Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Waring’s war on waste soon hit an insuperable enemy: cost. The reduction plant was shut down for lack of funds. Complaints from residents about the smell did not help. The First World War was not over before the city was again dumping its refuse into the ocean.

  The case of New York City was emblematic of the dialectic of urban waste at the time. Cities simultaneously caused growing volumes of waste and pioneered new solutions, such as the reduction plant and incinerators; by 1914, Budapest, Amsterdam and London all had their own sorting plants. The new standards of cleanliness made society less tolerant of waste and, at the same time, made it produce more, with wrappers and packaging to keep products clean and new disposable products such as Kleenex, which arrived in 1924. Above all, collecting bins from every household was hugely expensive, adding a major item to city budgets and taxes. Rising wages added to the bill. The earnings from Waring’s recycling plant had been barely enough to pay the women sifting through the rubbish there. Waste started losing some of its value, partly because its composition was changing as urban residents bought more prepared foods with fewer scraps, partly because industries found new substitutes for previously precious waste byproducts. In the fields, Fritz Haber’s process converted atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Fertilizer was plucked from the air instead of the toilet. In paper making, wood pulp (processed with sulphites) eliminated the dependence on rags; the first chemical pulping mill opened in 1890, in Sweden. The earlier regime of recycling, in which waste from households flowed back to farms and industry, unravelled at both ends.

  Waring’s philosophy relied on the collaboration of citizens, but residents proved less conscientious than rag pickers about separating materials. Physical analyses of rubbish revealed how much valuable material now ended up in the bin. In Washington DC in 1914, 10 per cent of household rubbish was tinware; another 10 per cent bottles. In New York, at the slip station on 13th Street, almost half consisted of marketable objects; a third was paper.20 All of this made recycling increasingly challenging and unattractive to cities. Food waste was notoriously heavy. It was much easier to instruct residents to burn it on their coal fire, as many American and European cities did in the early twentieth century. That way, municipal collectors had a lighter load. Homes became little incinerators; tellingly, in winter, the amount of food waste in bins dropped to a fraction of that in summertime.21 In 1903, Charlottenburg, then still its own city west of Berlin, was one of the first emulators of New York City’s sorting model. Households had a special garbage cabinet with three parts – kitchen waste went into the top-right half, ash and dust in the drawer below, and other bulky rubbish into the left side. The food waste was then cleaned, boiled and strained before being served to pigs. It was an expensive operation, because the kitchen waste rarely arrived pure, and dangerous items had to be picked out manually. Swine fever was the final nail in the coffin. In 1917, after less than a decade, the swill enterprise was dead.22

  Municipal waste management, then, had many unintended consequences. What had started as a crusade for public health and civic renewal ended up in the hands of engineers who focused on finding the best and cheapest technologies for getting rid of waste by either burying or burning it. In Britain, the first ‘destructor’ opened in Leeds in 1874. On the eve of the First World War, there were five hundred incinerators across Britain. The first ‘sanitary landfills’ appeared in the 1920s; America’s first opened in Fresno in 1934.23 By the 1960s, ‘controlled tipping’ took care of around 90 per cent of household waste in Britain and the United States. In France and Germany, it was around 70 per cent with another 20 per cent going up in flames in incinerators. The changing composition of waste – with its higher calorific value – and the sheer difficulty of handling the growing volume led to a new appreciation of waste as primary energy, with waste-to-energy plants mushrooming in European cities in the 1960s. None of these technological solutions guaranteed perfect elimination. Fly-tipping was a common sight. Cleanliness provided no immunity against the growing wave of packaging, plastic and other consumer waste. In 1972, German chambers of commerce guessed that one in thirteen unwanted cars was dumped in the woods or abandoned on a quiet road; in Saarbrücken, it was one in four.24

  It is important to stress how haphazard and uneven the adoption of these new strategies of waste disposal has been. Different cities confronted quite different challenges. Partly, this reflected standards of living and degrees of commercialization. New Yorkers in 1900 threw away three to four times as much as Londoners, Parisians and Berliners. But even among cities with fairly similar conditions, there were astonishing differences. In Vienna, glass made up 22 per cent of household waste in one district; in nearby Prague it was only 3 per cent.25 Composting did not suddenly disappear – or at least not everywhere. In the 1930s, the Netherlands installed a plant that by the early 1950s turned 163,000 tons of domestic refuse from The Hague and Groningen into agricultural compost a year; locomotives carried the waste to Wyster, where it was dumped six foot deep into composting cells, regularly sprinkled with water and then left to decompose for six months, before a grab crane pulled it out, leaving tins and bottles behind.26 Even in New York City, over 600 tons of swill a day were still collected for pigs in the early 1950s – not as much kitchen waste as what was burnt in incinerators but still a fairly impressive 16 per cent. It was only after the outbreak of a national swine virus and the discovery that uncooked meats were the source of parasites that could be transmitted to humans that this kind of recycling went rapidly out of fashion.27 In 1955 Hamburg, with the post-war boom in full swing, there were 185 Altwarenläden, shops buying and selling old goods. ‘Old iron’ traders and rag-and-bone men could still be seen in European cities in the 1960s and 1970s. In much of rural Europe, the municipal waste revolution had yet to arrive; communal waste collection did not reach one in three Bavarians at this time.28

