An excellent analysis of our individual and collective consumptive habits that produce waste. Through her comparison of two different American cities, Pollans offers incisive commentary on the creation of urban wasteways…[Pollans'] work can help us to determine if we are (intentionally or not) acquiescing to the extraction–manufacturing–consumption–waste chain or transgressing and resisting it.
~Metropolitics
[Resisting Garbage] is deeply insightful, offering much for planning practitioners, planning scholars, and policymakers to consider. The book offers a cogent and hopeful rationale for planning, citizen participation, and innovative governance even as it remains firm in presenting the dire consequences of the United States’ lackluster performance in municipal recycling efforts and lack of traction in reducing the production of waste...The implications for planning and for rethinking urban wasteways in Pollans’s book are profound and worth reading.
~Journal of the American Planning Association
[A] thought-provoking book...a meticulously detailed comparative analysis of waste management policy in two US cities: Boston, Massachusetts, and Seattle, Washington...By demonstrating contingency and alternative approaches to waste management through vivid case studies and intriguing concepts, Resisting Garbage provides both a practical guide and a theoretical contribution to understanding and reforming harmful wasteways.
~H-Environment
Pollans’s book is a robust history of municipal waste policy in Boston and Seattle, with useful policy ideas for those interested in more sustainable urban waste policy.
~Journal of Urban Affairs