History of Consumption and Waste, World, 1900s

Mass Commodity Culture

The intensification of a mass commodity culture and the increasing waste as a result of industrialization, consumption, and urbanization bewildered various social and economic thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century. The establishment of a world capitalistic system, the innovation and circulation of large numbers of new commodities, the growing sizes of the cities and their populations, and new technological discoveries became influential processes of social and economic change.

The intensification of capitalist culture, which would become focused on mass production and consumption, had been predicted by Karl Marx. Marx argued persuasively that human labor had become alienating and commodities had come to replace human relationships. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, another economist and sociologist argued that waste was the result of a leisure class that had developed through business and had as its main preoccupation conspicuous consumption. Thorstein Veblen developed a theory of a leisure class, which was based on a lavish acquisition of goods for the purpose of displaying wealth, social status, and social differentiation. Such attitudes were generally viewed as negative consequences of mass consumption in the 20th century.

Two World Wars

The most devastating events of the 20th century in terms of consumption and waste were the two world wars and the arms race, which brought large social, political, and technological changes. This first period of the century could be described as the age of the catastrophic wars. During this period, the capitalist and liberal Western societies lost faith in their economic and constitutional values, a bourgeois culture was replaced by an emerging middle class, material and moral progress was interrupted by acts of violence and intolerance, and the Eurocentric colonial empires whose soldiers had conquered large parts of the world began to break apart into nation states and independence movements. The first four decades of the century brought new forms of waste that would have been unimaginable in the 19th century and resulted in a huge consumption of continuously developing weapons that would be used even in the most remote islands of the Pacific.

In World War I, tanks, grenades, machine guns, chemical weapons, and aircraft were used for the first time in a war and completely changed the strategies of the empires involved. The use of chemical weapons such as tear gas and mustard gas, along with lethal agents that included phosgene and chlorine, became a regular part of warfare. Despite the fact that only a minority of soldiers were killed due to chemical warfare, the pollution of the environment during this period was large scale. In France, for example, at the end of the war, 40,390 square miles were cordoned off because of unexploded materiel. Shells of chemical weapons are still found [Page 382]regularly by farmers or building operations in areas where the war took place. The use of chemical agents in warfare was internationally condemned with the Third Geneva Convention signed in 1925. However, more than a decade later, in World War II, poison gas played an important role in the Holocaust.

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