Packard touched a nerve. Things no longer seemed to last as long as they used to. They were made to break. Today, concern about waste is mainly about environmental pollution. Then, it was about national decline and moral decay. The United States, Packard worried, was turning from a ‘have’ into a ‘have-not’ nation, wasting its precious oil and copper and risking dependence on foreigners. There were neo-Malthusian undertones: together with a growing population, the reckless love of novelty was pushing the United States beyond its natural limits. The shift from frugality, quality and durability to a ‘wasteful, imprudent and carefree’ lifestyle was corroding the ‘American character’. The young were becoming ‘soft’ and decadent, lacking the discipline of their fathers. And the cult of consumer goods tended to ‘disenfranchise’ the housewife, taking away her skill and identity. Instead of mending shirts and darning socks, she took a job to buy more goods, leaving the family in a ‘morass’.3
As these remarks indicate, waste, like consumption, is a deeply moralistic subject. The narrative of waste has tended to follow that of consumer culture, with the twentieth century progressing inexorably towards ever greater wastefulness. Waste mountains appear as a physical reminder both of our addiction to more and our careless disregard for objects and the resources that go into creating them. Writing in 1999, the American historian Susan Strasser noted how, for her fellow citizens, ‘discarding things is taken to be a kind of freedom’. They had lost the ‘stewardship of objects’ of their nineteenth-century forebears. A culture of re-use – where broken earthenware was mended by boiling it in milk and materials were recycled – was displaced by a culture of disposal. For Strasser, the loss of caring for things reflected a switch in the United States from being a nation of producers to one of consumers. Repairing and recycling, she writes, came ‘more easily to people who make things’.4
The rise of the ‘throwaway society’ has defined the way we think about waste. How much of it is true, though? In attempting to answer this question, our focus will largely have to be on affluent societies, not on waste and scavenging in poorer ones, because we are interested in whether societies when they get richer become more careless and wasteful. There are three dimensions to this question which call for particular attention and shape the main lines of inquiry of the pages to come. The first is a classic problem of history and concerns the nature and direction of change over time. The throwaway thesis presumes not only a parallel rise between consuming and wasting. It sees history as a succession of stages, where, in the course of the twentieth century, one social order (‘traditional’, re-using) gave way to another (‘modern’, throwing away). The second issue is about comparison. As the original protagonist, the United States naturally features in the historical vanguard of the throwaway society. Just as other societies have charted their own paths to consumer culture, however, it is worth pondering whether all affluent societies necessarily end up with the same waste heap.
Finally, there is the problem of how we track wastefulness across time and space. This is, perhaps, the most intriguing issue. In part, it is about what we count. Developed societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century are much richer than a century ago. Many more objects enter households today, so we would expect households to throw out more than their poorer ancestors; low-income societies today produce less waste than high-income ones. What is more interesting is whether they are also relatively more wasteful. To know this, we cannot treat throwing away in isolation but must see it as just one way of getting rid of stuff among others, including gifting and giving things to charity shops or storing them in the garage. It also matters where we look for waste. The throwaway thesis takes the private consumer as the unit of analysis. But materials and objects have a long journey behind them before they cross the threshold of the home. These stages can be more or less wasteful and may have little or nothing to do with the relative thrift or prodigality of Mr and Mrs Consumer. To know how wasteful modern societies are, we should also ask about the materials and energy that go into the buildings, cities and infrastructures that enable our high levels of consumption in the first place. After looking at household waste, therefore, we need to look at discarding and material flows more generally.
