United Kingdom

The histories of consumption and waste management in modern Britain are inseparable. Personal consumption has always generated some measure of household waste, and particularly in urban societies, its unregulated presence became an ever-increasing problem over time. As towns grew larger and more densely populated in the 19th century, even the relatively poor populations of British cities generated problematic quantities of waste, whose presence was increasingly seen as threatening public health. Systematic efforts to manage the problem began in earnest in 1868 with the passage of the Public Health Act, which set in motion a nationwide movement to improve sanitation and reduce illness. The legislation empowered local government authorities to provide the infrastructures needed to collect and dispose of house wastes and to recover the costs through local taxation. There [Page 946]was no attempt to regulate the generation of refuse per se, but the legislation did recognize that there was a fundamental duality in the nature of waste: although it was an undesirable nuisance, it also potentially had value. Ownership of collected refuse was thus vested in the authorities who were given the right to sell it, or process it for sale, using the income to offset service costs. Municipalities were quick to employ their discretionary powers. By the end of the century, most cities had in place comprehensive measures for dealing with urban trash. Many of them established organizational structures and procedures to sort and reclaim materials for sale, and by the start of World War I in 1914, the largest cities, such as London, Birmingham, and Glasgow, had large and often sophisticated operations for processing the growing amounts of byproducts of consumption.