A Crisis of Waste?

Understanding the Rubbish Society

Martin O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135900281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book takes a measured look at the 'crisis of waste' in modern society and it does so historically, sociologically and critically. It tells stories about past and present 'crises' of waste and puts them in their appropriate social and industrial contexts. From Charles Dickens to Don DeLillo, from the internal combustion engine to fish fingers, from kitchen grease to the Tour de France this book digs deep into society's dust piles and emerges with untold treasures of the imagination.

1 Rubbish Histories

[Behind] every embassy, court, palace or Grand hotel where history, as men record it, is made, in every city in the world, there is a row of battered dustbins. We have come a long way from the ape and the man who only threw away fruit peel that rotted where it fell, and we can measure our progress through the centuries by how fast our dustbins are filled. (Wylie, The Wastes of Civilization)

Writing histories of waste is not a typical undertaking. Library shelf upon library shelf is filled with histories of how societies have produced and consumed things; whole academic departments of scholars and researchers are devoted to teasing out the historical minutiae of making things and using them. Yet there are hardly any detailed, historically sensitive studies of how societies have dealt with their wastes and, conversely, the role that those wastes have played in historical development and social change. The histories that have been written tend, with few exceptions and where they delve sufficiently far back, to recount a linear legislative track from the mediaeval rakers of the mid-fourteenth century to the current ‘crisis of waste’ and the ‘throwaway society’. By and large, where the nettle of historical rubbish has been grasped firmly, it has generated fascinating insights into how people relate to the world around them and to each other. Melosi’s (1983) Garbage in the Cities, Strasser’s (1999) Waste and Want, Miller’s (2000) Fat of the Land — all, incidentally, American — demonstrate that waste is a key to understanding social, economic and political organisation.

In the British context the historical focus has tended to emphasise public health and hygiene, rather than waste as such. Wright’s (1960) Clean and Decent, McLaughlin’s (1971) Coprophilia, Wohl’s (1983) Endangered Lives are classic examples of the British coprologist’s art. Somewhat more concerned with the cultural mores surrounding the creation, rather than the disposal, of sewage, Inglis’s fascinating (2001) A Sociological History of Excretory Experience, attempts to trace the historical intersection between toilet technologies and ‘defacatory manners’ but is still well within the British canon. True, many books on recycling and ‘green’ thought seek to evaluate contemporary waste management practice against historical data but these do not dig into history’s rubbish piles in order to relate their contents to the societies that generated them (see, for example, Gandy, 1993; 1994; Tammemagi, 1999. See Chapter 4). This latter task has been left to archaeology but even here it is uncommon to find significant work on the importance of the waste itself, rather than on the social contexts of production and consumption illuminated by it. The tendency has been to view history’s waste through the lens of current understandings and treat it simply as an afterwards of production and consumption — as a leftover or excess that somehow escaped its social system.

Yet societies, contemporarily and historically, are built upon and, in important senses, fabricated out of waste. Waste is, quite literally, the ground upon which they stand, a crucial resource that has driven their development, and a key substance out of which they are, at least partly, historically composed. My main concern in this book is to investigate modern waste; that is, the roles that waste has played in social and industrial change in the period following the industrial revolution — from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day. In this first chapter, however, I want to try and set the scene for the investigation by looking briefly at how the period immediately following the industrial revolution compares with earlier ways of dealing with waste. I begin with the swamp of filth that was mediaeval England and progress to the beginnings of the consumer society in the early twentieth century. If there is a moral to the drawn from the story it is that if you think contemporary industrial societies are facing a crisis of waste, you should spare a sympathetic thought for the living conditions of your (not-so-distant) ancestors.

FILTHY HISTORY

Following his murder in December 1170, a select band of disciples gathered to undress Thomas à Becket — Henry II’s ‘meddlesome priest’ — in preparation for burial. Terence McLaughlin (1971: 19–20) describes the body’s many layers of clothing:

Outermost there was a large brown mantle; next a white surplice; underneath this a fur coat of lambs’ wool; then a woollen pelisse; then another woollen pelisse; below this the black cowled robe of the Benedictine order; then a shirt; and finally, next to the body, a tight fitting suit of coarse hair-cloth covered on the outside with linen, the first of its kind seen in England. The innumerable vermin which had infested the dead prelate were stimulated to such activity by the cold that his hair cloth … “boiled over with them like water in a simmering cauldron.”

