What we Leave Behind

The attitude of the residents may seem almost incomprehensible from a modern perspective. They wanted to keep their garbage? They refused to give their garbage even to municipal collectors? But what seems like strange behavior can illuminate a critical point: they wouldn’t simply give their garbage to the collectors because their garbage wasn’t waste. It had value, and it was useful. And it had, in their minds, a future. It wasn’t simply loaded into a garbage truck by nameless workers to disappear into oblivion. Their garbage was part of a relationship with the “swill children” that they valued and wanted to continue. It’s a marked contrast to the present day, when most people are happy to be rid of their garbage in the most convenient way possible, so that they simply don’t have to think about it.

As we look into the long history of garbage, we can see a number of different trends, trends that we can also see in civilization at large. First is increasing scale. Civilizations tend to increase scale as a matter of course—if those in power have a problem, there’s a good chance the solution involves making something bigger, or making more of things.

A second trend is increasingly complex technology. The earliest recorded trash was comprised of things like wood ash, organic waste, and rags. But technological “progress” has brought us a refuse stream that includes many different kinds of metal and alloys, toxic byproducts of manufacturing, radioactive waste, and thousands of different kinds of plastics and polymers.

A third trend is decreasing community autonomy and control over garbage. This is very much a result of the first two trends. Denser and more wasteful populations, especially urban populations, made it increasingly difficult for communities to cope with their own waste locally. And as new industrial technology produced new kinds of waste, it became impossible for small communities to maintain the infrastructure necessary to deal effectively with that waste. Larger and more complicated waste management systems meant that dealing with rubbish was no longer a community or household activity—it was the specialized domain of technical experts and engineers. As a result, the ability to make decisions about waste was often lost by communities.

To a person in power, all of these trends are markers of progress. More production means more garbage, and more profit and power. More technology means more things to make and sell, and that means more profit and power. And control over garbage also means more profit and power. (And vice versa: poor neighborhoods are a favored location for incinerators and other polluting and unpleasant waste management facilities.) This last point may be a difficult one for us to understand, because of our place in history during a period of immense wastefulness, in which garbage has no value. But as we shall see, the value of garbage was something our ancestors understood well, and any descendents we have will come to understand it as well.

If you have an object that you don’t want or find useful, you have some general options. You can store it until later, in the hope that you or someone else might find it useful then. You can give it, trade it, or sell it to someone else who does find it useful. You can get rid of it by sending it away so it isn’t a problem (for you) anymore. You can try to break it down into smaller parts that are more useful or easier to deal with. Conversely, you can try to combine it with something else to produce something that is more useful or easier to deal with. Historically, strategies for dealing with garbage have been combinations of these basic acts.

Garbage wasn’t really an issue for human beings until the advent of cities. Prior to cities and civilization, any trash produced by humans was either biodegradable and beneficial to the land (like shit or food scraps) or non-biodegradable but inert and harmless (like pottery). In either case, it was small in quantity.

When the first cities were built, garbage was still mostly harmless in nature. But the density of cities, their growing populations, and the large quantities of materials they brought in made the accumulation of garbage a problem. Instead of spreading small amounts of waste over large areas with a diversity of scavenging species above and below the soil, urban humans were now accumulating large amounts of waste in tight spaces where most nonhuman species had been wiped out. Piles of decomposing organic matter offered a wonderful environment for generalized scavengers like rats, flies, and cockroaches, who accompanied civilized humans as they spread around the world. The dense populations of humans and domestic animals allowed for the incubation of plagues and infections, many of which were communicated by those rats and insects.

Garbage disposal strategies fall into several main categories: landfills and dumping; feeding to animals and composting; burning and incineration; and recycling. Each of these techniques has varied widely in popularity at different points in history, and in different locations. Different climates and terrains are often associated with different waste disposal techniques. For example, cities in colder climates tended to produce more ash than cities in warmer climates because of heating needs. And cities in warmer climates tended to produce more organic waste because of their longer growing season.

Landfills and dumping are related and overlapping strategies that differ in intent and approach. A “sanitary landfill,” currently the most popular approach to waste disposal in the industrialized nations, is a site (usually lined with plastic) where garbage is spread, buried in layers, and capped to minimize the leaching of toxins from water flowing through. (This does not usually work as well in practice as in theory.)

Dumping is a far older, simpler, and more haphazard act. In fact, dumping is so old, and its consequences so severe and enduring, that a 1912 statement to the American Public Health Association even compared dumping to Original Sin: “In its simplicity and carelessness the dump probably dates back to the discarding of the first apple core in the Garden of Eden, and its subsequent train of evils is ample testimony of the Eternal Wrath elicited by that act.”¹⁷ Living as we do in an age of immortal plastics, persistent organic pollutants, and radioactive waste, we can chuckle at the author’s quaint concern about an apple core. But the author is likely right about one thing: the modern act of dumping could be considered a toxic and grossly amplified version of the ancient act of discarding harmless—or more accurately, beneficial—organic material.

In a hunter-gatherer society, like the kind that has made up the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of human existence, “carelessly” tossing away organic matter like food scraps or fruit cores is indeed a helpful act for the land. The food is quickly broken down and the nutrients reabsorbed into the environment. Scavengers like ants carry pieces of the food back to their nests and so incorporate the nutrients into the soil. The seeds of fruits are spread and can take root in new locales. In that context, discarding food into the environment is a universally helpful act. Only in recent history, as garbage became much greater in quantity and less digestible in composition, did this change from a helpful to a harmful act.

