Aerobic Digestion “Works best when material is chopped up, kept moist and warm, and exposed to oxygen with regular turning…digestion by bacteria, fungi, and insects which use their enzymes to break the large organic compounds into fatty acids, water, and carbon dioxide.” (Royte, Garbage Land).
Anaerobic Digestion “The utilization of organic waste as a substrate for the growth of bacteria that function in the absence of oxygen to reduce the volume of waste. The bacteria consume the carbon in the waste as their energy source and convert it to gaseous products. Properly controlled, anaerobic digestion will produce a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide, with a sludge remainder consisting of inorganic compounds, undigested organic material and water.” (McGraw-Hill Recycling Handbook Second Edition)
Binner “Someone who works scavenging through the garbage bins with the prospect of finding reusable and recyclable items that can be exchanged for cash.” (United We Can).
Biodegradable “Capable of being decomposed by biological activity, especially by microorganisms,” (Wiktionary). When it is used in common English, “biodegradable” usually means that the material will degrade to a set of products that do not harm the biological processes around them. If someone tells us that a piece of packaging is biodegradable, we expect the packaging to disintegrate and not create problems for the environment. We expect it to return to compounds found in nature.
Bioplastic A plastic “derived from renewable biomass sources,” (Wikipeida). The emphasis in the term “bioplastic” is on the source of the material used to produce it. Bioplastics are marketed as advantageous because they are derived from a renewable source, rather than a finite source like petroleum oil. Indeed there are bioplastics that are identical to petroleum-based plastics, with the only difference being the source material.
The ‘Bring’ System “The main means by which materials are separated from the waste stream in London is by the ‘bring’ system of recycling, comprising on-street collection facilities (mainly for glass, paper and metal cans) and civic amenity type facilities used as recycling centres for a wider range of recyclable materials.” (Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste).
C&D Waste Construction and demolition waste: all the waste materials generated by the construction industry, as well as the materials generated by demolition.
Clinker “The term used for the stony residue from burnt coal.” (Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste)
Consumption “A word used to describe acts of acquisition – generally, the acquisition of things, in exchange for money.” (Unconsumption website)
Cosmeticism “William R Catton defined a term I haven’t seen elsewhere. It is Cosmeticism: ‘faith that relatively superficial adjustments in our activities will keep the New World new and will perpetuate the Age of Exuberance.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
De-Minimis “In EPA regulation, de minimis, meaning trivial, applies in three possible ways: wastes that cause a lifetime cancer probability of less than 10^-4 (i.e., 1 in 10,000) need not be regulated; wastes that contain a very small percentage (less than 0.1%) of cancer-causing substances need not be regulated; or waste producers who produce relatively little hazardous waste (called small-quantity generators or very-small-quantity generators) may be exempted or regulated less strictly.” (Porter, The Economics of Waste).
Depth Burden “The length one has to reach” while working on a sorting (or assembly) line. (Pellow, Garbage Wars).
Dioxin “Dioxin is the common name for a family of chlorinated organic compounds that are never produced intentionally, but are synthesized when volatilized benzene rings (compounds that form the basic building blocks of materials such as wood and paper as well as petrochemical products) combine with chlorine (which is found in nature as a salt in plants, water, and soil, and in manufactured products such as bleached paper, pesticides, and chlorinated plastics). Dioxins were first identified as a by-product of the manufacture of pesticides and herbicides such as DDT and Agent Orange. Their international reputation grew as a result of an explosion at a pharmaceutical plant in Seveso, Italy, in 1977, and as a result of the discovery of dioxins in waste oils that had been used to suppress dust on a horse arena and roads in Times Beach, Missouri, in 1971. IN 1978, dioxins were detected in emissions from an incinerator in Sweden. When the Hempstead incinerator’s angry neighbors called the EPA in to investigate their odor complaints, dioxins were discovered there, too. Once alerted to their presence in the environment, researchers began looking for dioxins in various industrial processes (including paper making, pesticide and herbicide manufacturing, and cement production); in combustion processes that ranged from cigarettes, charcoal grills, and forest fires, to trucks and cars, to medical waste incinerators; and in background air, water, food, and human fat. Everywhere they looked they found them.” (Miller, Fat of the Land)
