"Give me your tired, your poor ...Your wretched refuse of your teeming shore..."

- From the base of the Statue of Liberty

Susan Strasser's 1999 Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash could have been titled America & Trash: A Love Story.  The book focuses on America's relationship to trash - sometimes with love and sometimes with abuse. There are some comparisons made to Europe's relationship with rubbish, but mainly the focus is on post-Columbian America. Although once considered something to be cherished by all classes, trash eventually became equated with the poor.

The title is adapted from a 1903 Salvation Army report to rouse the troops, "We confidently believe and are seeking to demonstrate that the want of our cities can be met from its waste!" We're left wondering if the waste means the city's trash or the city's poor.

Highlights

Strasser did exhaustive research for this book, with a whopping 43 pages of endnotes from newspapers, political tracts, diaries, magazines and novels of the time. She's found some really interesting information from the dustbin of American history, including:

• The word recycling originated from the oil industry in the 1920's. It referred to petroleum that needed to go through the refining process again.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame also co-wrote a book with her sister Catharine about "domestic science" called The American Woman's Home.
• Wastepaper didn't become a problem in America until 1885. Until then, no one needed to throw it out.
• Around the Civil War and well into the 1900's, giving your old clothes to the poor was frowned upon. It was a social disaster for a poor person to be seen walking around in your old clothes that your friends could recognize. You were to make new clothing specifically to give away to charity.

Lessons For Today's Environmentalists

Strasser doesn't romanticize the past. Although trash picking was a legal way for the poor to make a living (until it was outlawed, that is), the poor still had to live with the trash they picked, sorted, mended and sold. We also see that sorting trash and recycling (in the modern sense of the word) is not a new concept. 

Perhaps some of the means of trash disposal and recycling could be used again in the future America as she tries to once again patch up the relationship with trash. Maybe in the future we will see:

• Sacred pigs. These would be modern versions of urban swill pigs, which eat all of the food waste we toss out. The poor can hunt and eat the pigs (unless we do something about making the distribution of wealth more even, but is that really going to happen?)
• To counteract the lack of space for cemeteries, bones of the dead could be ground up to use as fertilizer
• Rags once again could be used for papermaking and perhaps a source of income for charities, the needy and local entrepreneurs keeping up the rag peddler tradition.

Civilizations come and go. Their monuments, art and traditions disappear, but their trash lives on forever for archeologists to find. Our trash might wind up being the eulogy of the human race. Let's make it a good one.

Further Reading:

• The Inconvenient Truth for Convenience-Obsessed Japan
• New Report Says 50% of Food Grown is Wasted
• China Plans to Pick Up Trash on Mt Everest
• Food Gets Political as UK Government Examines the Food Chain
• Zero Waste: Reduce, Reuse & Recycle
• The Story of Stuff
• Garbage Island - Pacific Toxic Dump
• FridgeBox
• E-Good
• Six Million Pounds of Trash On Beaches
• Mount Trashmore