Microorganisms

Early Conceptions and Study

Microorganisms represent a diverse range of creatures that are too small to be seen by the unaided human eye. Before the activities of microbes were experimented with and documented with the assistance of the microscope, their profound effects on the world were commonly attributed to other causes. The tendency for abandoned or unpreserved items to break down and transform was associated with the spontaneous generation of life, while the link between organic decay and odor helped lead to the belief that foul air contaminated with decomposed matter, or miasmas, was ultimately responsible for disease. These beliefs shaped waste management, as decaying waste matter was seen to be a source of pestilence and vermin. Without the recognition of microbial actions, waste may not have been contained and treated in the same way, but it was still removed from spaces of human habitation and sent to the margins of settlements. The dominant influence of these beliefs also shaped preferred waste treatment methods. Early incinerators, known as destructors, were greatly preferred among municipal engineers, even after modern landfill techniques were developed, precisely because cremation served as a method of destroying the noxious miasmas associated with the putrefaction of wastes, as well as getting energy in return.

The study of microbes and their effects on human health in the later 19th century played a central role in the modernization of waste management. The emerging field of bacteriology and the scientific writings of Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch, among others, helped to enlist microbes in the moral and medical arguments of Western hygiene movements of the Progressive Era. Their efforts helped the germ theory of disease to take hold in the 20th century and associated microbes, above all, with disease transmission. Hygiene movements went beyond medical explanations for disease and encompassed a whole host of efforts to establish social order in industrial societies, including alcohol prohibition, opposition to prostitution and vice, and, later, eugenics. As a corollary to these social movements, sanitation engineering emerged as a means of preserving social order through material purification. Bacteriological models of hygiene introduced a scientific ethos of waste policy and practice. In the 1920s and 1930s, a sanitary inspector with a position in the English Ministry of Health named J. C. Dawes began advocating “controlled tips.” His main recommendation, for which he is considered one of the most influential modernizers in sanitary engineering, was to use soil cover on waste dumps in order to prevent unwanted organisms from using them as breeding grounds for disease—an application of Pasteur's model of biogenesis and refutation of spontaneous generation. This key innovation was incorporated into the designs of modern landfills in later decades.

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