Jordan stumbled across his subject matter when he began photographing big piles of garbage at a Seattle landfill in 2003. At first he was entranced with the color schemes he found. Later some friends remarked that he was making a portrait of American culture and Jordan seized on that idea, quitting his job as a corporate lawyer to devote himself to documenting American excess.

His photographs attempt to illustrate the immense scale of our consumerism, depicting how many plastic cups the airline industry uses every six hours (1 million) or how many brown paper grocery sacks are used in the U.S. every hour (1.14 million), as is portrayed in this photograph.