everydaytrash

   Loreen Leedy’s ‘The Great Trash Bash’ (best title ever!) came out in 1991, but the lessons it teaches kids (and adults) about the different places garbage goes, what a problem too much garbage can be, are just as true today.  I discovered this book while researching potential Literary Trash week authors and thought an author-illustrator of Children’s books would round out our series.  Also, Mayor Hippo is adorable.   

everydaytrash:  How did you come up with the premise of The Great Trash Bash?

Loreen Leedy:  At the time, I was looking for a book project that would showcase the process of characters working together to accomplish a goal. Also, I was interested in working with an environmental theme. Now that it’s been awhile, I can’t recall exactly what inspired the notion of garbage. Perhaps it was/is so ubiquitous it seemed obvious. In general, I try to notice what is all around us yet taken for granted. We become accustomed to “how things are.” It takes insight and leadership to question it, as shown by the mayor of Beaston at the beginning of the story.

everydaytrash:  Even though it’s a book for young people, this story covers the pros and cons of incineration, landfills and recycling. How much research did you have to do to write it?

Leedy:  In those days (15+ years ago) I always went to the local public library to find magazines, encyclopedias, and books for research. Now the Internet is usually my first stop. If the book had required a lot of detail I might have visited an actual landfill and/or incinerator but it wasn’t necessary in this case. 

everydaytrash:  How did you decide to match the different animals to their characters?

Leedy:  Animals are fun to use as characters because they come in such a wide range of sizes, shapes, and colors from mice to alligators to ostriches. For a commanding yet comic presence I made the mayor a relatively large hippo wearing pants and tie (no shirt). Most of the other characters are small to medium-sized, reasonably familiar animals such as raccoons, foxes, and frogs. The diversity of critters reflects the variety of characters found in every town.    

everydaytrash:  What are some of the solutions that the citizens of Beaston come up with to solve their trash problems? Are they easy to follow in real life? 

Leedy:  Create less trash; fix old things instead of buying new things; stop littering; recycle; make a compost bin for food scraps; start a recycling center. Some are easier to follow than others– it’s hard to find anyone to repair electronic devices, for example. Perhaps the best idea is to adopt one new habit at a time until it becomes second nature. An easy one is recycling, though I do run across adults that can’t be bothered to recycle, which is frustrating. Hopefully children will be willing to adopt many of these practices for life. 

everdaytrash:  Do you have any sense of the impact of your book in the classroom? Do you get fan mail from kids and teachers?

Leedy:  I was surprised to learn that so far, The Great Trash Bash is my most translated book and has had many subsidiary rights licensed, such as being reprinted in textbook anthologies. This seems to indicate that garbage is a big issue all over the world and parents and teachers need a way to introduce it to children. Schools do a lot of trash-related projects such as:   

1.  Clean an area of the playground; tally the types of trash (metal/paper/plastic/wood); make a bar graph to show the most common litter found.  

2.  Each class collects the trash from one snack time; paste it onto poster board; display all the class trash posters together to raise awareness. 

3.  Kids bring in clean trash such as cereal boxes/egg cartons/cans; they combine their trash to make “trash monsters.” [editor’s note:  Contact Leila if you want to get together to make trash monsters.  Or make your own and send your photos to everday trash!]  

4.  Make useful items such as bird feeders out of trash.   

These are just some of the activities I’ve heard about, usually via email. It is fun to hear how the book is used in the classroom… you never know what they’ll come up with next!

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The Great Trash Bash is available through Leedy’s books. 

Check back tomorrow for more Literary Trash!

Update: Next up on the Literary Trash lineup is David Naguib Pellow, a professor of ethnic studies and author of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago
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The first time I bought the book Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, it was as a birthday gift for my oldest friend, Oro. Oro and I have known each other since infancy. More recently, we have been organizing walking tours for our friends about three or four times a year (nothing too formal, just an excuse to take long walks through new neighborhoods and perhaps eat better and more cheaply than usual). Given our mutual lifetime obsession with New York, Rats seemed like the perfect present. Our local bookstore wrapped the volume in map-of-Manhattan paper, which Oro later hung on the kitchen wall of the apartment he and his mother share. For several years, every time I went over to their apartment (which was about once a month because Oro and his mother are the two other members of my three-person book group), I thought of Rats and how none of us had ever read it and how none of us had ever suggested it for book group. The wrapping paper map on the wall began to represent every book I had ever wanted to read but somehow failed to get to; I wondered whether it would be tacky to ask for the book back.

