It would be a blessing if it were possible to study garbage in the abstract, to study garbage without having to handle it physically.  But that is not possible.  Garbage is not mathematics.  To understand garbage you have to touch it, to feel it, to sort it, to smell it.  You have to pick through hundreds of tons of it, counting and weighing all the daily newspapers, the telephone books, the soiled diapers the foam clamshells that once briefly held hamburgers, the lipstick cylinders coated with grease, the medicine vials still encasing brightly colored pills, the empty bottles of scotch, the half-full cans of paint and muddy turpentine, the forsaken toys, the cigarette butts.  You have to sort and weigh and measure the volume of all the organic matter, the discards from thousands of plates: the noodles and the Cheerios and the tortillas; the pieces of pet food that have made their own gravy; the hardened jelly doughnuts, bleeding from their side wounds; the half-eaten bananas, mostly still within their peels, black and incomparably sweet in the embrace of final decay.

                                                                                - William Rathje & Cullen Murphy, from Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage
                                                                                   HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, p. 9.