Dumping is kind of a combination of two of the basic acts we talked about earlier—sending things away, and storing them. Here’s what I mean: the strategy of choice for dealing with garbage in early cities was to have it dumped on the outskirts of town, ideally in a ravine or small valley, for the sake of human convenience. The first municipal dump in the Western world was created around 500 B.C.E., in Athens, where citizens were required to dispose of their garbage at least one mile from the city walls.¹⁸

But over time, as the world became more crowded with humans, sending garbage away often meant sending it into someone else’s backyard. By the late 1800s, some municipal officials in the US were already concerned about the long-term implications of the steady stream of waste. In 1889, the health officer for Washington, DC, complained that good sites for waste disposal were “becoming scarcer year by year,” and that “inhabitants in proximity to the public dumps are beginning to complain.”¹⁹

As people grew more discontented with the flow of garbage through or into the places where they lived, they sometimes turned to direct action. For example, people living in Alexandria, Virginia, at the close of the 1800s were appalled by the passage of garbage barges floating down the Potomac River from Washington, DC. So they began to sink those barges upriver of Alexandria, before they could pass by.²⁰

As a result of more crowded conditions, centralized dumps gained popularity. Organic matter would eventually decompose in these dumps, but metals, and later, plastics, would not. Those materials would essentially be stored indefinitely in the ground. Perhaps we can think of it as a variation on the act of sending things away: instead of being sent to neighbors, the garbage is being sent into the future, where it will become the problem of the descendents of the original dumpers.

Dumping has long been a popular strategy for cities on or near oceans and large waterways, and continued to be until quite recently. In the United States, the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act banned the dumping of garbage in navigable rivers. This was not motivated by a concern for aquatic ecology—rather, legislators were concerned that continued dumping would obstruct rivers and interfere with shipping.²¹ Ocean dumping wasn’t brought under environmental regulation until 1972, and dumping of sewage sludge and industrial waste wasn’t made illegal until 1992.²² The perceived convenience of dumping into water comes from one of our other basic acts: combining garbage with something else to make it easier to deal with. Superficially, this is an effective solution for the dumper, because moving water will carry garbage out of sight, or allow it to sink into the depths. However, the consequence is that control of the garbage is lost—it can now spread through the water and may come back as a problem later, especially in the case of pesticides and other toxins. All of this makes a mockery of the slogan so popular among producers of waste and the governmental agencies at least nominally charged with their oversight: the solution to pollution is dilution.

One of the oldest and most sustainable methods of dealing with trash has historically been to feed organic garbage to (nonhuman) animals. Certainly, in hunter-gatherer societies, discarded organic material would be eaten by animals, fungi, bacteria, and so on. And the humans would benefit, most often indirectly, from having those nutrients returned to the broader living community. But agricultural societies with domesticated animals had a different dynamic. By feeding scraps to farm animals, especially more generalized eaters like pigs and chickens, agriculturalists received direct benefits from their shared garbage in the form of meat and eggs.

This sharing of waste didn’t need to be especially organized, but it did require more sorting than simply tossing any and all organic matter aside. An 1835 edition of The American Frugal Housewife describes multiple levels of home “recycling.” Food scraps inedible to humans were put in slop pails to be fed to pigs. But fatty food wastes were kept in the “grease-pot” where they could be used for cooking and soap-making.²³ In rural areas, farm animals sometimes grazed close enough to the house that slop buckets were not needed; waste would simply be tossed out the kitchen window and eaten.

Even in cities, livestock often roamed the streets until the twentieth century, eating garbage that people discarded from doors or windows. In 1834 in Charleston, West Virginia, killing vultures was outlawed because the birds kept the streets clean by eating garbage.²⁴ And in 1842 it was estimated that something like ten thousand pigs wandered the streets of New York. When municipal governments in New York and other cities attempted to remove the pigs they were met with political resistance because of the street-cleaning activities of the pigs, and the food they provided for the poor.²⁵

Organic waste was also collected in a more deliberate fashion to be fed to animals in urban areas. In the early 1900s, many small and medium-sized towns built facilities called “piggeries,” where pigs were fed raw or cooked garbage. It took about seventy-five pigs to eat one ton of garbage per day.²⁶ But life in a piggery was not like life on a farm. These pigs often died from eating foreign matter like broken glass, sharp oyster shells, or lye-based soap. A government pamphlet at the time pled with householders to sort out dangerous foreign matter, and to “imagine the tortures suffered by the unfortunate animals.”²⁷

In an industrial version of the farmstead’s retention of grease and fats for candle- and soapmaking, many “Reduction Plants” were built in the US to extract greases and oils from organic waste. However, the growing extraction of fossil fuel oils meant that such efforts became uneconomical, and the last Reduction Plant closed in 1959.

Feeding waste to nonhumans does not have to be a relic of the past, even in the United States. All through my twenties I’d wanted to get chickens, and I still remember the exact moment, when I was thirty, that I finally decided to do it. It was a summer day. I sat on the couch, looking out the window and half-heartedly reading an account of the lives of white settlers on the Great Plains. Two sentences stopped me. I read them again: “If these early settlers could travel forward in time they would probably be surprised and perplexed to learn that their descendants actually purchased special food for chickens, instead of feeding them scraps and letting them forage. If you have to feed the chickens special food, what’s the point?”

I laughed, put down the book, and began dreaming of chickens. The next spring I built a little shelter and got some chicks. I quickly grew to love the chickens for themselves, for doing the things chickens do—dusting themselves, dancing in the sun, squabbling, grooming themselves—but I have to admit that I derived great satisfaction, even joy, from the knowledge that much of what they were eating was what most people would consider “waste.”

I never bought them any chicken food. They mainly foraged, which is a polite way of saying they killed and ate everything that moved—insects, spiders, worms, mice, and snakes; I’m sure that had the chickens been large enough they would have been delighted to eat me—and they also ate just about everything that didn’t move.

I did buy some food, but it wasn’t just for them. A pasta factory bagged the noodles that fell on the floor and sold them for ten cents a pound. I bought them by the hundred-pound bag. Not only did this provide chicken food, but it allowed me to gorge on pasta, and one trip to the factory completed all my Christmas shopping. The only problem was figuring out how to fit hundred-pound bags under Christmas trees (and you should have seen the intendeds try to shake their gifts). The good news is that for the first year, at least, nobody—and I mean nobody—was able to guess what I was getting them.

