Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

Hoarders are a national obsession. People like Jesse and Thelma Gaston, who refuse to discard any item and find themselves trapped in their own trash, fascinate the public and have inspired successful television shows featuring such “hoarders.” Millions of Americans are compulsive hoarders. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) categorizes disposophobia, or hoarding disorder, as a mental illness. The DSM explains that hoarding is more than mere collecting; it rises to a level that creates health and safety risks.

What alarms Humes about hoarders is not the spectacle or the health and safety issues their lifestyles pose, but rather “the refuse itself, or […] the rather scarier question of how any person, hoarder or not, can possibly generate so much trash so quickly” (4). Hoarders don’t generate more junk than the rest of us—we simply hoard our trash out of sight in landfills. Each American accumulates an average of 7.1 pounds of daily trash—102 tons over an average lifetime. Collectively, Americans generate 389.5 million tons of trash, more than any other nation. Recycling exacerbates the problem, permitting people to create more waste under the flawed belief that it is acceptable because it will be recycled.