Dirty MRFs “MRFs that accept garbage along with recyclables…’A dirty MRF means garbage in, garbage out.'” (Pellow, Garbage Wars)
Diversion Rate “The amount of garbage that isn’t getting buried.” (Royte, Garbage Land)
Embalm “Embalm, to cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor’s lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long in-utility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutoeus maximus.” (Ambrose Bierce, as quoted in Jensen’s What We Leave Behind)
Ephemeral “Fuller observed that in his lifetime the size of machines continued to shrink, even as their functionality continued to increase, becoming ever more ‘ephemeral’. Think of computers, getting smaller and smaller so that the cell phone in your pocket has more computing power than the early, room-sized computers. Or compare a 4000-pound 1950 Buick to a 1600-pound Smart Car. Or compare wood and stone buildings to those built with lightweight space-age materials. As knowledge and technology increased, Fuller believed, material items could become physically less substantial. Fuller presumed that since these smaller machines were constructed out of less material, production and population could continue to increase even with finite resources. In fact, Fuller went so far as to say that this could continue indefinitely, and that there was no upper bound on production. It’s surprising that he would say this, especially because of his stated recognition of Earth’s finite limits, but he isn’t the first technologist to fall prey to magical thinking. Fuller believed that because of ephemeralization, knowledge and information would continue to increase toward infinity, as material technology continued to shrink away to become more and more ephemeral.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
E-Waste “Electronic waste, or E-waste, is the inevitable by-product of a technological revolution. Whether generated in your home or office, E-waste includes the broad spectrum of electronic appliances, products, components, and accessories that, due to malfunction (such as the broken toaster or the boom box that’s cheaper to replace than repair), exhaustion (such as batteries, light bulbs and fluorescent tubes), or obsolescence (such as that old 286 computer you’ve been meaning to donate to Goodwill… or the Nintendo your kid begged you for 5 years ago, but hasn’t touched since the introduction of the latest Playstation) have been discarded. When disposed of in a landfill, E-waste becomes a conglomeration of plastic and steel casings, circuit boards, glass tubes, wires, resistors, capacitors, and other assorted parts and materials.” (Silicon Valley Toxic’s Coalition, Poison PCs and Toxic TVs, 7)
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) “Is a strategy designed to promote the integration of environmental costs associated with goods throughout their life cycles into the market price of the products.” (Wikipedia). “Is an environmental protection strategy to reach an environmental objective of a decreased total environmental impact from a product, by making the manufacturer of the product responsible for the entire life-cycle of the product and especially for the take-back, recycling and final disposal of the product.” (Institute for Local Self-Reliance)
Fashion “To apply this generalisation to women’s dress, and put the matter in concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer’s comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilised women’s apparel, are so many items of evidence to the effect that in the modern civilised scheme of life the woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man, –that, perhaps in a highly idealised sense, she still is the man’s chattel. The homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the part of women lies int eh fact that they are servants to whom, in the differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office of putting in evidence their master’s ability to pay.” (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class)
Fly-Ash “The solids condensed from the exhaust gases [of an incinerator] by a sprayed lime slurry that cools the hot fumes and provides an attractive surface onto which volatilized metals, acid gases, and newly synthesized organic compounds (such as, respectively, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and dioxin) can adsorb before most of the reagent particles are removed by fabric filtration (like a sneeze into a handkerchief) or electrical attraction (like dust onto a computer screen). (Miller, Fat of the Land)
Fly-Tipping “Illegal tipping”. (Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste)
Fringe Effect “This dispersal of garbage to the edges of an occupied space is known to archaeologists as the ‘fringe effect’ (Rathje, Rubbish!)
Gleaning “Is the act of reaping after the harvest and in modern times this has come to mean the capture of food at many points in the food chain before it goes to waste” (Salvation Farms).
Host-Route “A geographic line composed of a continuous series of points on which a stream of trash travels past people’s houses.” (Miller, Fat of the Land). Note that people in a Host-Town often receive a fee, while people along a Host-Route almost never do.
