Things cast a huge shadow even in their afterlife. In this book, we have followed the ups and downs of recycling. Today, many cities pride themselves on being committed to zero waste and point to ambitious goals of increasing recycling and diverting waste from landfill. But genuine zero waste would have to mean zero depletion. Two sustainable designers have proposed a zero-waste index to measure how well cities perform. Their comparison of three self-proclaimed zero-waste cities – Adelaide, San Francisco and Stockholm – is sobering. Adelaide has banned shopping bags and recycles half its municipal solid waste. Still, its zero-waste index was a mere 0.23 – recovering only 23 per cent of resources from everything thrown away. In Stockholm, it was a dire 0.17 – of a Stockholmer’s 480kg of annual waste, only 79kg succeeded in replacing virgin materials. Only San Francisco managed to recover half of its waste. Since many products carry a lot of embedded energy with them, recovery can make a huge difference – San Francisco substituted almost twice as much energy from the materials it recovered as Adelaide and Stockholm. By avoiding more landfill, San Francisco also saved twice as many greenhouse-gas emissions as the other two cities.117
All this does not mean we should belittle the advances in energy efficiency and waste management that have taken place in the last half-century. These have been nothing short of spectacular. Notwithstanding earlier campaigns for greater efficiency, the rich world was a hugely wasteful place in 1973 when the first oil crisis hit. Art Rosenfeld, who as a young man cut his teeth in particle physics with the Nobel-Prize-winner Enrico Fermi, before maturing into the father of energy efficiency in California, recalled how in November 1973 he decided to switch off the lights in the twenty offices of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, only to find that the switches were hidden behind filing cabinets, bookcases and posters. The lights were on twenty-four hours a day. In public as in private life, waste was endemic. One investigation the following year found that Americans encountered ten times as much artificial light outside as inside the home, even though they worked during daylight and spent their evenings at home.118 There were two ways to meet California’s hunger for energy: build new power stations or squeeze more out of existing energy. New building codes, heat-mirror windows that reflected nearby infrared radiation and prevented invisible heat from leaking out, the use of high-frequency ballasts that made it possible for 16-watt compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) to radiate as much light as the old 70-watt incandescent light bulb and lasted longer, more efficient appliances and car engines – together, these measures saved huge amounts of energy. Better homes and building standards alone saved California the annual output of two and a half 1-gigawatt power plants. In a single decade (1975–85), the energy used in a new home per square foot for heating and cooling fell by a staggering 50 per cent.119
The real problem is not efficiency but why these measures have not been enough. In California, it is true, demand for power was no longer rising at the rate of 6 per cent a year per person as it had since the end of the Second World War, but it was not falling either. All efficiency measures did was to keep things steady, at the high plateau that had been reached by the early 1970s. In the rest of the country, Americans used twice as much electricity in 2008 as in 1968. In other advanced societies, many experts in these years predicted that private energy use would fall or at least stay put.120 Reality proved otherwise. In Britain, for example, domestic energy consumption rose fairly steadily, by 30 per cent between 1970 and 2005, though it has fallen again since. In the old European Union (EU15), residential electricity use jumped by 40 per cent in the 1990s and 2000s; only Germany and Bulgaria managed to keep it static.121 More generally, prognoses of saturation have been belied by the proliferation of stuff in our lives. As in the case of waste reduction, in their use of energy and materials, private households have proved far more stubborn and far less responsive than shops and industries. Why?
In a way, the answer has already been given in this book. It has followed how consumption has changed across time and space and stressed that rising demand is not a simple economic function, nor just a play for status, but is shaped by the interplay between political, social and cultural forces. This is as true for the period since the 1970s as it is for the five previous centuries. Those predicting in the 1970s that households in advanced, rich societies would become saturated once everyone had a TV, a fridge, and most had a car were wrong because they ignored a fundamental dynamic of consumer societies: standards, norms, technologies and habits change.
