Let's Talk Trash
A history of waste management, scandalous anti-littering campaigns, and God in it all.
Sorry for the corny title. Couldn’t help myself. At least it’s better than the title I suggested for an inter-office chat function my husband programmed years ago for his company’s sewer flow analysis software. “You could call it Sh** Chat!” I exclaimed. He didn’t adopt my suggestion.
Recently I landed in my old college library’s basement bookstacks researching a potential reporting project. I found a gem of a book on the history of municipal solid waste management in the United States.
What?! You are skeptical that this book is a gem? Seriously, it has been fascinating.
Let’s start with this very basic question: What is waste?
The word itself implies a potential meaning. Waste is something that could be put to use, but isn’t. “What a waste,” we say, perhaps pointing to money frivolously spent or perfectly good food thrown out. What I learned from Resisting Garbage by Lily Pollans is that the way we currently handle “waste” across the U.S. is a very recent, very strange, and very disturbing phenomenon.
“Trash” is a modern invention. Before the industrial era when people began concentrating in cities, everything left over from a household’s activities got put somewhere, but not in a trash can. Fat drippings from meat went into the lard bucket. Hand-forged iron nails in dilapidated houses were pulled out of rotting wood to use for the next build. Paper was put in the woodpile as tinder. Kitchen scraps went to the chickens. An old shirt became a quilt or a rug. Plastic did not exist.
The concentration of people in cities made sanitation and disease a growing problem. Reformers pushed city governments to keep the streets clean. In the early days of cities taking over tasks previously handled by households, there were multiple categories for discards. In Boston, for instance, ashes, offal, combustible waste and rubbish, market refuse, street cleanings, and cesspool and catch basin cleanings were all handled differently.
Over time, efficiency-seeking engineers decided that having separate categories was uneconomical and lumped everything as “trash” to be hauled “away.” Out of sight and out of mind. “Americans lost expertise in reusing materials and self-provisioning,” Pollans writes.
After World War II, industry looked for new ways to market plastic polymers originally developed for wartime use. Single-use disposable products exploded onto the scene.
Here’s one of the more jaw-dropping stories in the book. You know the campaign Keep America Beautiful? The group strives to “End Littering, Improve Recycling, and Beautify America’s Communities.” I’ve definitely come across the slogan on highways and TV commercials urging folks not to litter.
The campaign started in 1953 as disposable beer bottles piled up along roads and spilled into farmland.
The campaign funders? The bottling industry.
That year, Vermont farmers and environmentalists lobbied to put a state law in place prohibiting sale of beer in disposable containers. They placed responsibility in the hands of bottle producers for designing products that could only be used once and now clogged roadways. But, in a clever sleight of hand, the industry shifted the blame onto “irresponsible consumers.”
The problem wasn’t the ever-increasing mounds of wasted material, they argued. The problem was that people didn’t know where to throw their trash. “Keep America Beautiful’s approach to fixing the problem of garbage,” Pollans writes, “shrewdly externalized the costs of disposability onto individuals, communities, and the public sector.”
The bottling companies won. Vermont let its disposable beer bottle ban expire four years later and did not renew it.
Federal laws passed in the 1960s and 70s addressing our growing garbage heaps. Source reduction was listed as the first line of action, but as cities and states implemented new guidelines, they took their cue from the bottling industry. We just need better ways to get rid of our stuff, was the thinking. Rather than, we need to reduce the amount of stuff we are producing and wasting in the first place.
The book goes on to detail the journeys of two American cities, Seattle and Boston, as they parted ways starting in the 1970s in how they defined the problem of trash. Boston continued to see the problem as one of disposal.
Seattle, on the other hand, had a responsive municipal government and residents very eager to find a better solution. Through many years of community input and trial and error, they began redefining the nature of trash itself. It wasn’t something to haul far away. It was a potential resource.
In partnership with citizens, the municipal government began educating the public, shifting incentives, and building out infrastructure to make it possible for residents who wanted to reduce landfill inputs to actually do so. Today, Seattle residents compost or recycle over 70% of their household trash. Sixty percent of Seattle’s municipal waste is diverted from landfills. People in Seattle throw away half as much daily (2.16 pounds) as the average American.
At one point, Seattle even considered establishing a tax on disposable goods equal to the cost of landfilling them at the end of their life. This is an example of “cradle-to-grave” thinking that considers the true cost a product. This cost includes raw inputs to byproducts emitted during production that might harm the surrounding community, to packaging and transport, to what happens to the product after its useful life. Every step has a cost that producers and consumers seldom consider beyond immediate profit or gratification.
A step beyond cradle-to-grave thinking is the circular economy and Zero Waste movements, which focus on generating no waste to begin with and putting all byproducts or discards back into the production cycle.
I’m still digesting everything from this book, but here are my initial takeaways:
The way that American cities handle waste—throwing everything into a bin and trucking it to a landfill—isn’t normal. This isn’t how things were done in the grand scheme of human history, and in many ways it’s not an improvement. It alienates us from the physical world that we depend on and makes invisible our reckless and unsustainable consumption of natural resources.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Our grandparents knew how to do things differently. Communities around the world are recovering practices and developing pathways to sort discards and put them to creative use. Activists and regular folks are also putting pressure on manufacturers to take responsibility for the environmental impact, recyclability, reusability, and repairability of the stuff they produce, from Styrofoam containers to appliances.
Local governments are key nodes of change. Municipalities control how a town’s solid wastes are handled. Though their decisions are constrained by state and federal laws, infrastructure, and budget, many are making the move toward municipal composting programs, more effective recycling, and even bans against single-use products. If enough people in a town care, organize, and raise their voices, city governments will have to respond. Though I wish I lived in a place like Seattle, where things have already been shifting for decades, I’m thinking more and more about what it looks like to “be the change you want to see.”
As folks push policymakers to regulate how things are produced and disposed of, others push back on the grounds of free market, government overreach, privacy, and individual rights (i.e. “I can put whatever I want in my trash bin!” or “Composting shouldn’t be mandatory.”). These are thorny battles. It would make a huge difference if everyone cared enough to change their habits voluntarily. Still, these problems cannot be resolved by individual shifts alone. Collective problems require collective solutions. What those solutions are should be a conversation across grassroots, local, and state/national groups.
Lastly, I can’t help making ties from this trash talk to the Christian story.
On the church calendar, we’re still in Christmastide. We sit with the gospel accounts of God becoming human, embracing physicality. Even so, our desire is strong to get away from the stuff of this life—from the fermenting ooze at the bottom of our trash cans to clipped toenails. It’s all just…gross. And all that Christmas wrapping and gift packaging, it’s so easy to drop it all in the trash bin and ignore where it’s going—into a gaping hole in the earth to molder for centuries.
But in Christ, God invites us not to label all of our stuff “trash” and ship it away in a container to “somewhere else.” Instead, God beckons us to come close. To sink into the particulars. Where does this item come from? What material is it made out of? Whose sweat and blood went into making it? What did it cost—real social and environmental cost—not just price tag? How am I related to it?
God invites us into a life-giving and redemptive relationship with the physical world. From promiscuous women to lepers, from Superfund sites to garbage heap villages, God sees value in what others deem “contaminated.”
We can too.
More on Trash
I wrote a couple pieces for our family travel blog about the Zero Waste movement.
“A Zero-Waste Grocer at the Edge of Patagonia” - an interview with the owner of a bulk foods store in Puerto Natales, Chile.
“What if There’s No Trash Can?” - “Produce no waste” is a permaculture principle. We saw this (imperfectly) lived out at an Argentine project.