'Garbology' has become a discipline in its own right, and is even taught in several universities in the US.Photo: AFP
Studying the contents of our trash is a practice known as "garbology". And it's by no means new, since this scientific discipline dates back to the 1980s.
When the United States was faced with a massive AIDS epidemic, employees of the city of Baltimore began to carefully inspect the contents of wastewater with a very specific aim: to count the number of used condoms that had been flushed, in order to measure the impact of campaigns deployed in the country to stop the spread of the virus.