THE MAKING OF WASTE
Let us start by lifting the lid on the garbage can. With its dense population and shortage of vacant land, New York City kept a close eye on the changing composition of refuse from the early twentieth century onwards. Residents had to segregate it into three categories for separate collection: ash, ‘garbage’ (mainly food waste) and all other ‘rubbish’. Thanks to the engineer Daniel Walsh, who has mined the samples recorded by the city, we have a snapshot of change between 1905 and 1989.5 The most dramatic change affected ash, which declined as coal gave way to oil and natural gas for heating and cooking. At the start of the century, waste was mainly ash. From the mid-century, a new kind of ‘affluent waste’ emerges: ash free but heavy in paper and, from the 1960s, with rising amounts of plastic. New Yorkers were now throwing away less glass and metal – a combined result of the plastic bottle, the aluminium can and ‘lightweighting’, which made it possible to produce thinner glass bottles and metal tins. The results become more startling once ash is taken out of the equation. Food refuse made up the same share in 1905 as it did in 1989. In 1939, bins contained more paper than fifty years later. Stunningly, New Yorkers threw out more ash-free waste in 1939 than at any time since – 500kg per person, compared to roughly 440kg a year since the 1980s. Equally remarkable, it was the era of affluence (the 1950s–’60s) which saw residential waste plummet to its lowest point in the twentieth century: around 360kg per person.
The example of New York City is a reminder of the long trail of waste, especially paper. At the same time, it illustrates how difficult it is to translate such historic data into conclusions about how wasteful we are. Most old samples measured weight, but this gives only part of the picture. One reason less waste ended up in New York bins in the 1960s was that it was now being diverted and burnt in residential incinerators; Walsh estimates that around 25 per cent went up in flames. This still leaves waste in the 1960s lighter than in the 1930s. If we asked about volume and material substance instead, we would arrive at a different picture. The decline of ash and the rise in packaging shifted the challenge of waste from weight to volume, and this makes comparison across time treacherous. Plastics and other new materials also have longer life spans and have introduced previously unknown forms of environmental pollution. Nor do we know precisely what was thrown away. Food waste fell in the half-century after 1939, but this was probably because the rise of frozen foods, ready meals and peeled fruit and vegetables eliminated a lot of peels and trimmings. Today, more edible food goes into the bin instead. That the weight of household waste has been persistent since the 1980s, in spite of bottles and packaging getting lighter, suggests people throw more items away, not fewer. In addition, the figures report only what people throw away at home and are silent about the additional waste caused by the rise in eating out and fast food.
Overall, we are left with a paradox. At the end of the twentieth century, New Yorkers were eight times richer than at the beginning, but their rubbish weighed slightly less. At the same time, they were throwing out many more bottles, containers and meals. From the point of view of material mass, they were less wasteful; from that of human behaviour, more so.
We have so far used the term ‘waste’ freely, as if it is self-explanatory, but it was only in the late nineteenth century that it acquired its modern meaning, referring to the disposal of unwanted stuff. In Old English, ‘waste’, from the Latin vastus, referred to wild or empty land. It could imply squandering, as in the biblical parable of the young man who left his home to ‘waste his substance on riotous living’ (Luke 15). Around 1800, Europeans used ‘waste’, Abfall and déchet to capture the loss of a substance in the course of production, such as the woodchips on an artisan’s floor or the chaff in threshing. There was a synergy between s
uch physical and metaphysical associations, but they were not about garbage. Under Abfall, in their German dictionary (1852), the Brothers Grimm follow the example of the leaf ‘falling off’ the tree with that of the angel falling away from God.6 Humans had long thrown away bones, food and objects that were no longer wanted; the first landfills in Knossos date back to 3000 BCE, and we know from archaeologists that Mayans in Belize in 900 CE threw away perfectly good items.7 But it was only in the late nineteenth century, once these material remnants were put in dedicated bins and separated from human faeces and urine, and cities took over collection from rag pickers, that they acquired a distinct identity as ‘waste’. ‘Municipal solid waste’ (MSW) was born, separated from human liquid waste.
