of the many forms of

obsessive-compulsive disorder. To Humes the thing to notice

about it is our tone-deaf response to the phenomenon (other

than freak show fascination). Those that do pay attention to

it—therapists, organization coaches, family, friends and TV

show hosts—always focus on persuading disposophobics to

do what ‘‘normal’’ people do, which is to take the trash to the

curb so it can be hauled away. ‘‘Little if any thought is given to

the refuse itself, or to the rather scarier question of how any

person, hoarder or not, can possibly generate so much trash

so quickly’’ (pp. 3-4).

Humes begins with these hoarding stories (there is another

one) to make a point: ‘‘the amount of junk, trash and waste that

hoarders generate is perfectly, horrifyingly normal’’ (p. 4). It’s

just that most of us hoard it in landfills, he says, rather than in

our living rooms. Consequently we never see the truly epic

quantities of stuff we discard. Humes could have added, though

he did not, that we also hoard it in the many self-storage units

that dot the country (Mooallem 2009). That, I presume, is a

chapter he will write for the second edition of Garbology.

Humes’ book is a play in three-acts: identify the problem,

investigate the causes, and wrestle with the solutions. Part I

ascertains the quantity of refuse we produce, but more impor-

tantly what we do with it. It includes an interesting history of

what we have done with our waste since the days when, as

he writes, sailors six miles out at sea would have smelled New

York City.3 Part II, the analysis, consists of two chapters. One

accounts for the fact that we really do not know a lot about

Figure 3. Trash bins lined up for collection.

Source: Author’s photograph taken on his street in the Chicago suburb of Palatine, Illinois.

Benton 117

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where the trash that does not find its way to landfills goes (and

there is a lot of it, too) and gives an account of how some are

trying to find out. The other chapter wrestles with the fact that

we know far too little about what is really in the trash that does

find its way to landfills. Both themes are ripe for participation

by macromarketing researchers. Part III is devoted to the

reduce piece of the familiar triumvirate. Humes takes it more

seriously than does Minter, but it is probably, even at that, the

weakest part of the book.

Part I concentrates on New York City and Los Angeles. It is a

history of what we have done with our waste from the time that

we simply dumped it in the streets and in the East River. All cit-

ies built on rivers, did the same thing—they used their rivers as

open sewers. We then dumped it at sea, used it to fill in swamps

and mudflats, took organic waste to piggeries, and burned the

inedible organic. We even attempted, believe it or not, recycling

programs (which involved attempts to get the citizenry to sort

their trash, much as we do today, and building of the prototype

of a mechanical sorting facility when they would not). We ren-

dered it, put it in open dumps (a vast improvement, he notes, to

river dumping even if they leaked the toxic soup that is leachate),

and eventually deposited it in modern hermetically sealed ‘‘sani-

tary’’ landfills. In his description and discussion of this last stage,

Hume focuses on Los Angeles’ Puente Hills and its history. In

short, it is a story of how we got to where we are.

Like Minter’s Junkyard Planet, Garbology is also a story of

the individuals who work in the industry, from Big Mike, who

drives one of the huge machines that shape and form the trash

into garbage mountains, to David Steiner, CEO of Waste Man-

agement, Inc. Mike’s story is interesting because he, too, is

proud of what he does. While a lot of weird and strange things

show up in the landfills, like human bodies, Big Mike talks

about the common ‘‘everyday stuff’’ that fills the place,

items that are not really trash at all: the boxes of perfectly new plas-

tic bags, still on the roll, tossed because the logo on them was out-

dated. Or the cases of food that turn up from time to time, perfectly

usable and brand-new, yet discarded as if they had no use. Cloths

of all types, some worn and torn but others seemingly pristine, are

common. There are whole cans of paint (a forbidden, toxic item in

landfills, though they arrive mixed in the household trash, difficult

to detect), trashed because someone didn’t like the custom color

that, once mixed, could not be returned to the paint store. And there

is the furniture—tons of it, much of it ratty and too far gone, but a

surprising amount of it perfectly serviceable, at least until those

chairs and couches and coffee tables meet Big Mike’s BOMAG,

the great democratizer of trash (p. 56). (see Figure 4)

Working at Puente Hills, Big Mike says, has changed him,

‘‘compelling him to think about how he and his family live,

what they buy, what they waste’’ (p. 57). ‘‘More people should

see what I see here,’’ he tells Humes, ‘‘where everything that’s

advertised on TV ends up, sooner or later, and a lot sooner than

most people think’’ (p. 57).

