High School Books
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Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things By: Michael Braungart Braungart and McDonough encourage readers to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Inspired by biomimicry, these environmentalists consider making waste the start of something else that can safely re-enter the environment. Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change. |
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The Waste Crisis: Landfills, Incinerators, and the Search for a Sustainable Future By: Hans Y. Tammemagi As populations continue to increase, society produces more and more waste. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to build new landfills, and the existing landfills are causing significant environmental damage. Finding solutions is not simple; the problem is enormous in size, vital in terms of its impact on the environment, and complex in scope. This book provides a vast look at solid waste management in North America and seeks solutions to the waste crisis. It describes the magnitude and complexity of the problem, focusing on municipal wastes and placing them in the perspective of other wastes such as hazardous, biochemical, and radioactive debris. |
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The Story of Stuff By: Annie Leonard We have a problem with Stuff. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we’re consuming 30 percent of the world’s resources and creating 30 percent of the world’s waste. If everyone consumed at U.S. rates, we would need three to five planets! Leonard does a flawless job describing how the US population simply has too much “stuff.” She reveals the truth behind our possessions while providing encouragement to be the change. |
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Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash By: Susan Strasser Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture-the trash it produces-and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning. Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexistent. With goods and money scarce, almost everything was reused. Strasser paints a vivid picture of an America where scavenger pigs roamed the streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. Over the last hundred years, however, Americans have become hooked on convenience, disposability, fashion, and constant technological change-the rise of mass consumption has led to waste on a previously unimaginable scale. |
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Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States By: Samantha McBride Recycling is widely celebrated as an environmental success story. The accomplishments of the recycling movement can be seen in municipal practice, a thriving private recycling industry, and widespread public support and participation. In the United States, more people recycle than vote. But, as Samantha MacBride points out in this book, the goals of recycling--saving the earth (and trees), conserving resources, and greening the economy--are still far from being realized. The vast majority of solid wastes are still burned or buried. MacBride argues that, since the emergence of the recycling movement in 1970, manufacturers of products that end up in waste have successfully prevented the implementation of more onerous, yet far more effective, forms of sustainable waste policy. |