Right off, let`s get one thing straight. We`re talking garbage here. Not
”solid wastes,” as the bureaucrats like to call it. Not some exotic chemistry secretly released by unscrupulous industrialists. We`re talking about the stuff we all put out at the curb-that dreadful, steamy, steady, stinking flow of bones and rinds, plastic and paper, gunk and junk. Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben. Whole cataloguesful of sofas, refrigerators, storm windows. Garbage-the spoor of the human species. The grossest of our national products.
America generates an average of 400,000 tons of garbage a day, which on a per-capita basis is more than twice that of any other industrialized nation. The miracle of the American economy is that our capacity to produce has outstripped our capacity to consume. The statistics are staggering. America is throwing away 200 million tires a year, 34 million Christmas trees, 45 billion paper cups. No object is too big to be thrown out. In our cities, entire buildings are being discarded by landlords.
It seems almost too much to handle. And it is.
Garbage is a vampire creeping toward the urban jugular. It`s a formidable problem for New York, Chicago and many other American cities. Within two years, half the nation`s cities will exhaust their existing landfill capacities and will have to find alternatives. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, D.C., estimates that over the next five years, $20 billion will have to be invested in new disposal facilities. Garbage disposal, once an afterthought in municipal budgets, is now equal to police and fire protection.
America has managed to keep the lid on its garbage problem for more than a century, but the day of reckoning approaches quickly. Businessmen are locking their dumpsters, and Goodwill Industries collection boxes are being used for post-midnight garbage runs. Styrofoam-flecked waves are breaking on condom-covered beaches, and tampon inserters are so common at the New Jersey shore that they are called beach whistles. Politicians suggesting landfills and incinerators are getting death threats from that new breed of American activist, the NIMBY-Not In My Back Yard. In outer space, about 15,000 pieces of refuse-nose cones, bits of exploded satellites, nuts and bolts-circle the Earth.
These are the unmistakable signs of an approaching calamity. We are wasting away. How on earth did we get here?
Some people place the beginning of garbage history at 4004 B.C., when Eve, no doubt, tossed away the apple core in the Garden of Eden. But Knossos, the capital of Crete, had compost pits for the deposit of organic wastes in the 15th Century B.C. The biggest slobs of ancient history probably were the people who lived in one of the early cities on the site of Troy. Archeologists have concluded that they simply dropped the garbage on the floors of their homes and lived atop it. When the floor level rose enough to keep the door from opening, they adjusted the door. Each of the seven cities on the site of Troy was built on the garbage of its predecessor. Archeologists have unearthed thousands of clay cups and eating utensils used about 3000 B.C. in the Syrian city of Terka; there are so many of them and they are so cheaply made that they may have been ancient man`s version of the paper plate and plastic spoon. But like so many things, the proper study of garbage begins with the Greeks.
400 B.C.-Greece develops the first town dumps that serve as the final resting place for everything imaginable, including, in the case of Athens, unwanted babies.
The dump would continue as an omnipresent institution for more than two millennia, and it was not so long ago in America that a standard duty of volunteer fire departments every Saturday afternoon was to light a fire in the town dump. A refinement of the dump is the sanitary landfill, in which each day`s load of garbage is covered with a layer of earth-making it something like a huge, inedible lasagna.
There were 18,000 sanitary landfills in the United States 10 years ago;
half of them have been closed either because they were polluting water supplies or because they offended the eyes and noses of the people who lived near them. Although about 90 percent of our garbage is still buried in this fashion, many urban landfills are filling up fast.
A.D. 200-Rome develops the idea of the sanitation worker. Two men walk behind a wagon, picking up the garbage from the street and tossing it into the wagon. There has been no significant improvement on this idea in 1,800 years. The Romans would take the wagons to central dumps. When 20th Century archeologist Rodolfo Lanciani was excavating one of these sites, he noted that he was
”obliged to relieve my gang of workmen from time to time because the stench from the putrid mound, turned up after a lapse of 20 centuries, was unbearable.”
1450-During a Portuguese attack on the Moroccan city of Ceuta, two princes charge up what appears to be a strategic point only to discover they have heroically captured the city dump. This is one of the few times garbage figures into medieval history.
1551-Andreas Bernhart, a German papermaker, begins placing his paper in a wrapper that bears a printed design and his name and address. This is the first recorded example of packaging.
Until recently, packaging was simple and unspectacular. Fish came home in yesterday`s newspapers, beans in a gunny sack, crackers in a barrel, butter in a tub. But packaging got more complex with self-service merchandising because tiny things had to be put in something larger to make them harder to shoplift, and then Madison Avenue discovered that the package sells the product.
