From waste basket to landfill, a vertiginous descent into the mysteriously hellish world of trash.

• The average American discards almost seven pounds of trash per day.

• With only 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. consumes 30 percent of the planet's resources and churns out 30 percent of its wastes.

• Garbage production in the United States has doubled in the last thirty years.

• About 80 percent of U.S. products are used once, then thrown away.

• 95 percent of all plastic, two-thirds of all glass containers, and 50 percent of all aluminum beverage cans are never recycled; instead they just get burned or buried.

Every day a phantasmagoric rush of spent, used, and broken riches flows through our homes, offices, and cars. The United States is the planet's number-one producer of trash; each American discards over 2,600 pounds annually. But where does all that garbage go?

In Gone Tomorrow , journalist Heather Rogers guides us through the grisly, oddly fascinating world of trash. Excavating the history of rubbish handling from the 1800s—an era of garbage-grazing urban hogs and dump-dwelling rag pickers—to the present, with its brutally violent mob-controlled cartels and high-tech rural "mega-fills" operated by billion-dollar garbage corporations, Rogers investigates the roots of America's waste-addicted culture. Gone Tomorrow also explores the politics of recycling, a popular but limited solution that, as Rogers points out, should only be seen as a first step toward much greater reform.

Part exposé, part social commentary, this work traces the connections between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our disposable lifestyle.