In fact, Humes notes, the sanitary landfill (as with all the pre-

vious attempts to deal with our waste) contributes to the huge

volume of waste that we generate because it empowers even more

wasting: ‘‘The landfill solution to garbage took away the slimy

stench of the old throw-it-in-the-streets disposal, the smoking pall

of the old incinerators, the noisome piggeries, the noxious reduc-

tion plants spewing out garbage grease, the ugly, seeping open

dumps’’ (p. 57). It took away, in short, ‘‘the obvious consequences

of waste and eliminated the best incentives to be less wasteful’’ (p.

57). In a similar way, the black plastic trash bag on the curb (which

was originally green when introduced in New York) made it all

but impossible for scavengers to go through peoples’ trash and

pick out things that, to the scavenger, had value. In short, the sort

of gleaning that Guillard and Roux (2014) write about largely

came to an end. The net result was more stuff going to the landfill.

That is not, in itself, sufficient to push the whole country

away from earlier eras’ acceptance of hard work, diligent sav-

ing, and the conservation of resources as the road to the good

life. We went from thrifty, frugal, conservation and unwasteful

attitudes to one that held that ‘‘the highest expression and mea-

sure of the American Dream lay in . . . the acquisition of stuff’’

(Humes, p. 59). How did it happen?

It is a complex story, one that has been told many times

(Jones 1965; Horowitz 1979; McKendrick 1982; Marchand

1985; Sulkunen, Holmwood, Radner and Schulze 1997; Blas-

zczyk 2008; Berger and Goldberg 2011). One thing is for sure:

it involved overcoming the forces of custom and tradition that

were in the way of a mass consumption society (Witkowski

2010). The current textbook approach, in as much as it relies

on the fabled concept of the production era, ‘‘presuppo-

ses . . . people . . . to have been engines of aggressive consump-

tion whose demand rose automatically with the supply of

affordable products’’ (Fullerton 1988, p. 112). But as Fullerton

points out, ‘‘Making more products available would have had

no effect on people who did not want them’’ (p. 112). What

we fail to adequately appreciate today is something, to quote

Fullerton again, ‘‘American marketing teachers in the early

1900s’’ understood, namely, that ‘demand creation’ was one of

the fundamental business tasks’’ (p. 112). That is, business had

the responsibility, and has the responsibility, of not only making

the products but of making the demand for them as well.

Humes draws attention to the role of mid-century marketers

such as J. Gordon Lippincott. Humes (p. 59) quotes Lippincott

as having said, in 1947:

Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn

out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history . . . It is

soundly based on our economy of abundance. It must be further nur-

tured even though it runs contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of

humanity, the law of thrift.

Humes could have drawn attention to Victor Lebow (1955-

1956), Pierre Martineau (1957), Fred Borch (1958), or any

number of marketing professionals during the post-war period.

He simply chose to concentrate on Lippincott. It was, however,

a common sentiment. Humes refers to an unnamed senior edi-

tor of Sales Management magazine as writing, in 1960, that

American companies and media outlets were working together

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to ‘‘create a brand new breed of super customers’’ (p. 58). And

boy did they! Humes notes that the golden age of television and

mass media marketing,

has been alternately celebrated and condemned for the last half a

century for its unprecedented impact on society and culture. Yet

one of its most enduring effects—helping bring about an American

trash tsunami—is rarely put on the list of mass media [and market-

ing] goods and evils (pp. 57-58).

It is doubtful we would be where we are, in this saga of waste,

without the help of marketing professionals. Let’s face it; we

did not move from households having one telephone, one tele-

vision, one car, and the least of them expected to last ten years

or more (the description of a prosperous 1950s household) to

the idea

that all members of a typical family, even young children, would

someday have their own phones, and that Americans could pay

several hundred dollars a month for this ‘necessity’—for cell

phones that would become high-tech trash in two years or less. It

was the labor of marketers that transformed yesterday’s waste and

excess into today’s normal and necessary (p. 64).

While Humes does not say it, I will. Since marketers helped get

us into this mess, as macromarketers we should help get us out

of it. We can, perhaps, begin in the classroom.

Part II of Garbology consists of two chapters. The first dis-

cusses what happens to the trash, mainly plastics, that go into

the oceans.4 This is a subject more thoroughly discussed by

Tadajewski and Hamilton (2014) in their recent discussion of

waste, art and social change. Humes’ treatment of it begins

with the story of MIT’s trash trackers, a program in which

‘‘smart trash’’ is created by attaching electronic sensors to

pieces of trash. These are then set free, as if released into the

wild. The object is to see where they actually go. The creators

of smart trash ‘‘wanted to expose how waste gets where its

going—the meandering, mysterious and, it turns out, occasion-

ally disturbing path it takes after it is thrown away’’ (pp. 132-

133). One thing they are learning is that ‘‘our waste doesn’t go

where we think it goes’’ and the idea that there is a waste-

management ‘‘system’’ ‘‘is more illusion than reality.’’ At best

there is a hodgepodge of potential trash destinations that eludes

both control and detection’’ (p. 140).

