This book is a history of household waste in the United States and what we have done with it over the years. Although Strasser takes her research as far back as colonial times, most of the focus is on the habits of the Nineteenth Century, and how they evolved with our changing society. The first chapter introduces the central theme of the book, how in the past, especially before the turn of the Twentieth Century, waste products served as raw materials for other products. In other words, before we ever invented the word "recycling", practically everything was recycled. Over the past 100 years, this has changed, so that now recycling seems like a new idea. Whereas in the past, cities and households constituted one component of a closed production/consumption system that included manufacturers, following the age of industrialization and mass production, that system has broken apart, and there is now a one-way flow from the factories to the consumers. And this flow leads eventually to mountains of garbage, for which we currently seem to have no better solution than mass burial.
Strasser begins her story by describing an archeological dig of a 1620s settlement, where matching pieces of potshards were discovered at great distances from each other, suggesting that if a pot was broken, residents might have been in the habit of reusing the pieces for other purposes. Social history is notoriously hard to reconstruct, since people of the time rarely thought the details of their daily lives important enough to document. This is especially true with the topic of waste, refuse, and garbage. But by carefully picking through such items as housekeeping manuals and business accounting ledgers, Strasser was able to pull many of the pieces of the garbage story together. She found that in the Nineteenth Century, household food scraps were fed to chickens and pigs. Metal and wood items were repaired or refashioned. Before the age of industrial looms, fabric of any kind had much greater value, since all but the very youngest of children were well aware of the tremendous labor involved in weaving cloth. Even after mass-produced fabrics became available, clothing was still stitched, often by hand, at home. For this reason, clothing often symbolized a bond between the producer and the wearer. It was never simply discarded, but rather mended, passed on to others, taken apart and refashioned into new garments, or made into quilts or rugs. As a last resort, it would be used as bandages or sold to the ragman.
The phenomenon of the ragman, as Strasser describes him, is particularly fascinating. This was a person who would make the rounds of rural homes with a motley collection of manufactured goods for sale, such as tin dishpans or soap. For payment, he would accept rags, fats, and bones. These items he would ship off to warehouses to be used as raw materials for paper, soap, and fertilizer. As Strasser puts it "The very distribution system that brought manufactured goods to consumers took recyclable materials back to factories."
Despite these widespread collection networks, early Nineteenth Century factories suffered continuously from a shortage of raw materials, and labor was also relatively scarce in North America. This led to the development of new industrial processes that relied on mass production techniques, which became dependent on new materials rather than recycled ones. This change, combined with the increasing urbanization of society, began to result in garbage and other unwanted items piling up inside and outside people's houses, soon leading to the need for municipal waste collection services. But no sooner had cities organized a collection system than a new problem cropped up: "Paradoxically, the more trash collection there was, the more trash was generated," as Strasser observes. In just the 4 years between 1903 and 1907, the amount of garbage collected by the city of Pittsburgh, for example, increased by 43%. Cities tried various methods to deal with these huge and growing mounds of garbage, from dumping the stuff in water, to piling it up in poor people's neighborhoods, to incinerating it. Significantly, what all of these methods had in common was that sorting of garbage by composition, such as organic material, metal, and glass, was no longer relevant. Cities which once universally required refuse sorting by households rescinded their laws, and it wasn't until the landfill crises of the 1990s that such laws began to be considered again as part of mandatory recycling programs.
This book is filled with many other thought-provoking and interesting topics, such as the history and impact of the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and the patriotic scrap collecting campaigns of the World Wars. Strasser's style is clear and interesting, academic without being stuffy. This is a great resource for anyone interested in material culture, ecology, or American history.
