There’s an interesting article in the NYT on recycling here. It’s not wrong. Even if you think every effort is worth it to preserve the environment, a rational person will recognize that resources are finite and so should be directed to the most efficacious action. I do think some of the content is excessively bleak–for example, most metal recycling is good, and paper recycling is generally cost-saving as well. But most Americans are so trained with the idea that recycling is Good that you need a strong tone to counteract that.
But the existence of a disposable society itself is something that the article doesn’t examine and that few people think about. It’s actually something that’s pretty new in civilization–that is, cultures that have cities, writing, and farming.
Now, hunting and gathering cultures generally have a lot of waste, per capita, compared to, say ancient Rome or early modern London. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard the nonsense about how the American Indians used every part of the buffalo–but that’s all it really is: nonsense. The truth is that the tribes that hunted buffalo (a much smaller subset of Amerindians than the sweeping statement usually credits) used as much as the buffalo as they had a use for. If hunting was easy, they ate the yummiest bits and left the rest to rot. If buffalo were scarce, then they ate what was edible, used whatever other bits they needed…and left the rest to rot.
Remember the hunts that involved chasing migrating buffalo off cliffs by the dozens, if not hundreds? The same textbook that spouted the Indian-as-nature’s-child propaganda probably talked about those, too. The waste involved in such hunting practices was appalling to the Europeans who first witnessed it–in highly agricultural areas, like western Europe, meat was too expensive and involved to much work to waste it so freely. (Somehow, this impossibility of reconciling the fake Indian who has a deep reverence for the sacredness of nature and makes propitiatory prayers to the spirit of every animal he killed with the Indian who drives herds off cliffs never bothers textbook writers. This is, of course, because the Indian of one’s textbooks isn’t a person at all but a symbol that was first co-opted by romantic Victorians and then by the environmental movement.)
This example can be generalized to the statement that people in hunter-gatherer/hunter-farmer pre-urban societies typically used whatever they had a use for (animal or otherwise) and ditched the rest. Let’s take our pre-Columbian plains Indian again–this time a real one. Yes, you could make containers from the intestines, clothes and shelter from the hide, needles from the bones, etc. But you only have a use for a certain number of containers, and there are a lot more bones than you need for needle-making. These societies generally had limited trade. Luxuries could be traded hundreds of miles, even thousands at times. Culture-critical objects, such as flint, would be traded long distances, too. But there was no trade of ordinary, commodity-type goods. You don’t see the Irquois loading up caravans of corn and taking back stacks of buffalo hide. So whatever couldn’t be used in the place it originated was, essentially, thrown away. Buffalo might make the best needles on the continent, but you’re not going to see a buffalo-bone-needle-making industry buying up all the unused buffalo bones to export them across North America. There isn’t a sufficient population density to create a market, and there isn’t a sufficient consistent surplus of food to allow this kind of specialization, either.
Once you start getting cities, though, you start getting a population that specializes occupationally and that engages in increasingly complex trade routes among various sufficiently populous markets. So suddenly the intrinsic value of buffalo bones for needles could, theoretically, launch a real industry. Not only can almost everything potentially have a use, but there is now a market for those uses.
There is almost no such thing as garbage in such a society. In pre-industrial societies objects are generally little chemically changed from their original states unless burnt or eaten, which makes them very easy to reuse. Metal can be reshaped. Wood can be reused until it is reduced to fuel. Ashes and manure–include human–enrich the fields. Clothing could be shredded and reused in clothing or, later, paper. Bones made glue. Even dog poop had its uses in tanning, and human urine was used in a number of different processes. There was almost nothing that wasn’t either biodegradable or reusable–or both.
This isn’t to say that pre-industrial civilizations are ecologically morally superior to modern society. Soot from cities could blight the plants and even change the weather in an area. Rivers were more polluted that we can really understand today. Farming practices permanently damaged the fertility of the earth–and much of this even happened pre-civilization and continued long into urban ages. (Most of Greece’s topsoil is now at the bottom of the Aegean, while Britain’s moors are damaged land caused by massive loss of fertile topsoil after severe deforestation in the bronze age.) Systematic efforts to exterminate undesirable animals were undertaken, and great areas of forest were clearcut in efforts to improve the land for human habitation. But despite this, the level of recycling was nearly complete. Baskets and ceramics were fairly disposable, but few other things didn’t continue to have a value that entire groups of people took advantage of.