In addition, I dumpster dug. Oh, how I dumpster dug. As much as I loved the chickens, I may have loved dumpster digging even more. I loved it not only because of all the good free food I got for the chickens, and not only because of all the good free food I got for me and most everyone I knew, and not only because it often acted as a substitute for pesky Christmas, birthday, and other shopping (“Oh, how sweet! You brought me a bag full of, what’s this, several hundred doughnuts! And what’s over here? A whole crate of artichokes! For Valentine’s Day, no less! Derrick, you really shouldn’t have”), and not only because it so often made for intriguing second or third dates (“I’m sorry, Derrick, I don’t think I heard you: what was it you said you wanted to do? Dive . . . in a what? A dumpster? Oh, umm, that sounds, well, umm, lovely! I’ll just have to check my schedule and . . . oh, shoot, it looks like I’m busy all this week . . . Oh, you’ll be going again next week? Unfortunately that’s looking pretty bad, too”), but also because it kept a great deal of food out of the waste stream.

In Spokane, where I lived at the time, this meant keeping all of this food from being burned in an incinerator. (What sense does it make to burn watermelons? What sense does it make to throw away perfectly good watermelons simply because the store received a shipment of some other fruit and needs the space?) I got some tremendous hauls: a big black grocery bag full of cashews.²⁸ An even larger bag of coffee (chickens, by the way, don’t like coffee beans). Gallon after gallon of slightly post-dated ice cream. (Grocery store employees waited for me to show up before bringing these out, since they, too, hated to see it go to waste. I had so much ice cream I ended up feeding that, too, to the cats, dogs, chickens, other birds, and anyone who would eat it: poultry, by the way, love ice cream.) Truckloads (literally truckloads) of perfectly fine watermelons (I felt as decadent as a Roman emperor: I had so many watermelons that neither I nor everyone I knew could eat them all, so I’d split them open with an axe, take two bites of the heart, and throw the rest to my humble subjects, er, the birds), cantaloupes, peaches (the birds didn’t like peaches), tomatoes (they loved tomatoes, and would run around with red all over their breasts, as though they’d been wounded in battle), onions (they didn’t much care for onions, and two of the worst smells I’ve ever encountered are deeply rotten onions and, oddly enough, deeply rotten honeydews), and so on. It’s fun to get free food, and it’s even more fun to share it with your (human and nonhuman) friends.

I dumpster dug a few times a week from probably 1990 to 1999, and over that time I witnessed the disturbing trend of grocery stores increasingly locking their dumpsters, or worse, installing huge and expensive enclosed systems that open only on top of the garbage truck. That seemed mean-spirited and unnecessary. When I asked managers of big stores why they’d done this (I always established relationships with store managers or owners where I dumpster dug: I learned to do that after the owner of a neighborhood grocery store once pulled a gun on me. I was there after-hours, and that day his store had been robbed; he thought I was the robber’s accomplice coming to pull the loot out of the dumpster. When I told him I was there for another kind of green—lettuce—he smiled and requested I come back during the day. Soon after, he and his employees were setting huge piles of food aside for me, and then for all sorts of other people. He did this slightly out of generosity, but mainly because it allowed him to cut his garbage bill by two-thirds), they uniformly told me it was for “insurance purposes.” Whether or not I believe them—and I’m not sure I do—the decision still seems wasteful and stupid.

Let’s follow the chain. Subsistence farmers in Mexico are forced off their land so a transnational agricorporation can grow tomatoes on the land that used to be theirs. The soil of this land quickly becomes toxified by the use of pesticides. The local river—which has forever been the source of water for local villages—is ruined by the pesticide and fertilizer runoff from the new tomato fields. Or it would be ruined if it hadn’t already been diverted for irrigation.

Now utterly impoverished, one of the men who used to live on this land (and whose wife is now dead from cancer and whose children are now brain-damaged from pesticides) leaves these children with his mother and crosses the (heavily guarded) border into the United States, which happens to be the destination for the tomatoes grown on land that used to be his. He works his way toward Spokane. Along the way he is robbed at gunpoint twice, beaten thrice, and raped once. Of course employers steal his labor any number of times. One night in Spokane he is hungry. He has no money. He goes to a dumpster. It is locked. Inside are a couple of dozen crates of tomatoes—coincidentally tomatoes that were grown on land that used to be his. He can’t get at them. Tomorrow morning these tomatoes will be taken to the incinerator and burned (insofar as tomatoes can burn at all). Whatever ash is left from the tomatoes will not even nourish any soil, because the incinerator is at the same time burning all sorts of other wastes, including plastic containers that formerly held toxic chemicals used to manufacture pesticides that were sprayed on the land where the man used to live.

In a strange way, forming that relationship with the neighborhood grocer, and finding that because of that relationship he set aside part of his parking lot specifically for people to come by and pick up the old food to feed chickens, pigs, or humans, made me more proud than just about anything else I did in Spokane, including writing A Language Older Than Words. The pride came from the knowledge that this accomplishment was tangible: because of me, those particular watermelons remained in the food stream, those particular tomatoes got eaten by ducks, those particular artichokes got eaten by me.

For me, dumpster diving wasn’t particularly political. It was simply something I did for fun. I enjoyed the physical act of dumpster diving, and I’m also more or less a cheapskate, so I was delighted to get free things. I’m also by nature pretty conservative, so I derived great satisfaction from saving food from being wasted, in the worst sense of that term, and I also derived satisfaction from protecting the natural world by my actions, however slight the protection might be from those particular actions.

Over the years I’ve met a fair number of people who saw dumpster diving differently: they believed it to be a profoundly political act, a way of sticking it to The Man. There is some truth in that: we have intentionally and systematically been made dependent for our very lives upon those who control the economy. Elsewhere, I’ve written extensively about how it’s almost impossible to get people to slave away for you unless you deprive them of access to land. Because access to land provides access to food, clothing, and shelter—which means access to land provides the possibility of self-sufficiency—if you want to maintain a dependent (and therefore somewhat dependable) workforce, it’s crucial for you to sever their access to land. It’s also crucial that you destroy wild foodstocks: why would I buy salmon from the grocery store if I could catch my dinner from the river? Now, with people having been effectively denied access to free food, clothing, and shelter, which means having been effectively denied access to self-sufficiency, if they are going to eat, they’re going to have to buy their food, which means they’re going to have to go to work to get the cash to buy what they need to survive. If you’re a corporation, you’ve got them where you want them.

