Currently reading: Heather Rogers – Gone Tomorrow: The Hdden Life of Garbage (2005) The New Press, New York
Gone Tomorrow takes us on an oddly fascinating tour through the underworld of garbage and brings meaning to all that gets discarded. Part exposé, part social commentary, Gone Tomorrow traces the connection between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our disposable lifestyle.
The Introduction poetically defines rubbish:
p.3 Garbage is the text in which abundance is overwritten by decay and filth. Rubbish is also a border separating the clean and useful from the unclean and dangerous. And trash is the visible interface between everyday life and the deep, often abstract terrors of ecological crisis.
Chapter 1: The Waste Stream takes the reader through the waste process beginning with the collection:
p.12 Since collection is the most expensive part of the refuse treatment process, condensing the stuff makes for more efficient use of valuable hauling space, but also means that potentially reusable objects are often immediately destroyed and rendered unsalvageable.
p.26 The more efficient, the more “environmentally responsible” the [waste treatment] operation, the more the repressed question pushes to the surface: What if we didn’t have so much trash to get rid of?
Chapter 2: Rubbish Past outlines the 18th/19th Century history of waste when manufactured goods were expensive and hard to come by. The majority of waste was organic matter that was used for agricultural fertiliser collected from cities and sold to farmers.
p.31 Garbage as we know it is a relatively new invention predicated on the monumental technological and social changes wrought by industrialization.
p.32 It was the treatment of dung and feces that the first systematic refuse collection developed.
p.34 So valuable had excrement become [in the 19th Century] that one Brooklyn, New York, farmer stipulated in his will that his son should inherit “all manure on the farm at the time of my decease.”
p.34 As the 19th Century wore on, all variety of rejectamenta, including human feces, known among professionals as “night soil” became commodities to be bought and sold.
On the industrialisation of New York:
p.50 These new wage-earning city dwellers [in 1900s New York] were more likely to purchase – rather than produce their own – milk, bread, clothing and other staples of daily life. Due to long hours on the job, industrial labourers had less time for repairing and rendering what would otherwise be “waste” … Such changes meant more garbage. Industry developed, consumerism began, and so too did modern waste.
Defining New York rubbish at the turn of the 20th Century:
p.56 In 1910 pioneer sanitarian William F. Morse wrote: “The household is required to have three receptacles, for garbage, ashes and rubbish.” At the time “garbage” was often defined as “vegetable matter and table waste” and “ashes” could include “floor sweepings, broken glass, discarded kitchen waste, tin cans and worn-out furniture” and “rubbish” usually referred to “paper, card-board, shoes and rubbers.”