Host-Town “A geographic point designating the citizens who would be paid for their willingness to allow garbage nearby.” (Miller, Fat of the Land)
Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) “The final contributors to the US hazardous waste problem are the millions of households which average five pounds a year of HHW, almost all of it into the MSW stream. HHW consists mostly of batteries, used motor oil, and such household maintenance products as paints, cleaners, polishes, and pesticides. Although the volume per household is small, the total is significant because of the large number of households and because much of our worry about landfills and incinerators for MSW stems from the HHW they contain.” (Porter, The Economics of Waste)
Humility “I need to say this again, since science is at this point a fundamentalist religion within this culture, and any criticism of science leads quickly to people misinterpreting what was actually said, and leads also to the frenetic quivering of so many sphincters: I am not saying that it is impossible to determine with some degree of accuracy cause and effect (in some cases); nor am I saying that the tools of science are not useful for gaining some pieces of information; nor am I saying that we should not attempt to understand cause and effect. I am merely suggesting humility. I am saying that it is arrogant, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, to think that we can even begin to comprehend the vast multiplicity of subtle and not-so-subtle associations of cause and effect in complex natural communities. And it’s even more arrogant than this to perpetuate mass changes on these complex communities–to destroy these communities–without regard for the harm those changes–that destruction–cases. And even more arrogant than this is the belief that just because you don’t see–or can’t comprehend even the existence of–cause and effect associations between some action and a possible reaction, they don’t exist.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Invidious “The term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or value–in an aesthetic or moral sense–and so awarding and defining the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.” (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class)
Leachate The product of water percolating through refuse.
LFG “When solid waste is put in a landfill, it is decomposed by anaerobic bacteria, whose by-product is landfill gas (LFG), about half methane and half carbon dioxide, both of which are greenhouse gases. This LFG also contributes to local air pollution–methane can produce explosions, and some of the other gases are known or suspected carcinogens.” (Porter, The Economics of Waste)
Light-weighting “Making objects in such a way that the objects retain all the necessary functional characteristics but require the use of less resin. The concept of light-weighting is not limited to the making of plastics; the makers of glass bottles have been light-weighting their wares for decades.” (Rathje, Rubbish!)
Limited Edition “A limited edition is in effect a guarantee–somewhat crude, it is true–that this [item] is scarce and that it therefore is costly and lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer.” (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class).
LULUs “Locally Unwanted Land Uses…generally include waste-to-energy incinerators, landfills, hazardous waste dumps, and polluting factories.” (Pellow, Garbage Wars)
Lysimeters “Metal containers with a diameter of about six feet and that stand some seventeen feet high, which hold carefully controlled and monitored simulations of landfills.” (Rathje, Rubbish!)
Manners “High-bred manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption.” (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class)
Monofill “A landfill that accepts only incinerator ash; its costs is usually a little higher than that of a landfill.” (Porter, The Economics of Waste)
Monopsony A market form where there is only one buyer (as opposed to a monopoly, where there is only one seller). This term is used in the world of waste to describe the situation of many developing-world scavengers who only have the option to sell to one middleman.
MRF Materials Recovery Facility: “pronounced ‘murf'” according to Royte, Garbage Land.
MSW Municipal Solid Waste.
NFP Natural Formation Processes, essentially “decomposition rates.” (Royte, Garbage Land)
NIMBY Not In My Back Yard (Pellow, Garbage Wars)
Nurdle “Nurdles are rabbit-poop-sized resin pellets not yet made into full-fledged plastic products. They make up about 10 percent of all plastic ocean trash. For obvious reasons, they’re essentially impossible to clean up.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Obsolescence “Actual use of the word ‘obsolescence’ to describe out-of-date consumer products began to show up in the early twentieth century when modern household appliances replaced older stoves and fireplaces, and steel pots replaced iron ones. But it was the electric starter in automobiles, introduced in 1913, that raised obsolescence to national prominence by rendering all previous cars obsolete. Even the most modern American women hated hand-cranking their cars and were greatly relieved when they could simply push a start button on a newer model. The earliest phase of product obsolescence, then, is called technological obsolescence, or obsolescence due to technological innovation.” (Slade, Made to Break). “‘Obsoletism,’ they write, is a ‘device for stimulating consumption. This element of style is a consideration in buying many things. Clothes go out of style and are replaced long before they are worn out. That principle extends to other products–motorcars, bathrooms, radios, foods, refrigerators, furniture. People are persuaded to abandon the old and buy the new in order to be up-to-date, to have the right and correct thing…Wearing things out does not produce prosperity, but buying things does.” (Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens in Consumer Engineering (1932) quoted in Slade, Made to Break)
ONP “Old Newspapers.” (Porter, The Economics of Waste)
Participation “The opportunity for public participation in recycling allows the raising of environmental awareness over the impact of individual behavior on other communities threatened by profligate resource use, both now and in the future. Furthermore, participation may help people counter a sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly intractable global problems.” (Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste)
Payhauler “A cartoonishly large dump truck that [holds] about eighty yards of solid waste.” (Royte, Garbage Land)
PIBBY Put In Black’s Back Yard (Pellow, Garbage Wars)
Pigovian Tax “Levying a tax equal to the marginal external costs–called a Pigovian tax after A.C. Pigou, who first wrote about it–has the effect of ‘internalizing the externality’ (Pigou 1920). The tax makes the perpetrator of the external cost think more carefully about continuing the practice.” (Porter, The Economics of Waste)
Planned Obsolescence “‘Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. We do that for the soundest reason: to make money.'” (Brooks Stevens quoted in Slade, Made to Break).
