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History of Consumption and Waste, Ancient World

The first evidence of object production by humans begins around 2.5 million years ago, when the earliest humans collected stones for making crude chopping tools. Stone tools are made by striking a blow that fragments the stone, leaving a sharp edge on the main piece of stone and resulting in the discard of the associated chips that are the byproduct of the flaking process. The manufacture of other early objects made of bone, wood, and other perishable materials would similarly have resulted in waste materials as an integral part of the production process.

Food Waste

The process of preparing and eating food also produces waste. Almost all foods have some inedible part, such as shells, peels, seeds, husks, and bones, which are discarded as part of preparation, serving, and consumption. The earliest humans would have continually been picking through their food items and discarding the unwanted portions, discarding them in patterned ways that can be recovered through archaeological excavation. The rate of discard of food items increased after the development of pottery and metal vessels, which also broke and were thrown away as part of food-related waste.

The process of discard diversified when populations grew and as residential sites became larger. Starting 10,000–12,000 years ago, human group sizes began to increase from 50–100-person mobile foraging groups to sedentary village societies with hundreds or thousands of inhabitants. Often, this transition to fixed-place living coincided with the development of agriculture, which required a whole new range of production and processing tools such as farming equipment, grinding stones, storage bins, and cooking pots. The process of settled village life also resulted in regular patterns of discard behavior as people determined the locations of appropriate refuse disposal.

Early Technologies

The technologies of the sedentary period comprised many composite tools such as plows, harnesses, and other agricultural equipment in which elements could be replaced to continually upgrade and maintain the utility of the object. This resulted in fragments of “partible waste” that represented the discarded or replaced elements of the composite object. Other types of objects, such as pottery, were usually discarded rather than repaired. The notion of selective repair resulted in the increase in categories of “waste” objects as individuals had to decide how and whether to fix items or simply discard them altogether.

New technologies such as metallurgy and pottery production produced large quantities of waste in addition to producing changes in the landscape through the extensive use of trees as fuel. In the Indian subcontinent as well as in many parts of western Africa, the production of iron resulted in large and distinct piles of slag as part of the human-made landscape. Waste from production of these new technologies and the discard of surplus objects piled up around settlements, resulting in a landscape in which waste was a constant component of everyday life.

Waste Management

The process of biological decay also resulted in the innovation of new techniques to proactively address the production of waste. Fermentation can be regarded as a process in which people deliberately managed natural decomposition processes to produce cheese, wine, beer, and other edible products. Other processes such as smoking, wrapping, and sealing off air are meant to forestall decay in fresh foods. The process of making value-added foods through additional work can be seen in analogous developments in the 21st century, such as the creation of croutons from stale bread or the invention of “baby” carrots through the shaving down of otherwise odd-shaped vegetables.

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