Total Garbage

Total Garbage by Rebecca Donnelly dives into the messy truth about trash, garbage, waste, and our world--it’s a fact-filled and fascinating illustrated middle grade environmental read!

Trash has been part of human societies since the beginning. It seems like the inevitable end to the process of making and using things--but why?

In this fascinating account of the waste we make, we’ll wade into the muck of history and explore present-day STEM innovations to answer these important questions:

What is garbage?
Where does our garbage come from?
Why do we make so much garbage?
Where does our garbage go?
What can we learn from our garbage?
How bad is our garbage problem?
How can we do better?

Rebecca Donnelly tackles the extraordinary, the icky, and the everyday, helping us see how our choices, personal and societal, impact our world and our planet--and encouraging us make a change.

Back matter includes a timeline of the history of waste management, selected bibliography, and index.

Rebecca Donnelly is the author of many best-loved books for children, including Cats Are a Liquid (nominated for the Mewbery Award), How Slippery Is a Banana Peel?, and Super Spaghetti. Her debut middle-grade novel, How to Stage a Catastrophe, was an Indies Introduce/Kids’ Indie Next pick. Rebecca lives in and writes from northern New York.

John Hendrix is a New York Times-bestselling illustrator and the author of many children’s books, including Shooting at the Stars, Drawing Is Magic, and John Brown: His Fight for Freedom.