Garbology, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Dig Through Trash

Well, this has been an eventful weekend!

If, six months ago, someone would have told me that digging through a garbage bin is an archaeological study I would have thought they were crazy. Now? Not so much! It all comes down to a little something called Garbology! Started in 1973 by an amazing man named William Rathje, digging through refuse has now become an academic discipline in some areas.

So, with that information in mind some fellow students and I took on the task of jumping in a dumpster and sorting through some trash for a study we'll be working on over the next few months.

This weekend we set up shop in the communal garbage bin at the condo complex of one of our team members. He lives in an urban area so we were expecting some great finds and it definitely did not disappoint.

I'll save you the gross details and not recount exactly what we found in every bag but needless to say the results were a little bit shocking! It turns out (in the particular complex) that people really take recycling seriously. We found comparatively very little paper or recyclable material in the dumpster. On the flip side, it looks as though nobody was cooking the week before we got to the bin! There were tons of takeout contains but not a lot of organic (food) material.

I'm sure some people are wondering, "What's the point"? That's a good question! We're hoping to go through the garbage in different areas of the city to compare and contrast samples of different population segments to see what the waste can tell us. It's generally pretty easy to infer age, gender, and income level just based on a few bags of trash. Of course, these are just inferences and we could be totally wrong, but that's the fun of archaeology! Everything is a puzzle and it's up to you to try and solve it!

Our garbage really tells a lot about the person who threw the stuff out. What would your garbage say about you?

*We did obtain consent from all the residents of the complex before beginning our study.

-Torri