For one, efficiency carried with it the in-built dilemma that it saved people money, which could be spent on bigger things or greater comfort. Efficiency and consumption shadowed each other. Indeed, the latter often outfoxed and undercut the former – the so-called rebound effect.122 Fridges became more efficient, but they also doubled in size. Appeals to consumers to curb their waste have often been naïvely complicit here. As an official campaign urging French people to switch off lights and keep their thermostats at 19 degrees explained in 2011: save on heat and you have more money to go on holiday.123 Engines were made more fuel-efficient, allowing car makers and owners to expect more horsepower under the hood. The energy used per square foot in new American homes may have fallen, but the houses themselves ballooned. Total energy use in American homes has remained constant since 1978. What was saved thanks to ‘low-E’ windows and more efficient heating was blown away through air conditioners and a greater number of appliances.124 A generation ago, offices in cities like Vienna were cooled by opening the window. Today, half of them are airconditioned, as new office designs have eliminated through-flow to make the most out of rentable space. In Sweden – a pioneer of energy saving – efficiency gains have been eaten up by a 40 per cent increase in the number of homes.125
The shrinkage of families and the rise of single households has been a contributing factor. This does not mean that all singles are more wasteful. Solo living includes thrifty grannies as well as profligate youngsters. Intriguingly, a 1972 survey of roadside collection in New Haven, Connecticut, found that the bigger the family, the larger the waste bin, relatively and absolutely; a mother who had to look after four or five children rather than one, it was reasoned, bought more goods and fewer services.126 From a general perspective of material use, however, such snippets are exceptions to the rule. Individuals who live on their own depend proportionally on a larger amount of embedded material and operational energy, just as the small carton of a pint of milk proportionally uses more paper than a two-gallon one. The problem is compounded by the individual ownership of appliances. In 2009 in the United States, every one-person household had a television – a third of them had two, and 13 per cent even three sets. Two thirds had their own washing machine and dryer. Every second single household had their own dishwasher.127 Many had a large 19–22 cubic feet fridge: why go for a small fridge just because you are a small household? Freecycle and virtual sharing is nice but it means little as long as singles in their own homes live by the motto of ‘to everyone their own machine’.
Inside the home, standards of comfort and more intensive habits and practices have risen in tandem. Central heating – still a rarity in 1950s Europe – has not only diffused warmth to previously chilly rooms but has helped to raise the temperature considered normal by several degrees; from 16°C to 19°C in Britain in little over a decade since 1990. Smarter boilers, a cult of fitness and busyness and ideas of athletic beauty mean that most people in the rich world no longer wash over the sink or have a weekly bath but have a hot shower at least once a day, if not more. People and their clothes have never been cleaner. The volume of laundry has risen five-fold in Britain in the course of the twentieth century. In the USA, most singles run two to five loads a week, which hints at the great frequency with which clothes are changed these days.128 With the homes, bathrooms, urban infrastructures and leisure spaces they design, urban planners, architects and policy-makers are busy encrypting such ‘normal’ conventions and practices into the material fabric of our fut
ure lives. It is difficult to revert to communal bathing once the bathhouse has been sold off and turned into condominiums.129
More than ever before, the home has morphed into one gigantic socket. In the United Kingdom, the electricity used by household appliances has doubled in the three decades since the 1973 oil crisis. Bigger freezers and bigger TVs are part of the story, but so is the influx of a new generation of gadgets, from Game Boys to digital phones and cameras which need their batteries recharged. In 2009, the average British home had more than ten times as many consumer electronic goods as in 1990. Notwithstanding energy efficiency and an attack on the silent waste of stand-by, energy consumption rose six-fold. In the United States, 5 million desktop computers were sold in 1983. Twenty years later, it was 35 million. New technological features, such as plasma screens, ensured that older products, too, never reached a point of saturation. In 2003, almost twice as many TVs were sold in the USA as in 1983.130
The home mirrors the faster circulation of material flows at a global level. Our material metabolism has quickened – not for every person but for most. New stuff and gadgets have grabbed the attention, but what is, perhaps, more troubling is that the proliferation has affected older kinds of articles and more conventional goods just as much. In 2006, British women bought twice as many clothes as they had ten years earlier. It is not only more electronic goods but more furniture that ends up on the waste heap; in the USA, the amount of furniture in municipal solid waste almost doubled between 1960 and 2009, reaching 9.9 million tons.131 Greater access to storage outside the home has failed to stop the pressure for space within it – quite the opposite. Professional storage and loft and kitchen extensions are symptoms of the same problem, just in different places. In the United States, the typical large kitchen in 2004 contained 330 different and a total of 1,019 items. Even a small one had a total of 655 items – three times as many as in 1948. Waffle irons, blenders, grapefruit spoons and espresso cups are all competing for space. Countertops have consequently been getting bigger, as have drawers. The ideal of the eat-in-kitchen, where hosts can demonstrate their culinary skills, has added recipe books and specialized equipment, even if these are rarely used. In Britain, this ideal of the kitchen as a social rather than a work space has had particularly sharp consequences, because new British homes, uniquely, have shrunk rather than grown. The arrival of a dishwasher or a fancy cappuccino maker quickly overwhelmed the available space, especially once the kitchen was meant to be the heart of the home and accommodate a table and chairs. The only solution was to renovate the kitchen, move walls or dig out the basement.132
We can imagine two ideal worlds of material efficiency. One is ruled by a culture of austerity, where people live by the mantra of ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do’. The other is a more dynamic and intense regime where lots of things race at high speed without causing waste and damage because the flow is circular and so efficient that old is constantly turned into new. At present, we are a long way from the first but not much nearer to the second. In popular mentality and everyday life, the debate about wastefulness has been dominated by the waste bin and the recycling container – so much so that it often seems as if we hold the answer to the problem of waste in our own hands as long as we remember to return bottles and espresso pods and sort our garbage responsibly. A study of five European cities in 2002 found that, everywhere, waste was the one environmental issue that mattered most to consumers. Using second-hand goods and eating less meat, by contrast, ‘were not important at all’.133 This is a dangerously lop-sided state of affairs. For the planet, re-using glass bottles and separating food waste is a nice gesture, but it is the busy, energy-hungry lives we lead at home and on the roads and in the air that are the real threat. Domestic waste needs to be put in perspective. In a rich society such as Britain, almost a third of all CO2 emissions come from our homes. Personal travel raises it to 47 per cent. Recycling has been little more than a comforting distraction from the stuff that really matters.