Unless, of course, they’re diving into your dumpsters, parasitizing of your waste products. Then they’re not paying you in order to eat. And if they’re also squatting, they aren’t paying you for shelter. And if they’re also shoplifting clothing (or getting their clothes from dumpsters: I’ve known divers who specialize in food, clothes, furniture, metals from industrial dumpsters, and so on), then these people have no need for cash, and thus no need to become wage slaves. That’s bad for a corporation’s bottom line.

So far, so good. But the problem I have with calling dumpster diving a powerful political tool is the same problem I have with calling any other form of lifestyle activism a powerful political tool. The problem is that any form of lifestyle activism (including dumpster diving, shitting in the forest, and so on) is an extremely short lever with which to increase your power to bring about social change. There are many actions we can take, as I’ve explored in Endgame and elsewhere, that are much more effective at bringing down The Man than simply living off the scraps he throws away.

I’ve also heard some dumpster divers say they’re living sustainably. Again, that is only partly true. As with me and my watermelons, they can consume decadently without this consumption causing direct physical harm. But ultimately my watermelon extravaganza and other divers’ dumpster meals and wardrobes are not really sustainable, because they all still depend on the larger, wholly unsustainable system. In the end, whether the tomatoes grown on land where the former subsistence farmer used to live are purchased, plucked from a dumpster, or burned alongside plastic pesticide containers, the truth is that all of these actions take place after the man was dispossessed, his wife killed, their children’s health impaired, the land poisoned, the river dewatered, and his village destroyed. For an action to be sustainable, it can’t merely parasitize off an unsustainable system. It must impede the system, and ultimately stop it from being unsustainable at all.

So one spring I bought too many chicks, ducklings, goslings, and baby turkeys. Way too many. And then my chickens started raising babies. And then I was able to get a bunch of hens who’d been rescued from a factory farm (when I got them their combs were wilted and pale, but after they’d been at my place for a while their combs became firm and bright red).

I tried to garden at the same time I had the chickens, but the birds ate almost everything. For the longest time I felt bad for what I was doing to the land. It looked like a moonscape for quite a ways in all directions from the chicken coop. But one day I picked up a shovel and dug beneath the thick dried crust of chicken manure. The soil was rich and black, with a higher worm density than I’ve ever seen outside a worm bin. The land only looked dead on top, but underneath that skin, the chicken shit was working its magic.

I kept chickens for about ten years, and quit only when I moved away. One of my great pleasures of that time (in addition to getting giddy over chicks, and giving away big bags of pasta) was watching the soil slowly crawl up the skirt of my double-wide mobile home. The chickens (along with the peaches they wouldn’t eat, the watermelon rinds they left behind, the onions they despised, and the potatoes they ignored) were making soil. Rich, black, healthy soil. And this soil—this living and breathing soil, this carnivorous soil who eats us all in the end—was growing so fast—maybe two inches in the ten years I lived there—that I could see the changes.

The particular method of waste disposal any historical town or city chose depended greatly on the composition of its garbage, and the makeup of human garbage has changed dramatically in the past century. A more detailed look at that change is illuminating and can help to answer some of our questions about how society got to be the way it is.

At the close of the nineteenth century, more than 80 percent of household waste was comprised of dust and cinders from stoves.²⁹ The use of woodstoves and coal for heating and cooking meant ash would make up the majority of household waste until the middle of the twentieth century, when new infrastructures allowed oil, gas, and electricity to become the primary sources of energy for heating and cooking. Of course, wood ash in the present day is effectively absent from household waste.

The remaining portion of late-nineteenth-century waste was made up of kitchen and organic scraps, as well as paper, glass, and a small amount of metal. Modern materials like plastic had not yet entered the picture. In urban areas, dead animals made up a significant portion of refuse tossed into the streets. In 1866, New York City’s Metropolitan Board of Health forbade the “throwing of dead animals, garbage or ashes into the streets.” Despite this, in 1880 alone, some fifteen thousand dead horses were removed from the streets of New York City, more than forty a day.³⁰

Household waste at the time was dealt with more effectively than one might imagine. The fact that household garbage was mostly two rather homogenous materials—and organics—meant that it was comparatively easy to deal with. Although movies have given us images of people dumping chamber pots willy-nilly out of their windows, early municipal garbage collection systems were well-organized and based on a system of “primary separation.” That is, citizens were required to sort their garbage into distinct categories when they put it out for collection, much like (but significantly predating) modern recycling systems. In 1896, New York City already had a system for separating different kinds of household waste, dividing it into food waste, ash, and dry trash.³¹ This system was enforced not just by garbage collectors but also by the police who would lay fines or even arrest people who failed to sort their garbage. And by 1898, the Street Cleaning Commissioner of New York City had organized a sorting plant for recyclables.³² Primary separation was not limited to New York, though. Rather, it was commonplace during the first few decades of municipal garbage collection across the United States. In 1902, 80 percent of cities with populations larger than twenty-five thousand required some degree of primary separation.³³ New York’s rather heavy-handed use of police to enforce primary separation lasted only a few years, with cities generally finding the most success for primary separation when it was endorsed by civic groups who helped educate and motivate the public.³⁴

Partly as a result of primary separation, turn-of-the-century society had specialized occupations for dealing with different kinds of waste. Although the jobs were often very dirty, labor was cheap because of high levels of poverty in the industrialized nations. Coal dust was collected from homes and factories by “dustmen”³⁵ and taken to “dust-yards.” There, workers (men, women, and children) would use sieves to separate the dust out into materials used as soil conditioners or for making bricks or pavement.³⁶ By 1939, coal and wood ash made up only 43 percent of garbage in major cities like New York, the proportion having dropped by almost half in only a quarter century.³⁷ The spread of natural gas infrastructures for cooking and heating was one cause. The effects of this were not entirely positive in terms of dealing with household waste. The use of gas was first available in wealthier homes, and since the use of gas produced no ashes, those more affluent city dwellers were even more apathetic about primary separation than they would normally be.³⁸

In fact, ashes are the only category of waste which has decreased in municipal waste collection in the past century, to the point where ashes are now a negligible component of household waste. It would be nice to believe that this is due to a dramatic decrease in coal burning. Unfortunately, it merely reflects a shift in the location of coal burning. During the twentieth century the burning of coal became centralized to large coal burning plants, and the ash by-product became treated as an industrial waste, rather than a municipal one. The effect was to move coal burning out of local control, and largely out of the public mind.