When I finally did read rats (to prepare for the interview below), it took me all of one sitting. The thing I find so compelling about the topic here is that, like trash, rats are one of those things you only really think about if you can’t afford not to, or if you’re uncontrollably fascinated by details. Robert Sullivan, infectiously, is the latter.

everydaytrash: In writing a book about rats in New York City, how much of your research focused on garbage in New York City?

Robert Sullivan: The food of rats is trash, so I spent a lot of time in, or very near, a lot of trash. I looked at what trash or kinds of trash they (rats) prefer, which turns out to be a lot like the food people tend to prefer. Trash bags in an alley are to rats what fields of delicious grasses are to a wild horse out in an Oregon wilderness. Rats love to wrestle around in individual garbage bags. One of the innovations that has improved rat watching since the time I first went rat watching is the see-through trash bag. Before see-through bags, rats were like kids wrestling in a pup tent; now, they are like the boy in the bubble only they are a rats in trash.

everydaytrash: How much of reducing the rat population in the city do you think relies on reducing the amount of trash we produce?

Sullivan: It’s partly how much trash we produce–and that includes trash we bag and put out on the street and all the trash we just throw down on the ground whenever we feel like it or even accidentally–and partly how we contain our trash. In Chicago, people use metal containers, dumpsters in the alleys. Here we use plastic bags. By using plastic bags, it is as if we are raising rats. A plastic bag to a rat is almost like puff pastry, at least in terms of it toughness as a protective shell.

everydaytrash: In Rats, you cover the housing rights movement and labor organizing among sanitation workers. Do you see rats as a catalyst for social chance?

Sullivan: Rats have been used as a catalyst. People pay attention when you talk about rats. The rent strike I refer to in the book, in which organizers brought rats to city hall and rats even to Congress, is said to be the largest rent strike in the history of the United States, not that you read about it in text books very often. I also think rats are a good indicator species. The presence of rats in neighborhoods, for instance, indicates a place where we, as a city or town, could stand to pay more attention, whether that means spending more money or just caring more somehow.

everydaytrash: Since writing the book, do your friends now give you rat-themed gifts? Are you now called upon to review or endorse strange rat-themed products?

Sullivan: I am sometimes called in by friends who have rodent problems. But
that’s not a problem for me: after having written a rat book I am happy to have any friends at all.

everydaytrash: Are there any new statistics on how many rats live in the city?

Sullivan: There are always new statistics–like the famous one rat per person statistic that never dies, even though it should. But the new statistics are almost inevitably wrong. We might better spend any money we might spend counting rats on helping people not have them.

everydaytrash: If a blogger writing about trash were interested in adding a rat category to her site, what online resources would you recommend she check out?

I can’t help you there. I don’t know any rat blogs. I did once meet a member of the Chicago Rat Patrol, when I was in Chicago looking at rats. He seemed like a nice guy.

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If your local bookstore doesn’t have Rats in stock, ask them to order it.

Check back tomorrow for more Literary Trash!

Update: Next up on the Literary Trash lineup is Loreen Leedy, author of the children’s book The Great Trash Bash.

Earlier this month, Treehugger posted on a floating, trash-collecting dock on the river Thames that “eats trash”.  The simple fix to floating nasties in the water (floating around and collecting them on barge-thingies) is the brainchild of Thames21, a clean water project which, with the help of Riverkeeper volunteers, has made London’s one of the cleanest rivers around. 

  Mark your calendars, next week is book week here at everyday trash.  Starting Monday, I’ll be posting interviews with authors exploring the world through the lens of garbage.