As I’ve already mentioned, the ease of reuse is one part of the equation. The existence of markets was another. There’s a third, though, and it’s the relationship between the value of human labor and the value of material goods. Compared to human labor, pre-industrial goods are very expensive. This means that it was worth the time of the rag-and-bone man to not only collect various bits of recyclable trash but to go to the trade entrance, knock on the door, wait for a servant to answer, come in to see what the household had to offer, negotiate a price for it, and then haul it away. This also meant that the base price for things was so expensive that they had to be made to really last or they would be prohibitively expensive to buy in the first place!
The life of a fine 16th-century coat might look like this:
-First, it was made for a gentleman as his finest coat for a sum of 1L, 5s, who wore it for ten years, until his death.
-It was willed to his son, valued at 1L, who wore it for a further ten years, and then passed it on to his manservant after removing the gold buttons and any other valuable bits, at this point valued at 3s.
-The manservant used it for fifteen more years. Finally, it was too worn to be considered suitable to his station, and so it was cut down for his eldest son, the scraps being used for cleaning or sold as rags.
-His sons wore it in succession for six years, until even the youngest hung two inches out of the sleeves, and so it was sold to an old-clothes dealer.
-It continued to be bought by housewives for their children, made over, and resold to old-clothes dealers for another 20 years, until it was either so small or so worn out that even the poorest couldn’t find a use for it, and it went to the bone-and-rag man.
Most of the wool that left the stream of use was literally worn away over time by its wearers.
But all this changed with industrialization. Gradually, goods became cheap compared to labor. This meant that the value of used goods plummeted, while goods were made of flimsier materials to make them even cheaper so that their design could follow the most rapidly fluctuating trends of fashion. This further reduced their resale value, as goods simply did not last as long anymore. Old-clothes men complained that readymade clothing was as cheap as anything they could sell, while old clothing just couldn’t hold together well enough to be attractive to buyers, and men who repaired the woven seats of chairs bemoaned the fact that a whole new chair costs little more than their services.
This changeover is marked particularly in the works of Mayhew and his near-contemporaries. Probably one of the most remarkable changes was in the services of the ash-men, or garbage collectors. At the time that Victoria took the throne, companies competed to give the highest bids for the privilege of collecting the trash of various London districts. Teams of women and children sifted through the piles, separating the various components for sale, while the bulk was sold to farmers who were engaged in land reclamation projects in the fens. Fifty years later, they were competing, not to pay for the trash but to be paid for removing it. The demand had collapsed, and disposing of the waste had become a matter of cost, not profit. Though the factors at play were independent of most of the issues causing the increase in throwing goods away, the result was typical of what was happening in dozens of areas of life at the same time. In the 1830s, England was a society with very high rates of reuse. By the 1880s, fashion had become democratized, a new standard of durability was accepted, and the disposable society was very much the rule. America and other Western nations soon followed suit. It is the silent birth of consumer culture and disposability that is so often missed in studies of the Victorian era simply because most of us cannot understand the existence of a society that is not like that. But today’s situation is actually the exception in civilized societies, not the rule–which might explain some of the anxiety that we have about our trash and the irrationality that we approach it with. Our waste is, really, a kind of bizarre quirk of history, and we may be responding to it in the context of the rest of human history without even being fully aware of it.
The labor/goods cost ratio is even lower today than it was in the late 1800s. Additionally, today, many of our manufactured goods are either made of materials that are hard to reuse or made of a complicated set of materials that are too hard to separate even though the elements might be usable. Working against this, though, are issue of scale, population density, and convenience of markets, which mean that, paradoxically, it is we who use practically every part of the cow to an extent that the plains Indians of 600 years ago could not have conceived.