The second chapter in Part II considers what, actually, is in

the trash that ends up in our landfills. It is the story of Bill

Rathje, the archaeologist at the University of Arizona that

founded the Garbage Project and has spent decades exploring

the inner space of landfills. Rathje’s story has been told many

times (Rathje and Murphy 2001; Zimring and Rathje 2012).

This is a nice introduction to the Garbage Project for those not

already familiar with it.

One of the key insights from the Garbage Project has been

that ‘‘people had no idea what was really in their garbage

Figure 4. Shaping a trash mountain in Perth, Australia.

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Landfill_face.JPG

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(or, for that matter, in their closets, refrigerators, cupboards and

shopping carts)’’ (p. 155). Rathje exposed our trash mythology:

‘‘what we know versus what we think we know about garbage’’

(p. 155), and in the process he began tackling a problem that

stands in the way of our ability to ever shrink ‘‘the 102-ton

legacy’’ that is our trash. Namely, ‘‘why we are . . . so . . . clue-

less about the true size and nature of our waste’’ (p. 155). This

discussion will be familiar territory to any marketer, especially

consumer researchers, because it deals with what we already

know: there is a huge gap between what people say they do and

what they, in fact, do—from how much healthy food we say we

eat and how much we actually eat to how much we say we

throw away and how much we actually throw away.

The Real Solution: Reduce

Humes’ Part III focuses on the most important element in the

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle triumvirate: Reduce. This was also

touched upon at the end of Junkyard Planet. ‘‘No doubt,’’ Min-

ter wrote, ‘‘the environment would be better off if everyone [in

the affluent countries] stopped consuming so much.’’ He then

added, ‘‘the likelihood of that is essentially nil, maybe less’’

(p. 252). That is why he gives up on it, even if he probes his

own behavior: ‘‘Even those of us who should know better about

consuming in excess simply can’t help ourselves’’ (p. 253).

Minter discusses an interesting article that appeared in the

Journal of Consumer Psychology (Catlin and Wang 2013).

The article reports on a set of experiments involving paper

recycling. In both experiments either a trash bin alone or a

trash bin and a recycling bin were available to those partici-

pating in the experiment. In both experiments the results were

troubling: ‘‘those who performed the task in the presence of a

recycling bin used twice as much paper as those who could

only throw their excess paper in a trash bin.’’ In other words,

‘‘the addition of a recycling option can lead to increased

resource usage’’ (p. 251).

‘‘Isn’t recycling,’’ Minter asks, ‘‘supposed to promote con-

servation and preserve the environment?’’ (p. 252). Why do

people use more paper if a recycling bin is present than if one

is absent? And does the availability of recycling options have

anything to do, as he puts it, with his own willingness to buy

an iPhone that he does not need to replace his current one that

is perfectly functional? It may be possible that a recycling

option gives us a ‘‘get out of jail free’’ card. The signal is that

it is acceptable to consume as long as the used product is

recycled. Here Minter throws down a challenge for macro-

marketers: ‘‘I leave it to others,’’ he says, ‘‘to write about how

and why convenience—and not sustainability—motivates con-

sumers around the world’’ (p. 253).

This is of concern to Minter for a couple of reasons. First, there

are hidden costs associated with recycling—and there are costs

associated with the water and energy used. Second, everything

cannot be infinitely recycled. Cardboard and paper fibers can sur-

vive six or seven trips. Metals are different. Theoretically some

metals, like copper, can be recycled indefinitely. Practically,

however, some copper is lost on each cycle. The same is true for

aluminum cans. ‘‘Nothing—nothing—is 100 percent recyclable,

and many things, including things we think are recyclable, like

iPhone touch screens, are unrecyclable’’ (p. 255). Rather than

being the best course of action, recycling is, he repeats, ‘‘the third

best course of action, after reducing consumption and reusing

what has been bought already’’ (pp. 252-253).

Minter is not hopeful about reducing consumption. Humes,

on the other hand, provides anecdotal examples of reduced con-

sumption at work. They involve artists reusing ‘‘found objects’’

from municipal solid waste facilities, and programs aimed at

weaning us from plastic bags (programs based on initiatives

developed first in Ireland). Humes is persuaded that banning

plastic bags is important because ‘‘incremental changes add

up’’ and the way to start the snowball rolling ‘‘is with the plastic

bag’’ (p. 218). Plastic bags ‘‘are kind of like the gateway drug.’’

