Politics of Waste

Early History

According to archaeological evidence, colonial Americans often cast their discards around their homesteads. This was not a problem in rural areas where neighbors were distant and foraging livestock consumed much of the waste, but the habit caused trouble in towns and cities. As early as the 17th century, towns required residents to sweep in front of their homes and to deposit their rubbish in specific locations. Enforcement was sporadic, except when the threat of epidemics inspired more concerted street-cleaning efforts. Even casual observers understood that diseases like yellow fever were deadlier in dirtier neighborhoods than in cleaner quarters.

First Organizations

Serious answers to waste problems did not become common across the country until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Progressive Era activists argued that there was a direct link between street cleanliness, public health, and what was understood to be the appropriate moral rectitude required of new immigrants. Organizations like Chicago's Municipal Order League and New York City's Women's Health Protective Association joined with physicians and civic leaders who were urging reform. Together, they pushed local and state politicians to create and enforce mandatory housing codes, zoning measures, food quality regulations, and street cleaning and garbage disposal infrastructure.

From these efforts grew municipally controlled systems that were more or less effective and organizationally transparent. The American Society of Municipal Engineers and the International Association of Public Works Officials (which merged to form the American Public Works Association in 1937) helped cities organize formerly casual labors and structures of waste management around clear measures, like how many man-hours were required to sweep how many miles of streets and collect how many tons of garbage, with what tools, at what cost. These efforts reflected a political trend toward greater rationalization and bureaucratization of government at all levels, but it was far from perfect. Municipal wastes were still dumped, with few controls, on land or in waterways, while incinerators (called “destructors” in that era) were primitive and noxious by 21st-century standards.

Consumption and Production Increases

Tighter management of municipal solid waste (MSW) coincided with a shift in cultural trends that would have profound effects on daily life and on the nature, volume, and political profile of garbage. Ashes, a significant component of household trash for centuries, were a good indicator of this change: they accounted for nearly half the municipal waste stream as late as the 1920s but less than 10 percent by the 1960s. At the same time, there was a steep rise in consumer consumption. The factories, mills, mines, and agricultural conglomerations that proliferated in the first half of the 20th century made commodities faster and more cheaply than ever before in human history.

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