The increase in organic waste is not due to an increase in kitchen scraps. Of course, in the past century there has been a great shift towards pre-processed and pre-packaged foods, so scraps such as vegetable peelings make up a smaller proportion of waste. Instead, the increase in the volume of organic waste is due to the incorporation of “yard trimmings” from mowing the grass. There’s a paradoxical irony here, and it’s one of many we’ll see. It was the inexpensive availability of curbside waste collection that caused grass clippings—a source of mulch and valuable nutrients for lawns when left in place—to become a waste product, a form of garbage that could be disposed of simply out of convenience.

Of course, the disposal of “product” wastes has seen the greatest increase in quantity in the past century. In a hundred years they’ve grown from only ninety-two pounds per person per year, to a staggering 1,242 pounds per person per year. Most of the increase in waste generation happened in the later twentieth century, with per capita waste generation increasing from 2.7 to 4.4 pounds per person per day.

A 1905 study identified common kinds of product waste as glass bottles, paper, pasteboard, rags, mattresses, old clothes, old shoes, leather and scrap leather, carpets, and straw.⁴⁰ As we will discuss shortly, those were products that were commonly recycled until the twentieth century. In contrast, modern waste is comprised of a very wide variety of unsorted products, each of which may be comprised of many different materials joined together in many different ways, making these products far more difficult to deal with intelligently than the products of a hundred years ago.

The current municipal garbage collection systems—called “Municipal Solid Waste Management” (MSWM) systems in the industry vernacular—emerged from the context of that turn-of-the-century waste composition. They were designed to deal mainly two with homogeneous categories of waste: ash and organics. The basic structure of those systems, combined with the inherent difficulty of dealing with a varied mixture of waste, doomed them to a feeble compromise. These systems are good at getting garbage away from the curbside and to a disposal site. But they’re not very good at recovering materials from waste (less than a third of material is recycled or recovered in some way⁴¹), and they’re inherently ineffectual at reducing the creation of waste at the source.

Any system, or any community, must have a method for dealing with waste with an intelligence and complexity that mirrors the diversity of its wastes. If this is not that case—if a community can’t sort and deal with its waste intelligently—then their waste truly becomes waste, because they can’t close the loop back to a useable substance. This is what has occurred to municipal waste management systems in the industrial nations, and though they’re effective at moving extremely large quantities of waste out of sight and mind of urban dwellers, they’re not effective at sorting or reprocessing it. As a result, countries like the United States now dispose of more than two-thirds of their household waste into landfills and incinerators. The reason these disposal methods now predominate is simple: they require no sorting, and they displace the ultimate responsibility to dealing with waste to other places and to future generations.

Burning waste isn’t new. If you’ve ever gone camping in the backwoods, perhaps you’ve burned your food scraps to avoid attracting bears or other wild animals (including ants). Practices like this are probably as old as campfires, and essentially harmless. What’s new, and not nearly so harmless, are chlorinated plastics, enormous municipal and industrial waste streams, and large-scale incinerators.

Though burning of refuse has been a common method for a long time, large public incinerators weren’t common in the United States until the 1920s, when they were called cremators. It was around this time, you may recall, that growing urbanization and a trend towards disposability in consumer items kicked off a municipal garbage problem that seemed serious at the time, but pales in comparison to modern garbage production. Through the middle of the twentieth century, landfills and incinerators vied for the position of “preferred waste disposal method,” although landfills generally predominated. Into the 1970s, the aim of incineration was still to reduce the volume of solid waste, but more recently incinerators have been built with the intent of capturing the energy released by burning garbage either as heat or by converting it to electricity.

Here’s how a typical modern incinerator works. First, garbage trucks bring in loads of mixed municipal waste. In theory, hazardous materials should not be included in this garbage, but of course, the municipal waste stream is contaminated by a variety of items like batteries and electronics waste that should officially be disposed of in other ways. The trucks dump their loads into a waste bunker that ensures a constant supply of waste is available to be burned in the incinerator. Next, overhead cranes pick up loads of waste and drop it into a feed chute supplying the incinerator. The garbage is then pushed onto the incinerator grate, which moves the garbage through the combustion chamber over a period of several hours. Air to support combustion is commonly drawn through the waste bunker to reduce odors outside the incinerator.

Incineration reduces the mass of solid waste by about 75 percent, and the volume by close to 90 percent.⁴² The flue gases heat a boiler to produce steam which generates electricity. The incinerator also produces “fly ash,” the light ash that goes up the chimney, which contains various hazards and heavy metals including vanadium, manganese, chromium, nickel, arsenic, mercury, and lead. Although the emissions are filtered, many particles produced are simply too fine for the incinerator’s filters to capture. The majority of the ash produced, however, is “bottom ash,” which is enriched with heavy metals. Although the fly ash should theoretically be disposed of as hazardous waste, bottom ash isn’t likely to get such cautious treatment. In some areas, bottom ash is even mixed in with construction materials as a form of “recycling.”

“Waste to energy” schemes are commonly used to try to justify the construction of new incinerators, with advocates insisting that burning garbage represents a source of “green energy.” As a desirable method of producing energy, garbage incinerators fall short, emitting more carbon dioxide (CO₂), watt for watt, than, say, natural gas power plants.⁴³ Furthermore, most of the embodied energy in garbage is derived directly or indirectly from fossil fuels, meaning that any energy gleaned from incineration is far from green, but simply a roundabout (and more polluting) way of burning fossil fuels. In fact, some researchers believe incineration to be the least energy efficient way of dealing with mixed waste.⁴⁴

In addition, the construction of new incinerators essentially encourages the production of more garbage, by further displacing the consequences of wastefulness. “Building incinerators lets industry off the hook,” says Dr. Paul Connett, professor emeritus of chemistry at St. Lawrence University. Instead, says Connett, industry should not be permitted to make materials that can’t be disposed of safely. “The message to industry is this: if we can’t reuse it, if we can’t recycle it, if we can’t compost it, you shouldn’t be making it.”⁴⁵

There are economic implications as well. Building a large incinerator costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and can even exceed a billion. This money doesn’t come from industries producing garbage, of course. Instead, it comes from taxpayers via governments. Again, the cost of producing garbage is externalized. And the high costs mean that incinerators often take decades to pay off, locking municipalities into that method of waste disposal for a long time to come.