Once manufacturers turned over their packaging work to all those Picassos and Yeatses working for advertising, packaging became a real can of worms. Today, the most ordinary commodity comes wrapped like the crown jewels-individually wrapped slices of America cheese, two-inch tubes of glue shrink-wrapped onto a 4-by-6-inch hunk of cardboard, appliances tucked into enough Styrofoam to float the Queen Mary.
The benefits of modern packaging are beyond dispute-better protection, longer shelf life, improved sanitation and more convenience through self-service. But all this packaging-metal, glass, plastic, paper-quickly becomes garbage.
And about half the volume of our garbage-that`s 50 percent-is nothing more than packaging.
1621-The Pilgrims and the Indians celebrate the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock. There are no paper plates, plastic forks, disposable aluminum broiling pans, cranberry cans, throwaway pie tins or whipped-cream squirt cans. Food is scarce, moreover, and there are no leftovers.
1698-Paper manufacturing begins in North America. What follows is an avalanche, ever-increasing, that will be unleashed by technology, advertising, higher education and the growth of bureaucracy. Just a few years back, they were saying the computer would lead us to a paperless society. But the printer, once thought of as a mere peripheral to the computer, has in many ways become its master-and the Computer Age actually has increased our paper use. Between 1959 and 1986, America`s consumption of paper for writing and printing has more than tripled-from 6.8 million tons to 22 million tons.
Clearly, paper is on a roll.
1757-Benjamin Franklin institutes the first municipal street-cleaning service. Eventually this evolves into the first municipal refuse-collection system, which culminated in slaves` wading out into Delaware River, tossing bales of garbage into the water and watching the swift currents carry them away.
1769-Thomas Jefferson builds Monticello, which includes a mechanical garbage disposal system; garbage is loaded into buckets and carried away from the house for disposal on an underground pulley system.
1776-The first act of recycling in America. Patriots in New York City knock down a statue of King George III and remake it into 42,088 bullets.
Lately, recycling, once practiced only by dedicated environmentalists, has been attracting entrepreneurs, for as the cost of disposal keeps rising, so does the profitability of recycling. A growing small business is can-picking-collecting discarded cans and taking them to recyclers. Aluminum cans can now be recycled more cheaply than bauxite can be mined. In addition, discarded tires are being turned into fan belts, glass bottles are becoming insulation for winter jackets and milk cartons are becoming park benches. In the last year and a half, subscriptions to the magazine Recycling Today have nearly quadrupled.
1785-Frederick Newman of Philadelphia manufactures the first cardboard box in America.
1793-President George Washington approves a requisition for a new chain for a frigate, but appends this note: ”Approved as far as regards a new chain, but is there an entire loss of the old one?” Nevertheless, the American military machine will become one of the world`s most profligate litterers, leaving its weapons and machinery throughout the world, on land and in the seas.
1810-Peter Durand, a London merchant, patents the tin can. Today more than 100 billion canned items are manufactured in the world each year.
1812-The world`s first cannery is established in Bermondsey, England. The Duke of Wellington tries the tinned beef and pronounces it very good. In 1936 the contents of a 122-year-old veal tin are fed to a cat, which suffers no adverse effects.
1834-Charleston, W.Va., enacts a law protecting vultures from hunters because the birds are an important force in removing garbage from the yards and streets of the city. Domestic dogs and hogs ably assist the vultures.
1866-New York City`s Metropolitan Board of Health declares war on garbage, forbidding the ”throwing of dead animals, garbage or ashes into the streets.”
1869-American John Hyatt uses chemicals to make a new product he calls celluloid. This is the birth of the plastics industry. Today, plastic is the Superman of manufacturing materials. Lighter than metal! More durable than wood! Safer than glass! Cheaper than leather!
Plastic is being used in rocket engines and motorcycle sprockets. We use plastic to brush our teeth, make our phone calls, pay on credit, keep food fresh and replace defective valves in our hearts.
Plastic is an adjective used disparagingly to symbolize all that is fleeting and temporary in our society, but in the world of garbage, plastic is forever. It doesn`t rust, evaporate or dissolve, and when burned, it gives off toxic fumes and tends to gum up the incinerator. And it accounts for about 8 percent of the waste dumped in landfills.
1874-The world`s first incinerator begins operating in England. The first American incinerator opened on Governor`s Island in New York Harbor in 1885, and later that same year another opened in Allegheny City, Pa. At the time, they were called ”garbage crematories,” though euphemizing bureaucrats would soon come up with something less clear.
Incinerators were a big factor in garbage disposal throughout much of the 20th Century, but when clean-air regulations were imposed in the 1970s, they were closed, and the burden was added to sanitary landfills. Modern incinerators are not supposed to contribute to air pollution, but many people think they do, and so they ignite opposition wherever the devices are proposed.