Postconsumer Recycling “The reuse of materials generated from residential and commercial waste, excluding recycling of material from industrial processes that has not reached the consumer, such as glass broken in the manufacturing process.” (McGraw-Hill Recycling Handbook Second Edition)
Polyhedron “A flattened-off pyramid whose maximum height is fixed by the length and width of its base–the bigger the base, the more profit per acre.” (Miller, Fat of the Land). Most landfills are in the shape of a polyhedron.
Preconsumer Recycling “Recyclable items that are collected from mills and manufacturing plants as by-products of their manufacturing process. These include over-runs on printing jobs, trimmings from envelopes, glass bottles that break prior to shipping, and excess plastic materials from molds.” (McGraw-Hill Recycling Handbook Second Edition)
Prolerizer “You remember that wood chipper from Fargo? Take that, and make it about fifteen hundred times bigger. Add hammers and teeth. And start the process with a conveyor belt and a seventy-five-foot plunge. Beginning to get the picture? That’s a Prolerizer.” (Car Talk, quoted in Royte, Garbage Land)
Put-or-pay “Most incinerators require ‘put-or-pay’ contracts stipulating that local governments deliver a guaranteed tonnage of material to the incinerator or pay a penalty.” (Royte, Garbage Land). “The ‘put-or-pay’ clause in the contract…meant that the [municipality] would be legally bound to send an adequate supply of garbage through the incinerator.” (Luton, The Politics of Garbage)
Recycling “Is the label applied to a variety of practices involved in recovering and adding value to post-consumer and post-industrial waste (i.e., garbage and scrap). The three arrows usually associated with the recycling emblem symbolize the three principle processes required to recycle waste: collecting and sorting, remanufacturing, and purchasing.” (Pellow, Garbage Wars) and “I will use the term recycling to refer specifically to cases in which human-made materials that would otherwise go to waste are collected and processed into new materials.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Reduce “Reduction of waste is the least understood option in waste management because it depends on altering buying habits, preferences and manufacturing (and packaging) processes that usually take place outside the locality wishing to reduce or eliminate waste…. Shifting patterns of manufacturing and packaging is difficult and is likely to result in strong opposition from manufacturers, and possibly–at least in the short term–in higher costs and fewer consumer choices.” (City of New York Department of Sanitation (1991), quoted in Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste).
Sanitary Landfill “Currently the most popular approach to waste disposal in the industrialized nations, is a site (usually lined with plastic) where garbage is spread, buried in layers, and capped to minimize the leaching of toxins from water flowing through. (This does not usually work as well in practice as in theory).” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Saudi Arabia of Scrap The United States (Minter, Junkyard Planet).
Simple Living “Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least five other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want). The first is that it’s fundamentally as narcissistic and as much a product of magical thinking as Baring Witness or orgasms for peace in that it substitutes private personal actions that accomplish very little in the real world, and a whole lot of wishing (‘But if everybody lived simply…’ they say, to which we can respond, ‘If we’re going to fantasize about everybody doing something, let’s fantasize about them demolishing the oil infrastructure to slow carbon emissions’) for organized (or solo) resistance. Once again, I’m not dissing simple living. This book started with me shitting in the forest because it makes food for slugs. But I”m not going to trumpet that act as particularly political. Although it does help those particular slugs and the frogs who eat them, it’s not going to slow global warming or stop plastics from being dumped in the ocean. Ultimately it won’t even help these slug and frog communities, because unless the industrial economy is stopped, global warming and global poisoning will kill them.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Sludge “Sewage sludge is solid, semi-solid, or liquid residue generated during the treatment of domestic sewage in a treatment works. Sewage sludge includes, but is not limited to, domestic septage; scum or solids removed in primary, secondary, or advanced wastewater treatment processes; and a material derived from sewage sludge. Sewage sludge does not include ash generated during the firing of sewage sludge in a sewage sludge incinerator or grit and screenings generated during preliminary treatment of domestic sewage in a treatment works” (40 CFR Part 503.9w).