There is some good news—to use the phrase rather loosely. The incinerators currently being built burn garbage at much higher temperatures than did historical incinerators. At these temperatures, chlorine atoms are unable to combine with carbon atoms to make dioxin molecules. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), backyard “burn barrels” used to dispose of household waste (including plastics) are now a significantly larger source of dioxin and furans than municipal incinerators. ⁴⁶ Of course, dioxins and furans are still produced in large amounts by older incinerators, and newer incinerators during start-up and shutdown. And some critics of incinerators point out that when waste-to-energy schemes are used, flue gases are cooled as their heat is used to boil water, bringing the gas back into a temperature range where dioxins can form.

Advocates of incinerators often point out that burning garbage does save some greenhouse emissions in the long term. Although incinerators immediately release large amounts of carbon as CO₂, landfilled garbage may release carbon more slowly in the form of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas. But it’s a Hobson’s choice; instead of trying to decide whether to build more landfills or more incinerators, industry should stop producing wastes that need to be landfilled or incinerated.

The development of urban garbage collection systems led to an unexpected, even paradoxical, result. As garbage collection became more regular and convenient, penalties for wastefulness were gradually removed. Free garbage collection led to an increase in the amount of garbage produced, because it was so easy to throw things away.

In a brief called “Unintended Consequences: Municipal Solid Waste Management and the Throwaway Society,” Helen Spiegelman and Bill Sheehan of the nonprofit Product Policy Institute examine this exact point. They note that one of the primary effects of MSWM has been to provide a public subsidy to the manufacture of disposable products, the cost of which is borne by taxpayers instead of the manufacturing companies. This marginal advantage to disposable products created market conditions which encouraged the creation of disposable products.

They also noted another contributing factor to the development of a throwaway society. Although used bottles were once commonly collected, washed, and refilled in the US (as they still are in many nonindustrialized nations), the “public investment in the national highway system . . . made it more economical to ship one-way from distant production facilities than to operate local bottling plants.”⁴⁷ Again, public monies acted as an incentive for manufacturers to make more and more disposable products.

If you’ve gotten this far you’ve probably realized, if you didn’t know already, that recycling isn’t a method devised by earnest environmentalists in the 1970s. Rather, the recycling of human-made materials (as opposed to the organic “recycling” that is implicit in nature) dates back many thousands of years.

In its earliest forms, what we might call recycling was something so fundamental that the name hardly applies. The “recycling” of nutrients and elements by living organisms is an intrinsic process that dates back to the beginning of life. To equate the carbon cycle with the collection and recycling of plastic grocery bags would be more than a little misleading, because there are some very major differences which I will discuss in greater detail soon. I will use the term recycling to refer specifically to cases in which human-made materials that would otherwise go to waste are collected and processed into new materials.

Processing, also, is an important aspect of our definition. If I, for example, took an old, torn-up sweater and sewed it into a scarf, this would be an example of “reuse” instead of recycling because I’m not making any changes to the material itself. Melting a glass bottle down to create a new bottle would be an example of changing that material. The distinction is important because recycling requires more energy and a larger infrastructure than does reuse.

Recycling practices that we might find recognizable as such date from early civilizations. (It makes sense that this is the case, since non-civilized cultures produced garbage that was dealt with through natural practices like biological decomposition.) Often the recycled material was a kind of metal. Because of its rarity in early civilizations, and because of the immense amount of energy and labor required to mine, smelt, and shape metal, it made economic sense to recycle whenever possible. This was especially the case in places where the raw materials to create an item anew where not available. For example, bronze is an alloy of both copper and (usually) tin. Settlements located where those two metals were not both present had to rely on imports and recycling.

Recycling was not always a gradual process where used or damaged items were reformed continually. Oftentimes in history large-scale recycling would occur after a civilization had collapsed. Those who lived in the wake of those collapses would often make thorough use of the refined materials concentrated in urban centers. For example, the famous Roman Coliseum was used as a stone quarry for centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire, with the marble façade either reused in other buildings or burned to make quicklime.⁴⁸ (This went on until 1749, when it was banned by the Pope). The Great Pyramids of Egypt were also used as stone quarries by those who lived after the collapse of the civilization that built them. The pyramids were covered in a polished casing of white limestone, and this limestone (and later the softer stone core underneath) was stripped for construction in adjacent Cairo.

As manufacturing businesses proliferated in the US during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as the population continued to grow dramatically, the demand for certain manufacturing materials began to grow. This was especially true for rags and cloth scraps, since at the time paper was made solely out of cloth fibers and not out of wood. It’s around this time that we find systems we can parallel with modern recycling systems. Reuse of materials within households and homesteads was common, as was the reuse of materials in workshops and even factories. However, the 1800s were full of historically documented and well-organized systems for bringing used materials from households back to urban scrap dealers and manufacturers, where these materials were then reprocessed into consumer goods.

This occurred largely through surprisingly sophisticated and widespread systems of barter. Shopkeepers and roaming peddlers would exchange manufactured goods from afar for quantities of used rags, bones, or certain metals and other recyclable materials. Some peddlers were employed by dealers and provided with equipment, and others worked more independently. The most reliable sources of information we have come from these dealers, who as businessmen kept detailed records of what was bought and sold. In some instances they set precise prices and terms for barter, so that the peddlers in their employ would not attempt to negotiate. The peddlers would travel from home to home, mostly in rural areas, where they would gather materials before heading back to their urban or railroad depots to drop off their collections and restock.

