Industry’s disposability deception

SHARON  —  Like a guerrilla warrior in the jungles of American consumerism, author Eve Schaub slashes away at the falsehoods and obfuscations of an industry founded on disposability, hoping to leave behind an activism born of hope and humor.

On Thursday, Aug. 3, at the Sharon Town Hall, sponsored by the Hotchkiss Library, Schaub, whose most recent book is “Year of No Garbage,” will hold a talk on the eve of the Library’s multi-author book signing at the same venue.

Schaub also will be on hand signing books at the event on Friday, Aug. 4 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Having investigated the ubiquitousness of sugar in the American diet and the many ins and outs of decluttering, Schaub turned her mega-experimental mind to a topic most of us would rather not acknowledge, let alone delve into: garbage, and especially our addiction to a throwaway lifestyle that is burying us in plastics, from the inside out.

“Year of No Garbage” is a must-read for everyone who cares about the environment, air quality, our bodily integrity and what we are leaving behind—for our own future generations and for the legions of people in high-poverty countries whose lives are led surrounded by our toxic garbage, conveniently shipped “away” even when it is supposedly being recycled at home.

The fact that trash is our nation’s number one export leads a list of “Ten Statistics to be Horrified By,” which opens the book. “The average American singlehandedly produces enough trash in their lifetime to build a Statue of Liberty: over one hundred tons of garbage” is another stunner.  The book’s well-researched content, with 14 pages of endnotes and a thorough index, is also extremely readable and often laugh-aloud funny.

It’s also touching, as it portrays in detail the changes Schaub put her family through, since they were all implicated in her goal of producing no trash for the entire year of 2020. Her husband and two daughters, labeled “extremely good sports,” manifested the vicissitudes of support and exasperation for the grand experiment they were part of, as it got established in the first three months of the pandemic year.

With chapter headings like “This Sucks and Everyone Hates Me,” “Secrets and Fraud: When ‘Green’ Plastic Goes Horribly Wrong,” ”Tooth Tablets and Period Panties: We Try All the Weird Zero Waste Products,” and finally “Is Life Without Plastic Even Possible,” the conversational tone, extreme, fearless attention to specifics, and underlying hope and love for the future make it a much-needed handbook for those who aspire to be better stewards of our precious biosphere.