Incinerators are cheaper than sanitary landfills, but for every 100 pounds of garbage that goes into an incinerator, 30 pounds comes out in the form of ash. This ash can be toxic and, of course, has to be disposed of.
1875-Louis Pasteur perfects the famous preservation process that still bears his name. Contrary to widespread belief, it wasn`t milk he was trying to preserve-it was beer, which had become scarce during the Franco-Prussian War. And he succeeded. Bottled beer didn`t work very well until 1892, when a metal cap was devised to prevent spoilage. In America, August Busch immediately grasped the significance of the new technology and became the ”King of Bottled Beer.” Canned beer was next, and then we figured out how to bottle and can soft drinks.
The results are still impressive. Last year 102 billion beverage containers were sold in the United States-76 billion of them were made of aluminum, 20 billion of glass and 6 billion of plastic.
1879-Frank Woolworth opens the first five-and-ten, in Utica, N.Y. He pioneers the idea of having his goods on open counters so customers can see and feel the merchandise firsthand. The opportunity for shoplifting increases geometrically. The packaging industry comes to the rescue.
1888-Lord James Bryce, the British statesman, publishes his three-volume study of the United States and offers this observation of Philadelphia: ”The streets of the city have been allowed to fall into such a state as to be a reproach and a disgrace. Philadelphia is now recognized as the worst-paved, worst-cleaned city in the civilized world.”
1893-William Halstead, chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, orders plastic gloves made for himself and uses them in an operation. In further quest of sterility, plastic gloves become disposable-as does nearly everything else used in American hospitals. Today America`s disposal problem includes
”red-bag” garbage-infectious refuse from hospitals, research labs, nursing homes and private medical offices. Nationally, our red-bag burden of hypodermic needles, bloody gauze pads, amputated limbs, used urine bags and rubber gloves comes to about 1.5 million pounds a day.
1894-The good citizens of Alexandria, Va., disgusted by the sight of Washington, D.C., floating its garbage down the Potomac on barges, take to sinking the barges in the river before they get to their fair city. The battle rages for years.
1895-King C. Gillette, a 40-year-old traveling salesman, has a brainstorm while shaving: a razor that uses disposable blades that you don`t have to sharpen. Gillette takes the idea and an investment of $5,000 and parlays it into a multimillion-dollar business that today includes an entire razor that is disposable, plus disposable lighters and disposable pens. Today, Americans discard 2 billion razors, 1.6 billion pens and 348 million lighters every year.
Disposable goods really took off after World War II, and by 1955 Life magazine printed a report on ”Throwaway Living” that featured such products as disposable draperies, disposable duck decoys and a barbecue grill that cooked only one meal. The disposable grill didn`t catch fire, but hundreds of other items came out in throwaway form, and it seems that every day the list of disposable products grows.
Black & Decker has a disposable travel iron, General Electric has a throwaway fluorescent lamp meant to be discarded when the bulb burns out, Fuji and Kodak make a film-loaded camera that you discard after the roll is shot, Mini-Phone makes a telephone that sells for less than $20 and is designed to last no longer than a year, and Gillette, which started it all 94 years ago, has a throwaway toothbrush that comes already loaded with enough toothpaste for a few brushings.
It`s more than just convenience. The costs of manufacturing have been going down while the costs of repair have been going up, and the result is that it`s easier to throw most things away and buy another than it is to fix them.
1896-New York City requires residents to begin separating household wastes-biodegradable in one tin, ash in another tin, trash in a bag or bundle. Forty police officers are assigned to enforce the new edict, but when they are withdrawn in 1898, New Yorkers stop separating their garbage. The city solves the problem by towing everything out to sea and dumping it. New Jersey residents complain of fouled beaches.
1904-Postmaster General Henry Clay Payne authorizes permit mail; 2,000 or more pieces of third- or fourth-class mail can be posted without stamps by paying a single fee. It opens the door to direct-mail advertising and mass solicitations, and within 50 years, the nation`s mail system will be groaning with an avalanche of junk mail and post offices will place receptacles in their lobbies for the convenience of patrons who don`t want to take it all home.
1905-New York City begins using an incinerator on Delancey Street to generate enough power to light up the Williamsburg Bridge; it is discontinued two years later when studies show it is cheaper to buy power from New York Edison.
1908-Paper cups appear for the first time. They are used in white porcelain vending machines that dispense a cup of ice water for a penny. The cups and machines are enthusiastically endorsed by the powerful temperance movement because it is believed that men are enticed into saloons merely to slake their thirsts with water but, once inside, turn to stronger stuff.