If we can kick that habit, ‘‘all the rest of our single-use habits

will start to fall like dominoes’’ (p. 219). Or so he hopes.

The most important route to a reduced level of consumption

is to just say no to consuming so much. This, he writes, is ‘‘the

home run of waste reduction’’ (p. 260). Here he discusses the

experience of Bea Johnson, her husband and two children.

They lived in a suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area. When

they moved to a new town they ended up in a much smaller

apartment than their San Francisco home. A lot of family pos-

sessions had to go into storage—furniture, extra cloths, and just

lots and lots of stuff. And that is when it happened; she soon

realized she did not miss any of it.

‘‘That’s how it started,’’ Humes writes. The ‘‘it’’ to which he

refers is their experiment to live a less cluttered life. It did not

begin ‘‘with a conscious effort to be greener or more sustain-

able or less wasteful,’’ as was the case with No Impact Man

(Beavan 2009). They just stumbled on the fact that they were

‘‘happier in a simpler, less cluttered home, and agreed that

they’d see where that idea would take them’’ (p. 241). The les-

son to be learned is not the lesson Minter relates—that it ain’t

gonna happen—but that it is actually possible. In a way their

story illustrates something economist Kenneth Boulding once

remarked (1969, p. 15): ‘‘What exists, is possible.’’ Since a

simpler, less consumptive life style exists, it is therefore possi-

ble. It can happen pace Minter.

Conclusions

These books contain macromarketing implications, especially

for those of us concerned about the environment. One implica-

tion is that we have to come to terms with the fact that we did

not get into this mess by ourselves. The ‘‘we’’ in that sentence

is ‘‘we, the people.’’ We had a lot of help from marketers. We

will need the help of marketers to get out of the mess. We (as in

‘‘macromarketers’’ this time) need to drop the pretense that all

marketing does is satisfy consumer needs and wants as consu-

mers, themselves, define and express them. If the tasks of mar-

keting management was in the 1970s and 1980s, to manage

demand (Kotler 1973), it is probably the same today. We need

to begin managing demand not with the profitability of giant glo-

bal corporations as the sole criteria in mind, but with the global

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ecosystem in mind as well—or instead. As I have expressed

before, that will be a daunting task involving a massive shift

in our root metaphor (Benton 2012).

It also means accepting a critical stance toward understanding

the role and function of marketing in society. It is not an all or

nothing, either/or, situation, however (Mittelstaedt et al. 2014).

You don’t have to be in love with markets or appreciate a critical

perspective. You can be in love with markets and be critical of

marketing. Macromarketers, even those with a critical bent, must

accept that markets have a role to play.5 Minter is clear about this

in terms of the global recycling industry. About the role of mar-

kets in the global refuse industry Humes is less clear. On the role

of marketing, Minter is silent; not so Humes.

In both cases, macromarketers need to begin looking into how

we can promote the reduction of consumption, and the reuse of

what we do buy, and spend less time getting more people to buy

more stuff, even if some of that stuff can be recycled. We need to

do this if we hold out hope for a sustainable future.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to

the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship,

and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. This is not to be confused with H. Beam Piper’s 1963 book with the

same title.

2. Miner and Humes cite data primarily for the United States so the

rest of the world is slighted in this regard. That is not to imply that

the rest of the world does not generate lots of trash. It does.

3. It is not just New York City. Environmental historian J. Donald

Hughes (1994) has said that travelers would have smelled ancient

Athens before they would have seen it.

4. In a second edition Humes may well discuss another place we put

our junk—outer space. I draw attention to the way the various

space programs have unwittingly and unintentionally, yet quite lit-

erally, littered the heavens just as the rest of us have littered the

earth. To reverse the biblical passage, ‘‘In heaven as on earth.’’ See,

for example, Olson 1998; Schwartz 2010; and Wright 2012).

5. Marketing has a role to play, too. But we ought not equate market-

ing and markets. They are different phenomena.

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Author Biography

Raymond Benton, Jr. is Professor of Marketing in the Quinlan School

of Business at Loyola University Chicago where, for fourteen years, he

was department chair. He has long taught courses in environmental

management, sustainability marketing and environmental ethics in both

the undergraduate and graduate programs. His primary concern is with

environmental sustainability, the problems that accompany over-

consumption, and with marketing and economics as cultural systems.

122 Journal of Macromarketing 35(1)

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