This system inherently placed limitations on the scale of collection and accumulation. Itinerant peddlers could only travel with whatever goods they could carry in backpacks, or sometimes on horses or in horse-drawn wagons. This meant that the recycling and exchange system was necessarily kept near human scale. It also meant that human relationships played an important role in dealing with rubbish.⁴⁹

Lists kept by materials dealers show a wide variety of materials accepted for barter. Some were materials we’d expect to see, like metals, rubber, glass, and most importantly rags. However, items listed were not limited strictly to conventional recyclables. They also included organic materials or goods such as “fruit, flax, mustard seed, woolen yarn, beeswax, butter, eggs, feathers, bristles, hair, horns, bones, and the skins of deer, sheep, calves, bear, mink, raccoon, and even house cats.”⁵⁰ Perishables like eggs and butter were resold at retail, such as in the general stores which acted as relay points for the dealers.

Many of the other materials were sold to industrial manufacturers. Paper manufacturers required a material to fill in the gaps between fibers in their porous paper. This material, called sizing, was made by cooking down animal products like horns, hoofs, and scraps of hide (hoofs and bones, of course, were also used to make glue). Fats were of great value for lighting and lubrication in any factory. These were eventually replaced by petroleum derivatives, but the first oil well wasn’t even drilled in the US until more than a century after these peddlers were well established.⁵¹ Fats were also processed to extract glycerine, which was used to manufacture explosives like nitroglycerine and dynamite.

But from the beginning, rag collection drove the development of these recycling systems. Rags and cloth scraps were needed to make paper, since wood pulp wasn’t used to manufacture paper in the US until the twentieth century. Recycled rags were the fundamental requirement for paper manufacturing since the first paper mill was opened in the US in 1690. That mill was the Rittenhouse Mill, near Philadelphia, which made new paper from waste linen, cotton, and old paper.⁵²

In the 1800s, clothing was still produced by tailors and in households, so there were very few large-scale sources of scrap fabric. To deal with constant shortages of rags, paper mills embarked on large-scale propaganda campaigns to convince women to save their rags and send them to the mills. These campaigns often included newspaper advertisements and witty or poetic slogans. For example, take this piece of verse from 1807: “The scraps, which you reject, unfit / To clothe the tenant of a hovel, / May shine in sentiment and wit, / And help to make a charming novel.”⁵⁴ This and other pieces of propaganda at the time emphasized the benefits of recycling in class terms—from hovel to novel. This contrasts starkly to twentieth century propaganda, in which being of a higher class became identified with wastefulness rather than thrift.

Patriotism, also, was commonly identified with conservation. A 1734 advertisement requesting rags claimed that it was “the Duty of every Person . . . to help forward so useful to a Manufactory; Therefore I intreat all those that are Lovers of their Country, to be very careful of their Linnen Rags,” and gave instructions on where to send them.⁵⁵ The coming of the American Revolution dramatically increased local demand for rags and patriotic calls for rag saving. Paper products from England were banned, and Americans urgently wanted paper for printing propaganda, for printing money, and for the manufacture of cartridge cases.

Rag and rag paper were in comparatively short supply until the twentieth century, with the onset of large-scale mechanization and the use of wood pulp for paper manufacturing. The difference was critical. To get a supply of rags, a society first had to clear and plow land, plant cotton or flax (for linen), harvest and process the fibers, weave cloth and sew clothing, and then collect scraps and used-up articles. This required large amounts of labor (often provided through slavery) and months or years of lead time. The use of wood pulp introduced a tremendous change. Instead of having to plant and harvest, papermakers could now cut down forests, liquidating fiber sources that took centuries to accumulate. In the short term, paper manufacturers were freed of the irritation of having to collect rags and could scale up production to whatever society demanded. In the long term, the change would doom many of the planet’s remaining forests.

The effects of rag and other recycling systems of the 1800s were somewhat counter-intuitive. Rather than solving rag shortages, recycling actually led to an increase in rag demand by fueling the growth of an embryonic industrial system. The availability of paper (with its importance for keeping records, communication, and advertising) facilitated a global trend of growth for business and an increase in economic activity. And this increase in economic activity and industrial production further drove the demand for paper.

It’s a phenomenon often seen in the history of waste. Take computers. They were touted as tools to reduce waste, fostering ideas like “the paperless office.” But one of the primarily real-world effects of computers was to increase the number of communications that took place and to vastly increase the amount of data that could be collected on any given subject. Since much of this information is printed out, computers ended up increasing the amount of paper used, rather than decreasing it. And through a system of planned obsolescence, the computer age also ushered a new era of electronic waste.

Another way to say this is that the attitudes a society has toward trash closely mirror its attitudes toward trash workers and “garbage pickers.” In situations where garbage is viewed as valuable, trash workers themselves often have greater social status or potential for “upward mobility.” For example, the ragmen and itinerant peddlers of the 1800s, whose salvaged product was viewed as valuable and worth trading for, would often accumulate wealth and eventually open their own stores or materials dealerships. This makes sense—in a society where sorted and recovered trash has worth, its collection and trading can be viewed as a form of economically gainful production.

Class and caste attitudes are also deeply related. Members of highly stratified societies—and most especially members of their upper classes—tend to have more disdain towards trash workers than members of more egalitarian societies. A few examples of people who work with garbage may help clarify our understanding of these social and economic relationships at work.

