28 Reject Waste; Embrace Thrift

I tell you that the very essence of competitive commerce is waste.

William Morris, ‘Art under Plutocracy’, 1884

Waste is unpoetic, thrift is creative.

G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Romance of Thrift’, 1910

Make compost, not war.

slogan of Graham Burnett, spiralseed.co.uk, 2005

As an amateur smallholder – or ‘chaotic tinyholder’ would be more precise – one phrase from John Seymour’s book Self-Sufficiency rings in my head. It is: ‘The dustman need never visit the smallholder.’ The first time I read this statement, we were producing perhaps three or four black bin-bags of rubbish every week. My mind boggled when I started to reflect on all the unnecessary work that this waste created. There was the toil of putting the rubbish in the bin, the toil of taking the bin-bag out to the dustbin, the toil of leaving the dustbins out on the right day. Then there was the work of the dustmen, the petrol, the man hours, the labour involved in manufacturing the giant, belching dustbin lorries. Then there was the toil of driving to the dump and shoving all the waste into a huge hole from which more lorries transport it to some toxic dump somewhere in the countryside where it sits for all eternity, loved only by rats, poisoning the soil. This is the result of waste: waste of time, waste of energy, waste of life.

The antidote to waste is thrift. Now, thrift, in the days of high spending and credit cards, is a very unfashionable notion. It’s presented to us as a pious, worthy and mean attitude to living, the philosophy of the skrimbleshanks, the miser, the tightwad. In the prejudice against thrift, there is perhaps a residue of the old medieval prejudice against hoarders, against Mr Money-bags, often satirized in medieval statuary, who gets but does not spend, who does nothing of social use with his money.

But being thrifty is not the same as being miserly. It simply means that you don’t spend your money on unnecessary stuff. It means, very simply, being creative with your money, and being creative in your household. Etymologically, it derives from ‘thriving’. One chicken makes many meals. It makes stock, it makes sandwiches, it makes curries and stews later in the week.

And, since shopping is today seen as our patriotic duty, to be thrifty is actually to be unpatriotic, and therefore it gives one a pleasant sense of rebelling against the state. It is your duty as a freedom-seeker to reject waste, as waste is a necessary part of the capitalist system. Think of the food that supermarkets and sandwich shops throw away each day. There is a new movement out there called ‘Freeganism’: this refers to the practice of finding all your food for free by raiding dustbins at the end of the day. It seems like an excellent scheme. Live in a squat, get your food for free and there will be absolutely no need to waste your time by working. It’s amazing what people throw away. Thrift allows you to escape the consumer culture and to replace working-earning-spending with creating.

In a superb essay on ‘The Romance of Thrift’, Chesterton makes the case that economy and thrift, far from being prosaic and dull, are, in fact, romantic notions:

Economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw a thing away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure.

This sort of passionate thrifting is quite distinct from the Puritan, Smilesian, Methodist notion of thrift, which was simply an expression of the greed of the manufacturers. They preached the importance of sparse living to the factory workers, teaching them how to live within their pitiful wages, as a cost-saver which would increase their own profits. It is not thrift as self-denial and the preaching of sobriety, industry, frugality and virtue to the lower orders that I am recommending; it is more a spirited reclaiming of one’s own finances. And, the thriftier you are, the less money you need, and the less money you need, the less paid work you will need to do. Therefore, thrift equals idleness. Thrift is freedom, freedom from bosses, anxiety and debt.

We should also be thrifty with our time, and that means not rushing through things and not wasting our time by giving it to an employer. That is the one aspect of being employed full time that used to annoy me beyond all others: the waste of time. Whether or not there were seven hours of work to do, you still had to sit there for seven hours. To sit staring at a screen pretending to work while the sun shone outside seemed crazy. I could have been doing something useful, like making a daisy chain or learning the ukulele.

