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Waste Disposal Authority

Any human society produces waste—residues or items, materials and substances having lost all use and exchange value. What is considered to be waste varies widely from one society to another depending on its cultural, sociological, religious codes, history, and economic system. However, a trend seems constant: waste disturbs—it creates disorder and danger for the community. In her well-known 1967 work Purity and Danger, the British anthropologist Mary Douglas chose this very criterion to define the notions of “uncleanness,” “dirt,” and “waste.” Waste, for her, is what is out of place, messy, and perceived as a disruptive agent by an individual or group: “As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder … Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment.”

The ordered arrangement of a human community rests upon the authority that governs it, whether it be collegial or held by a single individual. It is the very function of those empowered in this way to organize society in its environment, to ensure its smooth running by imposing rules and by its distribution into groups assigned to distinct spaces. One might be tempted to think that waste—as the agent of confusion and disorder—lies beyond such power, as the opposite of the order established by authorities. It is nevertheless because of the danger and the disorder that waste represents that the governing powers must take on its management, by allaying this threat for the community, especially by neutralizing it and defining the places where it must be deposited.

Rural Communities

Archaeologists and anthropologists have noticed that in small rural communities, human, organic, or manufactured waste is managed mostly individually by each domestic group, accumulated in or near the house, or scattered as fertilizer on fields or out in the open country away from living spaces. This generally does not represent a threat for the community as a whole, as waste is produced in small quantities, is often reused, and because there is enough space for it to be evacuated. Those in power do not intervene in a collective waste management, specifically in the demarcation of a space where waste should be deposited.

Urban Communities

On the other hand, in urban agglomerations, the concentration of population and of buildings led to an accumulation of waste that proved difficult to curb at the individual level, causing a number of disturbances in the urban space. Urban authorities were led to take on the task of waste management by defining collective modes of management and particular spaces of disposal. The invention of these technical systems of collection and treatment also entailed a distinction of waste according to its nature: as solids, such as leftovers, household materials, and objects deriving from businesses and industries; and as liquids, such as wastewater resulting from domestic washing, as discharges from industrial and craft activities, and as human and animal excretions. As the possible source of multiple disorders, whose nature varies from society to society (sanitary, ecological, social, and symbolic), waste disposal has thus become one of the major concerns of urban authorities held to be responsible for the neutralization of the inherent dangers of garbage.

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