Trashing the Planet: Examining Our Global Garbage Glut
or water Modern archaeologists study middens or ancient trash heaps The shells pottery and other long-lasting items found there help archaeologists determine how people prepared food what types of tools and weapons they used and much more about daily life in ancient times CITY LIFE The world’s first cities emerged in the ancient Middle East in about 3500 BCE Historians think that ancient city dwellers simply tossed their garbage including human waste animal waste and animal carcasses into streets or rivers Over the centuries as cities grew larger garbage became an increasingly worrisome problem Piles of waste attracted flies rats and other pests that spread diseases to humans During the Industrial Revolution which began in the late eighteenth century in Great Britain companies started to use power-driven machinery to produce goods Although craftspeople still made many items by hand more and more products came from large urban factories With industrialization which eventually spread to other parts of Europe and to North America cities got bigger and dirtier But even in industrialized cities most individuals did not produce much garbage Goods were expensive and citizens were thrifty They made much of their own food clothing tools and cleaning supplies at home Nothing was wasted Housewives used food scraps to make soup or fed them to domestic animals such as pigs and chickens Families handed down tools housewares furniture and clothing from one generation to the next When clothing items ripped or wore out women mended them by hand or used the scraps of cloth as diapers or rags If an item couldn’t be repaired or reused it could be sold for a few pennies In cities towns and rural areas peddlers called ragmen or rag-and-bone men went door-to-door in horse-drawn carts buying old clothes scrap metal scrap paper cooking grease and animal bones They sold the materials to businesses that recycled them into new products For instance papermakers shredded old cloth mixed it with water and 8 TRASHING THE PLANET
mashed it into a pulp which they then formed into sheets of paper Some craftspeople turned old cooking grease into candles and soap Other workers ground up animal bones and sold them to farmers as fertilizer Eventually industrialization changed the way consumers obtained household items especially in the United States In the mid-nineteenth century US manufacturers began to produce more and more goods for the consumer market Instead of making everything at home Americans could visit corner stores and department stores to buy clothing foods soaps and housewares Most products had very little packaging then Consumers usually bought food and cleaning products in bulk and carried their goods home in cloth bags This engraving from 1868 shows New York City rag pickers selling salvaged materials to a scrap merchant Sometimes called ragmen or rag-and-bone men recyclers made money by collecting unwanted materials from households and reselling them This was long before the era of city-run recycling programs FROM RAGS AND BONES TO PLASTIC DISASTER 9
However the businesses that produced the new consumer goods contributed to the dirt and grime of cities Factories powered their machinery by burning coal and petroleum Smoke and soot belched from factory smokestacks polluting the air and water Human sewage added to the filth While some nineteenth-century cities built sewer systems and some wealthy people installed flush toilets and indoor plumbing in their homes many city dwellers relieved themselves in outhouses and chamber pots Waste often seeped from outhouses into the surrounding soil and waterways and citizens often emptied chamber pots by simply dumping the contents outside As cities grew bigger dirtier and more crowded trash began to pile up Some city officials realized that garbage was a threat to public health They hired workers to pick up residents trash and haul it to dumps on the edge of town Usually just open pits these places reeked and they attracted rats and other pests Meanwhile US companies picked up the pace of manufacturing In the early twentieth century using assembly-line production factories churned out mass-produced clothing housewares cosmetics canned foods and electric appliances In magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post advertisers promised Americans that they would find health and happiness with new hair-care products instant baking mixes presliced bread vacuum cleaners toasters radios toothpaste deodorants and nail polish To attract shoppers attention manufacturers placed the new products inside colorful and decorative packaging The containers and wrappers included cans cardboard boxes aluminum foil paper and cellophane an early form of plastic With mass production and more stores the new goods were affordable and easy to purchase US families no longer reused household materials the way earlier generations had They began to toss empty containers food scraps and other garbage into the waste bin rather than upcycling them More big cities began to provide curbside garbage pickup But instead of just taking trash to open dumps haulers took it to 10 TRASHING THE PLANET
By the early decades of the twentieth century access to mass-produced goods had become a reality for most American consumers They bought manufactured food products cleaning supplies toiletry items and other items from stores rather than making them at home The shift led to a significant increase in the amount of trash Americans produced every year This 1936 picture by acclaimed US photographer Berenice Abbott shows the display window of an A P grocery store in New York City large incinerators or to facilities called sanitary landfills There operators covered layers of trash with alternating layers of soil Burying the garbage helped cut down on rats and odors More and more cities built sewage systems to carry off and treat human waste Indoor toilets became commonplace in big cities But trash removal and sanitation was not uniform across the United States In many places citizens still carted their trash to open dumps on the outskirts of town In other areas residents burned their own garbage in backyard or basement incinerators releasing toxic smoke into the air Many Americans still used outhouses well into the twentieth century FROM RAGS AND BONES TO PLASTIC DISASTER 11