Sports “The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man’s moral nature. This peculiar boyisheness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of make-believe with the games and exploits to which children, especially boys, are habitually inclined. ” (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class)
Subtitle-D In 1991 “The EPA published new and stricter guidelines for siting, maintenance, monitoring, and closure of sanitary landfills in the Federal Register. These new guidelines, now well known in the solid waste industry, are known as Subtitle D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976. The intent of Subtitle D was twofold. First, its stricter standards were intended to provide for a cleaner environment and better public health. Second, by closing unsafe landfills and raising costs of operating those landfills in compliance with the law, the new guidelines provided incentives for individuals and industries to place more emphasis on the other three components of the integrated approach: waste reduction, recycling, and waste combustion or incineration.” (Pellow, Garbage Wars)
Sustainable “Before we can answer these questions, however, we have to define sustainable. Many politicians, business people, ‘green’ architects, land managers, foresters and other resource specialists, and so on throw that word around a lot in meaningless or deceptive ways, labeling as ‘sustainable’ many manifestly unsustainable actions that most often make a lot of money for them or for the corporations to whom they are beholden. We hear about sustainable buildings, sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, sustainable this and sustainable that, and of course, within this culture, little or none of it is even remotely sustainable. For an action to be sustainable you must be able to perform it indefinitely. This means that the action must either help or at the very least not materially harm the landbase. If an action materially harms the landbase, it cannot be performed indefinitely: any line sloping downward eventually reaches zero. Any working definition of sustainability must emerge from and conform to a particular landbase–to what that landbase can freely give forever–and not be an abstract set of principles, or rationalizations, imposed upon the landbase. The landbase is primary, and what we do to it (or far more appropriately, with and for it) must always follow the landbase’s lead.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Tailings “Mine tailings are what’s left over after miners dig up the ground and extract whatever they’re going to sell. These previously buried, now-exposed rocks have normally been broken, and range from much larger than a softball down to coarse sand or even fine powder. Some minerals commonly found in tailings include–but are certainly not restricted to–arsenic (especially in gold mine wastes), barite, calcite, fluorite, many radioactive materials (that the earth had previously stored where the earth wanted them: underground), sulfur (and many sulfide compounds), cadmium, zinc, lead, manganese, and so on.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Technology “I think the idea that ‘technology is neutral’ is one of the most dangerous myths of our time. If we fall for the myth, it blinds us to the many ways that various technologies determine social structures and influence power relationships. We’re often told that technology is ‘simply technology’ and can be used for ‘good or for evil’ but is fundamentally amoral. In other words, that whether a technology is harmful or beneficial depends on the intent of whoever is using it. Hence, we should ignore issues around technology and focus on more productive approaches to changing the world, like choosing which wealthy capitalist to vote for at the ballot box.” (Jensen, What We Leave Behind)
Tipping Fee The cost, usually per ton, to dispose of something at an incinerator or landfill.
Trashspotting “To analyze the curbside recycling and general refuse of a household, neighborhood, city, or country, especially with a long-term view, for intellectual gratification, for social pleasure, and for cultural perspective.” (Emeril LeGoinegasque).
Unconsumption “A word used to describe everything that happens after an act of acquisition.” (Unconsumption website).
Waste “The use of the term ‘waste’ is in one respect an unfortunate one. As used in the speech of everyday life the word carries an undertone of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better term that will adequately describe the same range of motives and of phenomena, and it is not to be taken in an odious sense, as implying an illegitimate expenditure of human products or of human life. In the view of economic theory the expenditure in question is no more and no less legitimate than any other expenditure. It is here called “waste” because this expenditure does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole, not because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it. If he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its relative utility to him, as compared with other forms of consumption that would not be deprecated on account of their wastefulness. Whatever form of expenditure the consumer chooses, or whatever end he seeks in making his choice, has utility to him by virtue of his preference. As seen from the point of view of the individual consumer, the question of wastefulness does not arise within the scope of economic theory proper. The use of the word “waste” as a technical term, therefore, implies no deprecation of the motives or of the ends sought by the consumer under this canon of conspicuous waste.” (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class).
Zero Waste “Is [the] goal [of] changing [people’s] lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use. Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them.” (Zero Waste International Alliance, retrieved August 22, 2013. Minor revisions by Trash Blog).