December can be a very cold month in England so, in the absence of central heating, it is little surprise that Becket’s frame was layered against the elements. His ‘innumerable’ passengers, although seemingly there only for a free lunch, must have made an extra layer, helping to keep the drafts out and thereby contributing to much appreciated bodily warmth. Being ignorant of the potential dangers that fleas might herald — the plague had not struck England seriously for a very long time and even when it did return the potential role of the flea in its transmission was unknown — mediaeval folk of all social stations often put up with them for the whole of their lives. Anyway, given that Becket had a coarse hair-cloth next to his flesh, there may have been some difficulty distinguishing between the flea- and louse-feast and the general skin irritation deriving from the garment itself. Of course, the level of infestation also suggests that, if he had ever experienced a bath at all, it had been some considerable time before his death. More likely, Thomas à Becket and, equally significant, his clothing, had passed large phases of his adult life un-immersed in any cleansing water.

Even if Becket’s coarse hair shirt was worn as a religious penance, the condition of his body was no different from the population at large. The idea that energy might be expended in regular bathing — or even washing, either of the body or its apparel — was an alien concept to the majority of our mediaeval ancestors, including much of the monarchy and nobility. It is not that no one ever washed or bathed in these times. Lawrence Wright’s Clean and Decent, for example, presents several instances of medieval tubs and lavers, and communal bath houses which, in relatively short time, descended into houses for gossip and loose living. King John (1199–1216), for example, was said to have taken a bath ‘about once every three weeks’ (Wright, 1960: 39) — although no mention is made of his laundry arrangements. The point is that, in general, people passed their lives in a state of accumulated filth, and the places where they lived were no different. Houses were begrimed in dust, mud and all manner of dirt both outside and in. The streets of towns and villages were awash with refuse and excrement. In spite of the efforts of the rakers, who were instructed to remove deposits of filth, the tide of rubbish was simply too large to control. In London, the Fleet and Thames rivers were choked with refuse and sewage, and the town ditch, a defensive moat completed in 1213, regularly overflowed with accumulated detritus. ‘Human and animal dung and household rubbish,’ observes McLaughlin (1971: 28) ‘all discharged into the streets and left to find their own way into the river or the town ditch, were supplemented by the by-products of slaughtering and butchering.’ The remaining entrails of the slaughter trade, mixed up with excrement, blood and bits of carcass, gathered along the banks of the Thames to be washed over the side at the next moderate rain. The combined piles of household, industrial and excremental matter often blocked the gutters that ran down the streets, causing many houses to flood with the liquid run-off and encouraging some to put boards at the front of their doors to keep out some of the disgusting deluge.

The stench of medieval urban England, as can be imagined, was foul in the extreme. So pervasive was the stink of excrement, rotting carcasses and offal that few ever noticed anything amiss. McLaughlin recounts the case of two men who were prosecuted for piping ‘ordure’ into a neighbour’s cellar and who were caught not because anyone in the house noticed the smell but because the cellar overflowed. Given the tendency of street ordure to wash into houses, this circumstance is not as extraordinary as it may at first appear. When the plague did strike England in 1348, it added a new pungency to the normal stink of life. Bubonic plague carries its own peculiar, and fearful, odour. Combined with the smell of the rotting corpses that gathered in quantities too numerous to dispose of, the inhabitants of England’s towns and villages locked their doors, sometimes being forced to do so by panic-stricken authorities, and burned ineffective fumigants — such as incense — to ward off the invading stench. In a strange kind of association, to contemporary sensibilities, at least, many also believed that one foul stink could defeat the menacing consequences of another so it was not uncommon for householders to squat over their earth closets, breathing in the fumes to offset the threat of the black death.

If medieval England comprised a swamp of filth and rubbish, the Tudor period fared better only superficially. Houses, furnishings and clothes became more decorative but behind the grandiose décor and style lurked the same accumulations of refuse and dirt. Elaborate hooped skirts, extensive padding at shoulder and waste, ruffs and frills of huge variety, tapestries, textile hangings and covered furniture, for those who could afford them, still hid infestations of fleas and lice and provided an outward show of ornamentation overlaying an inner reality of grunge and grime. The Tudor era may have provided close stools and prototype water closets (the latter were considered an eccentricity) for the wealthy, but it did little to improve on the means of disposing of the accumulated cloacae. Nor did it do much for the state of the larger towns and villages. Street gutters were still filled with all manner of refuse, and rubbish was piled in such abundance on the highways that wagons often became completely stuck in it (see Mitchell & Leys, 1964: 161). As if the ground-level catastrophe were not enough, from the late sixteenth century onwards, houses and manufactures became increasingly dependent on coal, instead of wood, for heating. Supplies of wood for urban domestic fires and industrial production had all but dried up in many larger towns so, although the better off could still afford to buy some wood, the mass of the urban population and many urban industries had to exercise frugality by purchasing cheap coal — ‘sea cole’ — shipped from Newcastle. By the time of the Restoration in 1660, a million tons of coal was being mined in England every year, around half of it being consumed in London alone. Indeed, ‘Seacoal Lane’, near Ludgate Circus in London, is almost certainly so named in recognition of the coal-laden barges that landed there after sailing up the Fleet river. As a consequence of the substitution of coal for wood, the inside, as well as the outside, of houses was often choked by a fug of acrid smoke. Now, added to the excrement and refuse piled in the thoroughfares, overflowing cesspools and rank waterways, came ever-growing quantities of thick, black soot deposited from the belching chimneys of the breweries, dye-works and soap-makers as well as from the houses themselves. So dense and obnoxious was the foul miasma that in 1661 Sir John Evelyn was moved to present to King and Parliament a tract entitled Fumifugium: or the Inconveniencies of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated together with some Remedies Humbly Proposed which he opens with an illustrative anecdote:

It was one day, as I was Walking in Your MAJESTIES Palace, at WHITE-HALL (where I have sometimes the honour to refresh my self with the Sight of Your Illustrious Presence, which is the Joy of Your Peoples hearts) that a presumptuous Smoake issuing from one or two Tunnels neer Northumberland-House, and not far from Scotlandyard, did so invade the Court; that all the Rooms, Galleries, and Places about it were fill’d and infested with it; and that to such a degree, as Men could hardly discern one another for the Clowd, and none could support, without manifest Inconveniency.¹

The change from wood to coal as fuel for domestic heating and industrial production had other effects, apart from blackening the air of major towns and depositing concentrated Tudor acid rain on town and country alike. The ash from burned coal is a more effective binding agent than wood ash. In consequence, when piled on the streets with all the other effluvia of industrial and domestic life, it was progressively fused into a relatively durable mass by successive waves of traffic, causing the level of the roads to rise. By the early nineteenth century, using coal ash for making garden paths was recommended to American householders precisely because it can be trodden to a consistency more durable than brick (see Strasser, 1999: 23). In some cities today the roads stretch atop multiple layers of mixed refuse and coal ash going down as far as fifteen feet. In Edinburgh and other ancient cities the rising road level, rather than the builder’s shovel, explains the existence of some of the cellars (see Wylie, 1959: 32–3).

If the urban stench became particularly ripe, persons with spare cash were able to purchase perfumes with which to soak their gloves or handkerchiefs and thus mask the worst of the odour. However, ‘perfume’ is a rather fanciful term for the substances most commonly in use. Whereas today’s perfumeries may use, for example, tiny fractions of essence of musk — well disguised in compound fluids — the Tudor practice often was to apply the much less adulterated secretions of musk deer, civet cat, Russian beaver, or ambergris — this last being a putrefying emanation of dead whales. Civet is particularly interesting, in that it is produced by a gland near the penis of the civet cat and, in order to extract it, the collector frequently would first ‘tease’ the cat. It was a valuable substance, worth several pounds sterling per ounce at today’s prices — but how many people today would deign to arouse a very annoyed and potentially ferocious wild cat in order to earn a meagre living? Still, the notion that it is preferable to walk around smelling of slightly sweetened tom-cat spray than to inhale the raw air of urban England surely confirms that the smell at times was intolerable even to those for whom it was a fact of daily existence.

Still unaware of the role of the flea in spreading the plague, and oblivious to the place of Mus rattus, the native black rat, in the transmission cycle, post-Tudor England’s filthy towns and dwellings stored up the conditions for the return of the plague. Although the town and village authorities made some rudimentary connections between the dirt and disease, the measures enacted to sanitise the streets were both ineffective and often not implemented. Given also that designated places for excreting were few and far between, and given that the labour power expended on ridding the streets of the mixed human and animal droppings, rotting carcasses and refuse remained woefully inadequate, enacting provisions for cleaning up the towns was a deed with more than a little of the King Canute about it. Numerous, and vehement, public laws had been issued since the mediaeval period (see Salusbury, 1948) but no abatement in the tide of deposited filth could be discerned. The last true epidemic of Bubonic Plague struck England in 1665–66 and, in London, at least, inhabited by something of the order of a fifth of England’s population, the ‘cure’ was drastic indeed and had nothing to do with public sanitation measures. On Sunday September 2, 1666, a small fire started in Thomas Farynor’s bakery in Pudding Lane. Five days later, one and a half square miles of London and its environs lay in ashes and the new ‘Great Fire’ of London (exceeding that of 1212) entered the historical record. Over 13,000 of London’s close-packed wooden houses were destroyed along with every scrap of refuse upon which the black rats had been feeding, thus encouraging Mus norvegicus, the more aggressive and more prolific imported brown rat, finally to supplant its plague-carrying cousin in England’s capital city. London was about to be reborn and whilst there were some improvements — notably in the construction of many more buildings from brick and stone instead of wood, and a better system of barging refuse to the food-growing suburbs — the rivers and streets very soon overflowed with filth once more.