After the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001, the country saw a sharp devaluation of its currency (the Argentine peso). As a result, common consumable materials like paper, cardboard, and copper became too expensive for most businesses to import, creating a larger market for local recycling. At the same time, there was a massive increase in unemployment. These factors combined to cause a burst in the number of cartoneros—poor people who collect and sort recyclables like cardboard (“carton”) to sell to dealers for a small amount of money.⁵⁶ Each evening cartoneros take a government-supplied train from poor neighborhoods to wealthy areas of downtown Buenos Aires, where they search through the day’s trash for recyclable materials of value. The train they take is stripped-down, without lights and without heating or air-conditioning. The seats have been removed to make room for shopping carts. Instead of glass, the windows are often covered in rusty wire.⁵⁷ The cartoneros call this El Tren Blanco, the white train. Because the train arrives at night and leaves downtown Buenos Aires before dawn, the wealthy Argentines almost never see the cartoneros at work. In a pointed commentary on their social invisibility, many cartoneros have dubbed the train El Tren del Fantasma—the ghost train .⁵⁸

The International Red Cross estimated that in 2002 about two thousand cartoneros used the train each day.⁵⁹ In 2003, anthropologist Francisco Suarez estimated there were between thirty and forty thousand cartoneros working in the greater metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. In contrast to the behavior of many wealthier cities around the world, the municipal government of Buenos Aires has chosen to work with cartoneros, although the situation is still far from desirable. They’ve legalized the practice, which had been illegal for decades, and launched a campaign for wealthy residents to separate their recyclables in green bags, so that cartoneros will not have to sort through rotten food or hazardous or sharp objects. They’ve also begun to offer cartoneros vaccinations against tetanus.⁶⁰ And the cartoneros themselves have also become more organized, as the closure of factories brought an influx of laborers with union experience into the cartonero demographic.

Now, let’s contrast that with the municipal dump for the city of Tijuana. A popular city for tourists, Tijuana grew rapidly as an industrial center following the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The easy movement of products across the border to consumers in the US combined with barriers to the movement of poor Latin Americans across this same border provided the cheap labor and economic circumstances that allowed a boom of labor-intensive factories called maquiladoras. Often, these were simply sweatshops. Continuing American tourism and (often wasteful) local manufacturing helped to produce a steady stream of many different kinds of garbage.

Luis Alberto Urrea tells many stories about the Tijuana dump in his excellent, moving, and sometimes horrifying book The Lake of Sleeping Children . He writes that although the dump was once “a gaping Grand Canyon, it gradually filled with the endless glacier of trash until it rose, rose, swelling like a filling belly. The canyon filled and formed a flat plain, and the plain began to grow in bulldozed ramps, layers, sections, battlements.”⁶¹

But Urrea’s main focus is not on the landscape. It’s on the people who live in the dump. The conditions of widespread poverty that allowed the maquiladoras to proliferate also meant that scavenging in the dump to find materials for personal use or to sell was an economically viable option for many people—if not a necessity out of desperation. Urrea observed that “poor Mexicans, transformed now by NAFTA into a kind of squadron of human tractors, made their way through the dump, lifting, sifting, bagging, hauling, carting, plucking, cutting, recycling.”⁶²

The decomposing garbage in the dump produces highly-flammable methane, which flows out of openings and crevices in the dump. Sometimes the residents will deliberately ignite methane-emitting openings to cook over. And sometimes the methane will flow out unexpectedly, bursting into flame and even burning down entire neighborhoods.⁶³ Toxic gases fill the air, not just from the mountains of garbage but from the places where garbage is burned for fuel, or to extract the metal from radial-belt automobile tires or insulated copper wires. Fires under the surface may smolder for years.

Often, families will eat food that comes directly from the garbage. And a local health clinic reports that those living in the dump have abnormally high incidences of “skin rashes, throat ailments and cancers.”⁶⁴ And problems like these, awful as they are, are small compared to the ever-present risk of being crushed by one of the many huge garbage trucks.

The trash workers of the dump were not driven by the same goals of self-interest and personal profit which drove the architects of international trade arrangements. Instead, they developed community norms of mutual aid and egalitarianism. “The original dompe rules, a set of ordinances that sprang up organically from the people who have to work the garbage, prevailed. A set of rules, by the way, that are extraordinarily humane and sane.”⁶⁵

Just as the ethics and norms of indigenous groups were partly derived from their particular landbases, the rules of the Tijuana dump were partly determined by its structure. The middle of the dompe is where the trucks disgorge their loads. This is also the most promising site in the dump where canned food, (relatively) fresh produce, and working machines may be found. Because of the hazards of the trucks and bulldozers, the “youngest and the strongest” work here. When garbage-pickers drop into holes or fissures for choice finds, they erect poles with rags on the end to warn tractor drivers not to drive into them, crush them, or bury them in garbage. Despite precautions like this, garbage-pickers are still often killed in the Tijuana dump, and in other dumps throughout the world.

Urrea describes five rules that garbage-pickers follow. The first is to watch for dangerous heavy machinery. The second is that children are not allowed in “the trash,” the main area of the dump piled with garbage. The third has to do with gender equity: men and women are equal in the trash. The fourth is that children and older people are allowed to work on the fringe of the trash, away from the dangerous machines, where garbage pushed by tractors down the slope of the expanding mountain is sifted by gravity so that some of the best finds roll out to the pickers. And the fifth rule is that a special “safe area” is set up by the healthy workers for the very old and for people with disabilities. Universally honored, this area is avoided by tractors and trucks, though the occasional load is dumped or carried there. This way, the old and people with disabilities can still work safely. Urrea observes: “There is no welfare in the dump, but there is work, care, sweat, and dignity.”

In 2007, the city of Tijuana began to shut down the municipal dump Urrea wrote about. This is not necessarily good for the planet or the pickers. As far as the land around the dump is concerned, little has changed. Visiting the area of the dump, journalist Kinsee Morlan wrote, “When it rains, the hillsides of Fausto Gonzales bleed trash. Jagged bed springs pop out of the soft mud like broken bones from flesh. Plastic bags, rotted wood, pieces of Barbie dolls, bottle caps, cigarette butts and other debris join a muddy waterfall that spills into the canyon below. The smell is putrid.” And of course, Tijuana has not stopped producing garbage, or even tried to staunch the flow. Instead, the garbage goes to new dumps to drown even more land. Many of the pickers still live there, though others have moved on to other dumps. Strange as it may seem, many prefer working in the dump to working in sweatshops, where the daily wage may be even less than one can gain by selling their best finds from the dump.

At a new landfill location outside of Tijuana, history is repeating itself. Simple shacks and shanties are being built from scavenged materials, and individuals and families are setting up shop, despite government efforts to keep them out. Alfonso López Posada, codirector of Tijuana’s Municipal Cleaning Services, is resigned to the situation. “As long as there is trash, there will be people who work in the dump.”⁶⁶