History of Waste

A century ago urban squalor and disease led citizen reformers to demand cities take action. They did. Cities became responsible for disposing of waste.
But urban refuse was different then. It was mostly coal ash and food scraps, with a small proportion of simple manufactured products like paper and glass. Today, 75% of our waste is throw-away products and packaging, some containing toxic components. Despite municipal recycling, these wastes keep growing. Local communities have been shouldering the burden of cleaning up after producers and consumers of wasteful products. By subsidizing wasteful product makers, we’re providing welfare for waste.

Enabling the Throw-away Society:  The convenience of weekly waste collection masked the growth in resource consumption. The use of toxic components in everyday products that were thrown away introduced public risks from landfills and incinerators. Public costs were growing, while real incentives for producers and consumers to avoid waste were lacking. Even municipal recycling programs failed to achieve hoped-for results, because most products were not designed for recycling.

Resources

Tools

• Change in Waste Graphic (PPI)
  
  SOURCES: 
  • For turn of the century New York City, see Morse, W.F. 1908. The Collection and Disposal of Municipal Waste. The Municipal Journal and Engineer, New York, NY, USA. and Parsons, H. de B. 1906. The Disposal of Municipal Refuse, John Wiley & Co., New York, NY, USA.
  • For 1960 on see US EPA data at http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/msw99.htm   PPI’s  report, Unintended Consequences, used US EPA 2003. Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts and Figures. The picture has not changed substantially since.
    
• A Short History of Waste  By Helen Spiegelman. Product Policy Institute,  March 2007
• Unintended Consequences: Waste Management and the Throwaway Society  By Helen Spiegelman and Bill Sheehan. Product Policy Institute,  March 2005
• The Next Frontier for Municipal Solid Waste, Spiegelman and Sheehan, BioCycle, February 2006
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