by JULIET WATERS

Reading Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, I was struck again and again what a perfect book this would be for a Spike Jonze/ Charlie Kaufman film.

Part cultural, political and social study, part environmentalist manifesto, mostly Garbage Land is a quirky, dark personal quest by a highly intelligent, possibly highly neurotic New York writer to find out just where her trash ends up. When I picture Royte sitting in her kitchen, meticulously and compulsively weighing her garbage so that she can compare it to statistical averages, boating down the suspicious waters of the Gowanus canal, and spending a night on the road with a couple of veteran NYC san men, somehow I keep seeing Meryl Streep.

But there is one great movie moment in particular. Royte has been trying desperately to get a tour of the Bethlehem landfill in Pennsylvania, where much of NYC's trash is shipped. Reasoning and pleading with the landfill's manager hasn't worked. Neither has trying to sneak through the surrounding wilderness. "The landfill, it turned out, was like Sleeping Beauty's castle, protected on its lower slopes by a thick overgrowth of spiky brambles." Finally she phones Al Wurth, a political scientist at a local college, to see if he has any insight into why she's having such a hard time getting access. Wurth explains: "They may arrange a tour for a class of third-graders, but they're not going to let a writer in,"

"Geez" says Royte, frustrated. " I mean, what have they got to hide?"

"Look," says Wurth, significantly, "this isn't goods they're transferring from place to place. This is bads."

In the movie, this would be where we meet up with the mob. In the book, we get an interesting little history lesson on why "waste management" really isn't just a cover for Tony Soprano. Carting waste in our day and age is a huge business, which until very recently has been controlled without much opposition by organized crime. In the early '90s, however, transportation conglomerates began to undercut the "little guy." One supervisor early in the war reported finding the head of a German Shepherd on his lawn with a note in its mouth, reading "Welcome to New York." Loosening the mob's hold on garbage was one of Giuliani's first projects, and it's been largely successful; but the nature of the job, its repulsiveness to "upstanding citizens" who prefer not to look too closely at it, will always make it a magnet for criminals.

The business of garbage, however, wasn't always this dirty, and it seems in many ways to be becoming less and less so. Royte also visits some pretty cool large-scale sanitation projects. As the lead character in Don DeLillo's Underworld points out, garbage, more than almost anything, is one of the most significant motivations for building a civilization. These days, the pressure to recycle and detox has created whole new social sciences.

Yet, Royte's quest turns out to be essentially Quixotic. After a long, amazing journey that charts a spectacle of disposal as awesome sometimes as a trip to Alaska or the Grand Canyon, we learn that Municipal Solid Waste - the only kind of trash she's been tracking - makes up a mere 2 per cent of waste in the U.S. The other 98 per cent is industrial, agricultural and mining, a fact that no amount of green boxing is going to change. Recycling is always a good thing, but all in all, Royte decides it's mostly a balm on the conscience of people who aren't really willing to change what really needs to be changed.

For every 100 pounds of product that is made, 3,200 pounds of waste are generated. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but essentially, we don't need to find new ways to deal with our old crap. What we really need to do is make a radical decision to stop producing and buying so much new crap. And something tells me this is a true story Hollywood will probably want to stay far, far away from.

GARBAGE LAND BY ELIZABETH ROYTE, LITTLE, BROWN, HC, 304PP, $24.95