Gone Tomorrow is a strident and conventional environmentalist screed against trash. In a kind of cosmological sense, the third law of thermodynamics is a harsh mistress, and every process produces some kind of waste as it runs down towards entropy. But 20th and 21st century American civilization is a particular kind of grotesquely wasteful, a life of single-user plastics which endure for millennia, electronics that obsolete themselves, bruised fruit, shoddy fast fashion, machines that are more expensive to fix than toss, and so on, all formed into a massive waste stream that gets picked up from bins behind our houses, and through a clever little social magic trick, seems to disappear.

Of course, this is just a trick. The garbage isn't really gone. Instead it's compressed and trucked off to be buried in a plastic lined pit in the ground, and we have to trust the corporations involved, like the massive Waste Management, and the thoroughly captured regulatory agencies like the EPA, that it won't be leaking toxic leachate into the ground in a few decades. Garbage is typically finally dumped in areas with large numbers of BIPOC residents, or these days sent off to the Global South. It's a real problem.

I think my issue with this book is that Rogers is gesturing at the idea that trash is just another logistics space plugged into our homes, but she's coming in with such a resolutely antagonistic attitude that she can't see how the system works, instead only seeing the corruption and the harms. This book has an extremely romantic attitude towards the pre-Progressive era system of 'gleaners' who'd rummage through the garbage stream to pull as much value out of it before the remains would get tossed in the nearest body of water, and modern equivalents in zero-waste communes.

There are some interesting historical facts in here about the rise of sanitation engineering as a profession, almost all of which appear to be pulled from Melosi's classic Garbage in the Cities, and while this book opens an interesting question to think about how the advantages of garbage have been privatized by manufacturers and shippers, while individuals and society bear the cost, it's hoary environmentalism hasn't held up.