In the area of fashion, my friend Kira Jolliffe’s magazine Cheap Date has protested against the sheep-like buying of the latest thing and instead promoted thrift-shop clothes and charity stores. To be able to find an odd item that looks good from a secondhand shop proves that you have real style and are not a mere follower of fashion. Style is about being yourself, and fashion is about being like the others.

The Mutoid Waste Company demonstrated the creative power of thrift. By taking vehicles that were destined for the scrapheap and making them into amazing sculptures, they made a radical statement against waste.

Now, having been shocked into action by John Seymour’s line about the dustmen, I decided at home to try to cut down on the waste we were producing. His idea really is that the smallholder creates a friendly cycle in which nothing is wasted. Food waste turns into compost or is fed to animals, old meat is fed to animals, animal waste fertilizes the fields, there is precious little packaging, since most things are produced at home, jam jars are endlessly useful, paper and cardboard can be burned or shredded for compost. Bottles can be reused or recycled. Old clothes can be made into patchwork quilts. Wood can be used to make things or burned. Even household slops can be made into compost rather than being piped off into costly sewage works. So things would have been on the medieval smallholding: no waste, no rubbish; no dependence on councils and their elaborate waste-disposal systems. Rubbish provides us with another example of how the system toils hard to correct the problems it has itself created. We create problems like waste and plastic, and then congratulate ourselves on inventing unwieldy structures for removing the waste. We should simply not create it in the first place.

Our first step was to make compost, which is the process of keeping organic waste and decomposing it to turn it into useful food for the soil. There are many books on the art of compost, but if you get it right, the compost heap will heat itself up and the rubbish will turn into juicy compost in only a few weeks. And even if you don’t get it right, you will still get compost in a year. And if you can’t be bothered with all that, then simply dig a ditch in your veg patch and chuck the waste in that. It will rot in the earth and return all its organic splendour to the soil.

Plastic can be a problem. However, it can have its uses. I use see-through plastic pots as cloches in order to protect small seedlings. If you plant out small lettuce plants, for example, they will be destroyed by slugs. But, inside a little upturned plastic yoghurt pot, they will thrive. Cardboard should not be thrown away. Cardboard boxes can be cut up into wonderful shapes. The other day, we made ice-cream shops out of cardboard boxes. Cardboard is good when shredded into the compost heap, as it soaks up excess moisture. It can help when clearing new ground for cultivation; simply put a layer down over the grass and weeds, and then put a layer of compost, straw and anything else organic on top. Newspaper can be used for lighting fires and as litter for your pets. The other bonus for the responsible idler is that the more of these sorts of policies you pursue, the less work you are creating for the rest of the world. It is the duty of an idler not only to make his own life as work-free as possible but also to avoid adding unnecessary burdens to others. Most of work is waste, and therefore the idler is extremely efficient.

Of course, it goes without saying that the medievals were Permaculturists: in an age without oil, all energy was renewable, money was kept circulating in local communities, there was no waste. Everything had a use and went back into the household in a friendly cycle.

The traditional objection to anarchist ideas is: ‘Who will do the dirty work?’ Well, the simple answer is that you will do the dirty work. We will do our own dirty work. And if the work is your own work, it doesn’t seem so dirty.

Take shovelling shit. In my experience, shovelling shit is not the most unpleasant task in the world. There is also a world of difference between shovelling your own shit and shovelling someone else’s shit. If you forced me to shovel shit in a factory for seven hours a day, then I would, before too long, hate the sight of it, dread the job, detest every moment. But shovelling your own shit around your own property at a time of your own choosing and making good use of it – well, that is a pleasure. I am delighted when I see chickenshit and horseshit lying around the place, because I know that it is fantastic stuff for the soil. And it’s free. Therefore, to collect it will be a huge pleasure.

It is, after all, remarkable that the stuff that comes out of the back end of a horse or cow or chicken should be precisely what the earth needs to remain fertile. We might as well make use of this fact. To be free, use free stuff. To embrace thrift is to embrace freedom; waste is for the slaves and the fools, the dupes of the capitalist system.

SHOVEL SHIT!