MSW is a tricky category, since it records what cities pick up rather than what households dispose of. To this day, it includes rubbish from schools, parks, some shops and firms, and farms to various degrees. In Copenhagen, for example, household waste makes up only 30 per cent of MSW; in the United States it is 60 per cent, in Britain 89 per cent. How waste is defined matters hugely. Japan, which follows a different nomenclature, treats paper, glass and other refuse as valuable resources. It does not include them in its official waste figures, which, consequently, look minuscule. In an ideal world, we would want to capture everything that a consumer throws out, from the paper at home to the Styrofoam cup at work and the left-over food on the plate in a restaurant. Sadly, in the real world, data is organized by who does the collecting, not by who generates waste. Where possible I have tried to give separate figures for household waste, but in the following pages it is important to bear this caveat in mind.
There are probably few concepts in modern times that have attracted a greater variety of interpretations than waste. For many writers and artists, it has encapsulated the human condition. Sigmund Freud imagined the psyche as a constant system that created waste as it generated excitement – a notion he borrowed from thermodynamics and its recognition that all work involved the waste of energy through heat loss.8 More recent writers have defined waste as a way of ‘holding things in a state of absence’.9 Many invoke the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who famously defined dirt as ‘matter out of place’, a byproduct of categorizing something as clean in the first place.10 There is a vast gulf between these approaches and the pages of waste-management journals, where engineers analyse material density, incinerators and recycling mechanisms. Readers of the former rarely bother with the latter, and vice versa. This is a shame because, to understand the evolution of waste, we need both. Waste is relative, a matter of culture and shifting meanings. But it is also physical matter, shaped by products and practices, infrastructures and technologies of collection and disposal. In fact, it was engineers who already in the years around 1900 argued that garbage was not ‘worthless waste but matter in the wrong place’, in the words of Hans Thiesing, a scientific member of the Royal Testing Station for water supply and waste-water removal in Berlin, the oldest institute for environmental health in Europe.11 Domestic refuse, Thiesing stressed, included food waste that, once separated, made excellent fertilizer. Waste is not something that humans have always repressed or tried to hide, as some writers like to imagine, nor is it naturally the opposite of value.
Since the mid-nineteenth century waste has undergone a series of remarkable metamorphoses that changed its value and the places, people and practices connected with its disposal and recovery. We can loosely distinguish three transitions: from dustyards (where ‘dust’ or coal ash was collected) and rag pickers to municipal control in the pursuit of cleanliness and public health in the late nineteenth century; the rise of ‘burn or bury’ engineering solutions in the early and mid-twentieth century which treated rubbish as cost; and its resurrection as a valuable material since the 1970s, with citizen-consumers doing the recycling. None of these transitions was smooth or perfect. Let us have a closer look at how they played out in different settings.
Dustyards and rag-and-bone men were central actors in the systems of re-use and recycling that pervaded Western cities in the nineteenth century. Rags, bones and other secondary materials were important industrial inputs at a time when raw materials were scarce and technological substitution limited – rags were turned into paper and wallpaper, bones into glue. As late as 1884, there were around 40,000 rag pickers (chiffoniers) in Paris; across France, recycling is estimated to have employed half a million people, most of them women and children. By the mid-century, a dual system was emerging in many European cities, with licensed collectors picking up rubbish in the morning and informal gatherers operating at night. In early-nineteenth-century London, dustyards took recycling to a new level, recovering ‘soil’ (coal ash), ‘breeze’ (bits of coal) and cinders. Dust made good fertilizer but, as London grew, it was even more valuable for making bricks. By the 1840s, the dustyards’ days were numbered, as cheap ‘Oxford clay’ and new forms of brickmaking took over.12
Recycling created a virtuous link between consumers, industry and agriculture. It would be wrong, though, to imagine it as a closed loop or a self-sufficient local metabolism in which material energy keeps circulating through the same veins. Materials were re-used, but not necessarily by the same community that threw them out. Local economies got injections from far-away places. A good deal of Londoners’ dust ended up in the bricks used to rebuild Moscow after the 1812 fire. Shirts and jackets discarded by their Parisian owners were worn across Europe, North Africa and Latin America; in 1867, over 800 tons of old clothes were exported from France.13 The rag trade was a global business. Britain, the United States and Germany each sucked in tens of thousands tons of rags.14 With the Lancashire cotton industry in full swing, British rags, not surprisingly, were especially rich in cotton (50 per cent), not a plant that grew on British soil fertilized by British sewage. The growing portions of Danish butter and American beef consumed by Londoners equally contained a lot of embedded energy and water that never found its way back into their original eco-systems. In brief, local recycling fed off the international extraction and permanent transfer of materials.