  Outside the West, the notion of a simple progression from a traditional to a modern waste regime is even less helpful. Colonialism did export the municipal approach. In Tel Aviv, in the 1920s, for example, British authorities rolled out the foot-pedal dustbin, fined locals for throwing garbage into their yards and ran education campaigns. Here, as in London and Liverpool, the municipal conquest of waste was inspired by ideals of public health and cleanliness, but it was reshaped by colonial ideology. It was a top-down effort, not a shared project for active citizens, as it had been for progressives like Waring. The dominant language was one of command and punishment, since, after all, the natives were not ready to clean their own villages, let alone run them. Colonial authorities rarely had the inclination or money for a comprehensive separation of human from solid waste. Thus Tel Aviv got compulsory European toilets in the 1930s but no sewage system to carry the excrement away. Municipal services tended to favour the districts of the colonial rulers, reinforcing their identity as clean and civilized masters reigning over dirty and barbarian subjects.29

  In Shanghai, the epitome of modernity in the East, recycling, bins, landfill and incineration all complemented each other. In 1905, the Municipal Council ruled that from then on all refuse had to be placed in designated receptacles for collection; the galvanized iron bins could be obtained from the Convict Labour Department at the city jail. The containers were to be taken directly by Chinese barrows to garbage chutes on the creeks. From there, the waste would be shipped to nearby farms or the depot. All this was easier said than done. At the end of the year, the Council reported ‘much difficulty . . . in changing the old habits of native residents of indiscriminately throwing all refuse out of the door’. Over 1,000 offenders were prosecuted. For every single one fined, several new migrants arrived with their own ways of dealing with refuse. Boat coolies continued to dump refuse into the Soochow Creek. Plague prevention – Shanghai was hit by cholera in 1907 – saw the introduction of a standard concrete house-refuse container with an ‘efficient and satisfactory lock’, devised by the ‘ingenuity of Inspectors’, to prevent rag pickers from going throug
h the rubbish and strewing it about the alleyways. But these concrete receptacles were more suitable for large foreign buildings than for Chinese houses, which lacked the watchmen to supervise their appropriate use. By 1924, there were still an estimated 2,000 rag pickers in the streets every morning. For the council, public health and recycling continued to go hand in hand: ‘the return of all refuse to the soil is the ideal to be strived for.’ Some 40 per cent of house refuse was sold to farmers in the 1920s. At the same time, residents were urged to burn ‘all combustible refuse, such as vegetable matter, paper, straw, etc’. Landfill and incineration were supplementary technologies. After two years in landfill, the refuse was considered pure enough to raise low-lying land. Waste regimes were seasonal. Farmers were interested in waste in spring and summer. Come September, they took very little. It was in autumn that the ‘destructor’ sprung into action. Millions of tons of human excrement were barged to the countryside as fertilizer as late as the 1980s.30

  The municipal revolution is a well-known chapter in urban history, but it was only part of the story. A second, equally important revolution was under way at the same time. In the early twentieth century, waste became a veritable keyword of social, moral and economic reform. There were campaigns for social, industrial and national efficiency.31 All were animated by a similar diagnosis: unnecessary waste was causing unemployment, inequality and national decline. In November 1920, Herbert Hoover was appointed president of the newly founded Federation of American Engineering Societies. One of his first acts was to launch an ambitious inquiry into waste in industry. Waste, the commission reported, was not an individual failing but systemic – the result of boom and bust, speculation, high labour turnover and inefficiency. Half of it was the fault of business owners and managers; a mere 20 per cent the fault of labour. But the consumer was also to blame. ‘In certain industries,’ the commission concluded, ‘the consuming public is to a degree responsible for seasonal fluctuations because of the eagerness with which it accepts or adopts changes in style.’ The clothing industry attracted particular ire with its ever faster changes of fashion – a customer was able to choose between 1,100 varieties of cloth. Style should be constrained by the ‘standpoint of usefulness and economy’.32 For Hoover and like-minded champions of productivity, the future lay with standardization. Car makers such as Henry Ford and home builders were leading the way.

  Critics of the throwaway society tend to view industry as the culprit, but it is important to recognize that industry, in addition to creating more products and more waste, also provided some of the answers by re-using materials in new ways. The gradual (if never complete) retreat of rag-and-bone men and recycling consumers was accompanied by industry taking over the role of scavenging. From the point of view of the materials, what changed was who did the collecting. Data does not allow us to say whether industrial recycling was more or less prodigal than private efforts. What available figures do suggest is that a lot of secondary materials found their way back into the cycle of production in the era normally associated with heedless waste. In 1951 America, electric light bulbs were 60 per cent broken glass. Up to 50 per cent of cullet (broken glass) was recovered overall. Disposable nappies used cotton waste. Four thousand firms sourced fats, grease and blood from meat waste to make cosmetics, gloves and guitar strings. A decade later, 2,000 firms were busy reconditioning carburetors and clutches, and Chrysler offered a warranty on rebuilt parts. Department stores had their own salvage paper bales. The Bell System, the telephone giant, scooped up old telephones and cables and ran its own smelting and refining works to get at the copper needed for wires; it recovered 20 per cent of the 2 million tons of copper consumed in the USA.33 Waste-material dealers filled the space vacated by the rag-and-bone man and sourced non-ferrous scrap metals for industry. Forty-five per cent of US steel was made from secondary materials. By 1970, the paper industry still took 20 per cent of its raw material from recovered waste, down from 35 per cent at the end of the Second World War – not, perhaps, enough to save the planet but still significant enough to save a forest of 200 million trees; in Britain at the time, it was 42 per cent. Even plastic – the synthetic material that more than any other symbolized the throwaway culture – did not all end up in landfill in the 1960s. Some 10 per cent was recovered, finding its way back into toys and the heels of shoes. In the United States, corporations made $8 billion from recycling, according to a contemporary expert.34

