Elizabeth Royte lives in Brooklyn and writes for The New Yorker and other magazines, most of them based in New York. That knowledge makes it easier to understand a few things about her new book.

First, the New York connection might explain why a 304-page book was written - and published - about what happens to Royte's trash. Little, Brown publishing executives, and all their NYC friends, must have been curious at some point about what happens to their trash. If publishers saw a proposal from, say, St. Louis, well, thanks but no.

Second, The New Yorker connection also explains why Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash is larded with words like concordance in place of words like agreement. The first chapters, especially, are written in that distinctly New Yorker style, which makes a writer susceptible to sanitizing a subject by calling, say, a computer case a "carapace."

But something happens to this book along the trail of trash: It gets real. And it gets real good, too.

Royte's premise is simple: She wants to know what happens to all her trash - everything her small family throws into the trash can and the recycling bin and down the sink and the toilet. It's not easy to track. During her reporting, she's chased off of some landfills and has to approach others from a boat.

But she uses the journey to write about the realities of trash. Most of what she digs up is interesting, such as the history of the word biosolids, which is much more sanitary-sounding than sewage sludge (which is what the stuff actually is). Other tidbits are more tedious, such as the endless lists of the exact kinds of cancer and birth defects caused in lab rats by other endless lists of toxins found in various forms of garbage.

But even involved citizens and active recyclers will undoubtedly learn some things from Garbage Land, despite its New York-centric viewpoint.

For example, did you know that the water that gets flushed in Brooklyn, and other big cities, sometimes mixes with storm-sewer runoff during heavy rains and gets washed out to sea? It wasn't until the 1980s that New York connected Royte's sewage lines to a treatment plant. Before that, it all drained into the New York Bay, flowing in the general direction of the Statue of Liberty.

I, for one, also had no idea that New York City burned trash until 1994 and that plenty of other places around the country still do.

Most of the people in the trash business whom Royte interviewed tried to make the case that they were doing something good for the planet, and it's hard to dispute.

After all, someone has to deal with all that stuff we throw out.

So recycling must be superimportant, right? The answer here is surprisingly nuanced.

Paper or plastic? Well, Royte points out that it just doesn't matter all that much. Plastic is bad, bad, bad, but paper is much bulkier, and paper production is certainly no friend to the environment.

Some fundamentalist environmentalist recyclers refuse to accept plastic, saying that nothing worthwhile happens with the recycled material anyway and that it's the production of the plastic that's environmentally destructive.

To get all wrapped up about that is to get wrapped up in the tiniest of minutiae, especially given what Royte calls the "mind-boggling statistic that municipal solid waste constitutes just 2 percent of the nation's waste."

That's right, what you and every other family in America throws out adds up to one-fiftieth of the waste discarded, with the rest being produced by industry, mining, agriculture, etc. to provide us with pork chops, pillows, paddleballs and the rest.

So the most adamant of the anti-trash church advocate essentially not buying anything new, anything wrapped in plastic, etc.

Royte quotes a Marxist graduate student who says that just throwing whatever you want into the trash is fine. "There are very few environmental benefits to recycling," the student says, adding that recycling is just a big corporate mind job.

In the end, Royte seems to advocate recycling mainly as a philosophical exercise, a way to keep people aware about what they're throwing out.

That isn't such a bad rationale, considering that most of us toss our trash without giving it a second thought. Still, for all the minutiae Royte covers, there's one issue she never tackles: the amount of trash generated by the thousands and thousands of copies of her book that are printed, distributed in cardboard boxes and, if not sold, sent almost certainly to a landfill.

To prevent that, there's a simple solution: Buy a copy of this book. Garbage Land is a thoughtful look at the history and future of trash. Most important, it's a look at what we can learn about ourselves by studying what we discard.

Scott C. Yates is a freelance writer and entrepreneur living in Denver.