The Tucson Garbage Project is an

archaeological Archaeology or archeology is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of Artifact (archaeology), artifacts, architecture, biofact (archaeology), biofacts or ecofacts, ...

and

sociological Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociology was coined in ...

study instituted in 1973 by Dr. William Rathje in the city of

Tucson Tucson (; ; ) is a city in Pima County, Arizona, United States, and its county seat. It is the second-most populous city in Arizona, behind Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix, with a population of 542,630 in the 2020 United States census. The Tucson ...

in the Southwestern American

state State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

Arizona Arizona is a U.S. state, state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States, sharing the Four Corners region of the western United States with Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It also borders Nevada to the nort ...

. This project is sometimes referred to as the "

garbology Garbology is the study of modern refuse and trash as well as the use of trash cans, compactors and various types of trash can liners. It is a major source of information on the nature and changing patterns in modern refuse, and thereby, human so ...

project".

History

Dr. Rathje (also known affectionately as "Captain Planet") and his students studied the contents of Tucson residents'

waste Waste are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor Value (economics), economic value. A wast ...

to examine patterns of consumption.

Quantitative Quantitative may refer to: * Quantitative research, scientific investigation of quantitative properties * Quantitative analysis (disambiguation) * Quantitative verse, a metrical system in poetry * Statistics, also known as quantitative analysis ...

data from bins was compared with information known about the residents who owned them. The results have shown that information people freely volunteered about their consumption habits did not always tally with the contents of their waste bins. For example, alcohol consumption was proven to be significantly higher in reality than in the questionnaires completed by the people studied. Such findings have highlighted the difference between people's self-reported and actual behaviors. Such findings cast doubt on the reliability of historical record when applied to archaeological sites in general and follow a processualist approach stressing the benefits of scientific analysis. The project has since expanded to other American cities and has undertaken excavation of

landfill A landfill is a site for the disposal of waste materials. It is the oldest and most common form of waste disposal, although the systematic burial of waste with daily, intermediate and final covers only began in the 1940s. In the past, waste was ...

sites. Among many of the important results of Rathje, were his conclusion on landfill degradation and consumer waste patterns. For example, an intuitive idea that existed before Rathje's work is that people will waste less expensive food in times of economic recession. Rathje's landfill project proved this idea to be incorrect: when resources are scarce, people tend to buy larger quantities of -for example- beef-meat, when they are on sale, only to end up throwing it out again as they have bought too much to consume before the expiration dates. Rathje's data shows that waste beef is far more common during an economic recession. Another idea Rathje shattered is that of paper degradation in landfills. For a long time, it was believed that paper is a relatively safe and environmentally friendly waste product, degrading quickly in landfills. Rathje showed, however, that paper is typically a ''bad degrader'': newspapers dumped in landfills as much as over half a century ago, turn up again as fresh and as readable as the day they were issued.Rathje & Murphy, 1992. Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage

History

References

Further reading