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Your trash - Have you ever thought about what your trash says about you? If someone were to rifle through your trash bin right now, what conclusions might they come to?

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What it can teach us -

Your food waste, for instance, can teach people a lot about your diet and eating habits, while your bathroom waste can give a good idea about your hygiene habits and general well-being.

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Introducing garbology -

Rifling through people’s trash to extract data may sound unappealing, but ‘garbology’ is in fact a well-established field of research.

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Back to the beginning -

The term garbology has been around since the 1970s. It was first coined by a writer and activist, but it quickly became associated with anthropologist William Rathje.

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The Tucson Garbage Project -

Rathje and his colleagues led a study called the Tucson Garbage Project, which involved scouring landfills in Tucson, Arizona, and extracting waste for analysis.

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The questionnaires - The team also circulated questionnaires about eating and drinking habits to consenting Tucson residents, and compared their answers to what was found in the participants’ trash cans.

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The findings -

It turned out (surprise, surprise) that people were clearly downplaying the amount of junk food and alcohol they were consuming.

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The evolution of garbology -

Since then, the discipline of garbology has provided valuable data to both political researchers and historians, in situations where it might otherwise have been hard to come by.

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Applications -

In the 1990s and 2000s, researchers were able to learn about the history of China’s Cultural Revolution from waste paper thrown away by local households or officials.

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Tianjin, China -

Unable to access the official archives, researchers would go to flea markets on the weekend in search of bundles of documents that were headed to be destroyed.

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Help from the market peddlers -

Peddlers at the markets soon became acquainted with what the researchers were looking for and helped them pick out papers that held valuable information.

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Learnings -

For example, Canadian researcher Jeremy Brown was able to get his hands on papers that showed how deportations of people from urban to rural areas had been orchestrated by local governments.

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North Korea application -

More recently, garbology has even helped us gain a glimpse into the inner workings of North Korea, one of the world’s most secretive and enigmatic countries.

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Wrappers -

According to a story in The Guardian from February 2022, a professor in South Korea collected more than 1,400 North Korean product wrappers that washed up on the South Korean coast.

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Unlikely source of information - The professor noticed that the newer wrappers were more colorful than the older ones, suggesting that subtle cultural changes may be underway in North Korea.

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Soviet Poland -

In Poland, archaeologist Grzegorz Kiarszys has been able to build a picture of what life was like for people who once lived at the former Soviet nuclear weapons bases.

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The type of trash -

He has studied the debris found at a handful of these bases. Much of it is actually very domestic; razors, lipsticks, and used bags of powdered milk are all around.

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Curious -

Interestingly, he also found some relatively expensive children’s toys such as Lego bricks, which were not available to the general public in Communist Poland.

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Possible conclusion -

That would suggest that the Soviet officers living at these bases had access to foreign currency that enabled them to provide their kids with these sorts of toys.

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Garbology in commerce -

Garbology is not the reserve of academics either: it also has a commercial application. For decades now businesses have used people’s trash to learn about consumption.

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Ski yogurts - As early as the 1970s, yogurt company Ski engaged a company to run a ‘dustbin audit’ across thousands of households in the UK.

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Market research -

The company was interested to learn how their yogurts were doing compared with other products in their market.

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How it worked -

Participating households were paid to place the packaging from certain products, including yogurts, in a separate trash can when disposing of them.

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The analysis - Analysts then collected these trash cans and used their contents to determine which brands were faring better than others.

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Useful project -

Of course, participants may have behaved differently because they knew their trash would be analyzed. But overall, it seemed that Ski got the data they needed.

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Nowadays -

Even today, when barcodes and loyalty cards make it much easier for retailers to track exactly what is being sold, there is a certain attractiveness to garbology.

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From the horse's mouth -

According to retired marketing consultant Datha Damron-Martinez, she used to recommend that firms use garbology to learn about trends in a target population.

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Proctor & Gamble -

Companies that rely on garbology for their market research aren’t always looked on kindly, however. In 2001, Proctor & Gamble decided to halt their ‘dumpster diving’ project.

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Proctor & Gamble - The aim of the project was to gain information about rival hair care companies, but it was canceled because it was "outside our strict competitive business information gathering policy."

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Not forgetting -

For garbologists who analyze people’s trash on a daily basis, there is the added downside that they are constantly reminded of just how much we consume as a society. But that’s for another time…

Sources: (BBC)

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