Epilogue
What is to be done?
Our lifestyle is characterized by high and rising levels of consumption, in rich societies and increasingly in developing societies, too. Yet resources are finite and consuming them carries significant environmental costs. Most readers will be aware of this problem. There is now an industry of forecasts and models, utopias and dystopias, and global conferences setting goals for a more sustainable world by 2020 or 2050. Most of these begin in the present and then project forward to a better future. This book, on the other hand, offers a historical perspective. It looks to the past to bring to light the long-term forces and deeper currents that have made consumption ever more central in modern societies. It is this longer history that continues to shape the way we use, live with and think about things.
A good deal of current analysis and policy is restless, always in search of the next best technological solution or regulatory goalpost. History is often little more than a point of departure from which to escape. Or it can serve as a backdrop to contrast the present with an unspecified industrial or pre-industrial era, as if the past was cast out of solid blocks. Some of the sentiment is understandable. A lot of environmental damage has already been done, so it is tempting to draw a line now and focus on more sustainable forms of consumption in the future. Historical knowledge can appear an indulgence when compared to the hard sciences and engineering which are cracking on with the immediate task of developing more efficient products and delivering cleaner energy. It therefore rarely makes it into the tool kit.
But the past is not just a costly page in the ledger of humanity that we can turn over as simply as that. Our material history is not prior: we carry it with us today and it is bound to affect our future. By revealing the diversity and dynamics of change, historical knowledge also enables us to look with fresh eyes at what today can appear to be normal, natural and immutable – for what is normal today was not so in the past and, inversely, a lot of what appeared normal to previous cultures would strike us as abnormal today. A historical perspective is therefore essential if we want to understand the surge of consumption and its underlying causes, and the first step before we can evaluate what are more or less promising remedies.
In recent discourse, the critique of ‘consumerism’ has, notably, come in two guises. For the first, the root of the problem is a social and moral failure: people want constantly more than they really need, egged on by brands, advertisers and corporations and by their own desire to show off and emulate their superiors. The second sees ‘consumerism’ as part of a larger obsession with economic growth that triumphed after the Second World War.1 Liberate rich societies from the gospel of growth and switch to ‘zero growth’, and the unsustainable surge of material goods will come to a stop. Sometimes, the two views work together. Neither offers a compelling historical account.
Complaints about conspicuous consumption by the rich and by others who spend beyond their means in an attempt to imitate them are as old as human civilization. There is nothing particularly new or modern about it. In the first century CE, the Roman philosopher Seneca worried constantly about the way riches turned lesser mortals into slaves to pleasure.2 In the mid-eighteenth century, Rousseau and other thinkers attacked the corrupting lust for luxury. But the world’s material metabolism has accelerated enormously since. Clearly, status-seeking cannot be the principal explanation for our unprecedented levels of consumption. To focus on shopping sprees, branded accessories or luxury yachts misses the wood for the trees. True, some goods and leisure practices involve showing off. In the larger picture, though, these represent just a small fraction of our voracious material desire. Most goods and services are acquired and used for other purposes, such as creating a comfortable home and fashioning one’s identity, in the pursuit of activities and entertainment, or being with friends and family. In brief, the focus on showing off comes from an ancient moral script that is out of synch with the present scale of consumption and the threat it poses to the planet. Ev
en if it were possible to outlaw all luxury bags, designer watches and other items of conspicuous consumption tomorrow, it is hard to see how this would make a big difference to what is currently an unsustainable use of material resources. Nor is it clear that such measures would necessarily be fair and democratic. Who would decide what is conspicuous or excessive for whom? The lesson of the sumptuary laws in early modern Europe is that it was patrician men who used such measures mainly to repress the material lives of women. It tends to be well-off commentators, like Seneca, who berate others for being in the grip of material temptations. It is rarely common people. Such voices, in other words, should not be taken at face value. Rather, they are one side of the pendulum of consumption that has swung back and forth between more goods and the disquiet they set off.
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