Obviously, it did not help that the common practice, ingrained over centuries of habituation, was for householders, and manufacturers, whenever it suited them (and whenever they could get away with it), simply to disgorge any and all detritus straight into the street or, for those ‘lucky’ enough to live near running water, into the nearest stream or river. Excrement, bones, fish waste, feathers, metal and fibrous industrial discards, and effluents, worn out items of every kind, household dust and debris, dead dogs: you name it and out of the door or window it went. Walking beneath the windows of Edinburgh lodgings required that you be alert to the characteristic cry of Gardy-Loo (‘Gardez L’eau!’) and shouted, as quick and as loud as you could, the appropriate response Haud yer han in order to avoid being showered by the contents of chamber pots. In fact, since beer, rather than water, was the usual beverage of the common urbanite, the condition of the slops thrown from the windows can hardly be imagined. If you happened to be out when nature’s call was felt (and even, sometimes, if you happened to be in), little embarrassment attached to an abrupt dash and squat in the nearest doorway or street corner. Even during the eighteenth century, that period of Enlightenment and progress when the minds of men and women turned to the rational exploration of the natural and social universes, it was still necessary to wade through the slime and grime of urban life. In these circumstances, if you could afford it, a thick-soled wooden ‘patten’ or galosh came in handy. Designed to maintain several inches between foot and smut, it just goes to show that the platform shoe was an in-demand item centuries before the 1970s and that there is indeed nothing under the sun (or very little, at least) that is new.² The faecal morass was not a peculiarly British phenomenon: the whole of urban Europe was caked in the stuff. In Paris, according to Corbin (1986: 27), ‘excrement was everywhere: in alleys, at the foot of milestones, in cabs,’ and the stink of that city was matched, if not surpassed, by the choking odours of Bordeaux, Rouen and Clermont.

Although the streets of England and Scotland slowly and spasmodically became cleaner as the century progressed, and although increased access to water meant that, for some people, greater cleanliness was theoretically possible, urban waterways deteriorated even more. A major reason for this was the growing popularity of Alexander Cummings’s water closet, patented in 1775 and subsequently improved by Joseph Bramah. In spite of a tendency to find its own natural course to the waterways, at least a portion of the ‘nightsoil’ customarily had gathered in earth closets or on the streets, or was collected by nightmen either for fertiliser or to be dumped in laystalls, but now increasing quantities were flushed through crude sewers or into open street channels straight into the rivers and streams that supplied the water drunk by the urban population. The seventeenth century had been struck by a plague it did not understand and whose origins were not of its people’s own making. The eighteenth century, in contrast, began to ferment a perfect organic culture in which to nurture its own epidemic: typhoid (or ‘enteric fever’), which, by the end of the century, was already signalling the tragedy that was to follow in several large-scale epidemics after 1836.

REFORM HISTORY

The turn of a century means nothing in itself, yet the arrival of the nineteenth century was marked by a fitting event since 1800 was the year of Edwin Chadwick’s birth. Chadwick bestrode the Victorian public health movement like a sanitary behemoth, producing schemes for social reform in every sphere from accident insurance to ‘preventive policing’ and sewage management. Chadwick, in fact, epitomises the soul of Victorian urban reformism. He was not a philanthropist, he was a social engineer seeking to mould the physical character of urban England in the service of a higher plan — and a quick profit in the process. A utilitarian through and through he became secretary to Jeremy Bentham but soon exceeded the latter’s capacity to devise practical schemes for social development. The prime mover behind the 1834 Poor Law Ammendment Act and the 1848 Public Health Act, Chadwick’s influence extended across the Atlantic to encourage successive waves of American urban reform.

Looking back at nineteenth-century Britain, it certainly appears that reform was necessary. The filth and squalor that had characterised the medieval and Tudor towns was simply intensified in rapidly growing urban areas like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and London. The rivers were stil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Rubbish Society?
• 1  Rubbish Histories
• 2  Rubbish Literatures
• 3  Rubbish Industries
• 4  Rubbish Households
• 5  Rubbish Relationships
• 6  Rubbish Idealisms
• 7  Rubbish Materialisms
• Conclusion: Rubbish Society!
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index