At the time, Jordan was practicing insurance law and photography was his superficial means of escaping a career he loathed. But this image wasn’t just another pretty picture. When friends and other artists saw the new print it inevitably spurred conversations about consumerism — and specifically their own contributions to the Seattle-based trash heap the work depicted. They would point to an aluminum Altoids container or orange juice carton and wonder if it was theirs. Jordan found this “misinterpretation” of his work annoying. “That’s not what it’s about,” he would argue.

“I was asleep to mass culture and the role of the individual,” Jordan admits. For the entire 10 years he worked as a lawyer, he didn’t vote in a single election. “I lived in some pretty deep denial about what was going on around me and my own role in it,” he confides. He justified buying things like rosewood speaker cabinets by convincing himself that it would make no difference if he alone changed his behavior. He assigned responsibility to “a bunch of good ass-kickers in the Sierra Club” to fix things, and washed his hands. “I didn’t realize the cost to myself,” he says.

The more time he spent around garbage and the more he tuned in to people’s reactions to his photographs, the more his own attitudes began to shift. He realized he could honor his aesthetic and also connect with the contemporary world on the issue of consumption. That’s when he started sneaking into landfills and dumps, like “a spy in my own country,” and his art took on an intensity and excitement that he hadn’t experienced before. “All I had ever known about consumption up until that point was about the nice stuff you buy,” he says. Jordan decided that people needed to see the underbelly — the ugly machine behind our consumerist nature — and he was just the guy to show them.

His newest collection of photographs “Running the Numbers” pushes the boundaries of his previous work by depicting the actual number of cups, cigarettes, batteries, plastic bottles and cell phones we consume in a finite period of time. It shows the scale of our mass consumption on both an abstract and representational plane.

For Jordan, consumerism remains a complex issue. He struggles with the hypocrisy he witnesses at sustainability conferences — where inspiring discussions about solutions to environmental challenges occur, but also where guests receive free Nokia cell phones, personal limo service and extravagant dinners complete with imported wine from Australia. “The disconnect can be incredibly frightening and overwhelming,” he says. “It’s like now we know we’re alcoholics but we’re not stopping the drink.”

Jordan is the first to admit that he’s not doing everything he could. He buys much of his clothing at Goodwill, eats a vegetarian diet and recycles, but it often feels “like a bunch of gestures.” “Every time I upgrade to a new computer or fly on jets, I am part of the problem,” he says. “I am in no position to finger wag, but I also don’t want to be silent.” And perhaps it is his own imperfections that make his message — couched in the beauty of photography — so potent.

The Garbage Groupie

What began as a foray into a book about garbage has taken on a life of its own. While researching and writing Garbage Land (Little, Brown and Company, 2005), author Elizabeth Royte saved and weighed her yogurt cups, plastic wrappers and milk cartons on a daily basis and then followed them to see where they ended up. In the process, she got intimately acquainted with waste treatment facilities, landfills and compost heaps, and conversed with numerous san-men, haulers, bureaucrats, tight-lipped landfill operators and hardcore environmentalists. By unveiling the secret life of our trash she also uncovered some interesting (albeit stomach-churning) trash lingo: “Coney Island whitefish” (used condoms), “disco rice” (maggots), and perhaps the greatest environmental evil of all, “Satan’s resin” (plastic).

Trash isn’t inherently sexy, but changing our relationship to it can be, believes Royte, noting the increased popularity of reusable bags and bottles and our growing concern over our carbon footprint. As she discovered, there’s a lot of human interest in garbage issues. “People always want to know the most astonishing thing or the grossest thing I discovered,” she says.

Not surprisingly, having this kind of information has made her think about everything that enters her life. Living in a small brownstone apartment on a journalist’s salary naturally limited her consumption, so she found it easy to beat the national average of 4.5 pounds of trash a day, including recyclables. But she was compelled to make some lifestyle changes. For one, she stopped buying things in single-serving sizes (no matter how much her daughter may beg for them). And after learning about the tremendous expense associated with transporting food waste to landfills, and the methane gas it produces once buried there, Royte started composting — no small feat in New York City, where there’s no formal program or curbside pick-up. She worked out a deal with her downstairs neighbor to compost in the garden and, well, so far so good.

Royte admits that while she knows her personal contributions to recycling, reuse and composting aren’t going to change the world, being informed and urging the city to consider solutions to help curb [and recycle] commercial garbage can.

“We are clearly thinking more about where what we buy comes from, and we can’t consider downstream impacts without looking upstream as well,” she continues. Her newest book Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought, available in mid-May, explores the horrors of our recent “health” obsession with plastic-encased water. Royte takes comfort in witnessing celebrities who once endorsed Evian and Perrier toting recycled designer bags and extolling the virtues of water filters. For Royte’s tips on what we can do to temper our consumption, click here.

Since writing this piece, San Francisco freelancer Amelia Glynn has sworn off to-go cups for good. To read up on her to-go cup trials and tribulations, click here.