  The dilemma of the post-war boom was that such efforts were outpaced by an avalanche of consumer waste and a simultaneous drop in the price of virgin materials. Put bluntly, it had never been so cheap to buy new, nor so convenient to dispose of materials. As packaging and self-service spread, the concomitant rise in rubbish was stunning. In 1950 West Germany, peas, lentils and rice were mostly still sold loose. By the end of the decade, they all came pre-packaged. In the 1960s, household waste shot up from 200kg to 300kg a person a year, but, most worryingly, its volume doubled. In Berlin and Paris, half the rubbish was now packaging, mostly paper and cardboard; plastic still made up only 3 per cent of waste in 1971.35 In Canada, beer continued to be served in returnable bottles but, elsewhere, a new culture of convenience took over. Across the border, only eight out of every hundred containers were still returnable in 1966. People stopped returning bottles, and the drinks industry abandoned deposits. In New York City, the typical bottle now made only two trips to and from the store before it ended up as solid waste. In West Germany, the number of one-way bottles doubled in the course of the 1970s to reach 3 billion.36

  Disposable products polarized opinion. There were those who, in the 1960s, started to put the throwaway society on trial. In his sculpture Poubelle de Jim Dine (1961), Arman Feer exhibited a Plexiglass cylinder filled with the empty cigarette packs, cosmetic bottles and other packaging discarded by his Pop-artist friend. Conceptual artists set out to dematerialize art by placing concept over object. ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting,’ the American Douglas Huebner famously said in 1969. ‘I do not wish to add any more.’ Artists who piled up disbanded TV screens and car wrecks or who shredded their private possessions in front of museum audiences have been part of the art world ever since.

  Yet for every counter-cultural critic there were others who took a more cheerful attitude to waste or who openly celebrated rapid product turnover. Disposability and transience were an influential strand in modern art, aesthetics and architecture. For readers who have grown up in an age concerned with climate change, this might seem surprising. In their 1914 ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture’, Antonio Sant’Elia and F. T. Marinetti promised that ‘things will endure less than us.’37 For them, impermanence and material change were the mark of a dynamic society. Every generation ought to have its own new city, buildings and interiors. Conservation meant stagnation. For Archigram, a British group of avant-garde architects, material and stylistic obsolescence was the sign of a vibrant, sophisticated culture. Fashion literally became disposable when, in 1967, Bernard Holdaway created paper furniture and paper dresses; the dress sold for a pound, a fraction of its cotton rival.38 ‘Pop’ went the object.

  In visual arts, the twentieth century saw the rise of waste art. In 1913, the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp installed a bicycle wheel in his studio, the first of a string of mass-manufactured objects he turned into so-called ‘readymade’ pieces of art. In Germany after the First World War, and then from 1941 in exile in England, Kurt Schwitters similarly turned his attention to discarded objects, combining string, bits of newspapers and a pram wheel in installations and collages. In the 1950s, the American Robert Rauschenberg picked up where Duchamp and Schwitters had left off, playfully assembling metal scraps, Coca-Cola bottles and other debris in his ‘combine paintings’; Rauschenberg had seen some of Duchamp’s work and would meet him in 1959. Recycling ran in the family. Rauschenberg’s mother went as far as turning the suit in which her younger brother had been laid out into a skirt; later, in Yoicks, her son made a pa
inting from strips of fabric. In college, Rauschenberg drove a garbage truck. As a young, poor artist in Manhattan, he collected umbrellas and objects off the street. ‘I really feel sorry,’ he said, ‘for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly.’ In Monogram (1955–9), he wrapped a car tyre around the midriff of a stuffed angora goat; Rauschenberg had picked up the goat for $35 at a struggling office-supply store on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan (see Plate 72).

  Rauschenberg found beauty in waste and set in train a cultural revaluation of rubbish. This did not make him a critic of the affluent society, though. In fact, he was an optimistic waster. At home, he had a TV set in almost every room, running day and night. He was quite at ease with the affluent society that furnished him with the secondary materials for his art. In 1963, when a gallery in Florence put on a show of his scatole contemplative – wooden ‘thought boxes’ of junk he had collected on his European travels – an irritated Italian critic suggested they should be thrown into the Arno. Rauschenberg thanked him and took him at his word – it took care of the packing problem, he said.39