A big city garbage truck makes its rounds, consuming everything from apple cores and banana peels to leftover ziti with zucchini.

"What a Waste! explores the problem of garbage and how humans have dealt with it from prehistory to modern times. Topics include how archaeologists study ancient garbage; the growth of consumer culture and disposability; food waste; the environmental effects of garbage; "problem" garbage like electronic and toxic waste; sewage and dead bodies; and garbage in the oceans and in space. Sidebars highlight people and organizations around the world who...

Explains how people create too much waste and how waste is now recycled and put into landfills.

Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world's garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world's detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them. Written in exquisitely wrought prose, Pigs asks questions about community,...

"At the Iremonger mansion, set in the trash heaps of an alternate Victorian London, Grandfather Umbitt Iremonger has found a way to make objects assume the shapes of people, and how to turn people into objects. Will outcast grandson Clod--transformed into a gold coin--and servant girl Lucy (now a discarded button) be found and returned to human form?"--

Explains the challenges that face our planet as trash continues to build up, and teaches the importance of reducing, reusing, and recycling items in order to reduce the amount of waste produced.

Examines various methods of garbage disposal, with an emphasis on sanitary landfills but also surveying such alternatives as mass burn and recycling.