In the light of today’s concerns about landfill sites and pollution, it is tempting to extol a Victorian mentality of thrift and recycling. However, all this recycling probably says more about infrastructures than minds or habits. Rag pickers and second-hand dealers existed because people were buying new, increasingly cheap and mass-manufactured clothes and getting rid of old items rather than recycling them into napkins or curtains, as the Pepys family still did in the 1660s. In 1830s America, families had no problem with throwing out an eight-place porcelain table setting that was barely damaged.15 Things were recovered only where systems of recovery were in place. Without them, consumers picked their own methods of disposal. In 1893 Boston, the sanitary committee observed how many residents burnt their refuse ‘while others wrap it up in paper and carry it on their way to work and drop it when unobserved, or throw it into vacant lots or into the river’.16 Whether burnt or set adrift, it would have contained paper and food waste that could have been re-used or composted. The Mississippi and Hudson were, similarly, treated as dumping grounds. Households in British cities were notorious for profligately throwing away partly burnt coal.
The waste bin announced the coming of a new era. On 24 November 1883, the prefect of the Seine, Eugène Poubelle, ordered all Parisians to put their refuse in a bin and place it outside for collection, between 6.30 and 8.30 in the morning during summertime, and between 8 and 9 a.m. in the winter; neither shards of glass or pottery nor oyster shells were allowed. Poubelle won the honour of giving his name to the French dustbin (la poubelle), but not without a fight. What right did the city have to take over waste collection? Was rubbish not the property of the householder? And what about the chiffoniers, how were they to earn a living? A year later, a compromise was reached. Residents were allowed to put out their rubbish from nine o’clock in the evening and no longer had to separate oyster shells. The chiffoniers were granted permission to sort
through the rubbish before the next morning, as long as they did so on top of a large blanket to contain the mess.17
Across the West, the dustbin symbolized the ideal of the sanitary city and of clean, democratic living. Its early years were plagued with problems – bins were of different materials and sizes, sometimes without lids. In Hamburg, they originally belonged to households, which caused endless headaches, since they were often thrown away together with the trash; the city introduced municipal bins only in 1926. Still, within a generation, the bin revolutionized waste. It simultaneously made it more convenient for residents to throw away more and marginalized rag pickers and existing channels of recycling; as bins got bigger, so did the amount of waste.18
The municipal takeover was paved with good intentions. Refuse and manure in streets were major health hazards, killing thousands of children through diarrhoea and infecting others, not least the rag pickers themselves. Clean streets would improve public health and raise civic spirit. The approach was not necessarily based on new scientific knowledge of germs. George Waring, the sanitation commissioner whose broom swept garbage off the streets of New York City, believed to his death in 1898 that disease was caused by miasma. The attack was three-pronged, combining sanitary reform and civic action with modern technologies to extract value from waste. For the progressive ‘colonel’ – Waring had served in the bright red Garibaldi Guards during the Civil War – waste producers were also citizens. They had to do their bit to create a clean, civilized community. Children, women’s groups and civic associations were mobilized to help the official ‘White Wings’. For Waring, civic awareness extended to disposal at home. Residents had to separate garbage (food waste) and rubbish (rags, paper, metal, glass) from ash; fifty officers went from door to door to instruct them. Individual sorting was crowned with a municipal sorting and ‘reduction’ plant on Barren Island, the first of its kind; its conveyor belt was fired by burning garbage. Rags were sold on to paper mills; grease and ammonia to soap makers and chemical industries. Ash was used to increase the size of Rikers Island.19
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