NEW YORK, March 31 — Originating in the 1980s in the United States, “garbology” refers to the careful examination of the contents of our trash! This form of “garbage archaeology” was first used to measure the effectiveness of HIV prevention campaigns, before being extended to other fields and being used in various ways throughout the world.
Studying the contents of our trash is a practice known as “garbology.” And it’s by no means new, since this scientific discipline dates back to the 1980s. When the United States was faced with a massive AIDS epidemic, employees of the city of Baltimore began to carefully inspect the contents of wastewater with a very specific aim: to count the number of used condoms that had been flushed, in order to measure the impact of campaigns deployed in the country to stop the spread of the virus. “By early 1988, workers were finding between 200 and 400 every day,” reports a BBC story on the subject.
“Garbology” involves carefully studying the waste thrown away by populations for a specific purpose. Far from being confined to the United States, the practice has since been applied in other parts of the world, notably in Africa, again to determine the extent to which citizens are likely to use protection during sex. Several decades later, the technique was adapted to monitor the prevalence of Covid-19. This was achieved in the city of Boston, for example, by analysing the city’s wastewater.
Far from being confined to public health, “garbology” quickly spread to other fields (politics, economics, marketing, sociology, journalism, etc.). In the early 2000s, a field study conducted in the United States used this method to study the eating habits of participants. “Garbology” has thus become a discipline in its own right, and is even taught in several universities in the United States.
But above all, it has the merit of making us aware of the extent and impact of our own consumption, and more particularly, of our waste production, whether in terms of plastic pollution or food waste. As underlined by a Reporterre article, the recent and dramatic garbage collectors strike in the French capital proved a shock to the system for some Parisians, who came face to face with their waste production. In fact, some parents explain that they switched to cloth diapers for their babies in order to cut down on trash. With so much garbage piling up on the sidewalks, it became increasingly difficult to look the other away! — ETX Studio
