Strasser begins her story by describing an archeological dig of a 1620s settlement, where matching pieces of potshards were discovered at great distances from each other, suggesting that if a pot was broken, residents might have been in the habit of reusing the pieces for other purposes. Social history is notoriously hard to reconstruct, since people of the time rarely thought the details of their daily lives important enough to document. This is especially true with the topic of waste, refuse, and garbage. But by carefully picking through such items as housekeeping manuals and business accounting ledgers, Strasser was able to pull many of the pieces of the garbage story together. She found that in the Nineteenth Century, household food scraps were fed to chickens and pigs. Metal and wood items were repaired or refashioned. Before the age of industrial looms, fabric of any kind had much greater value, since all but the very youngest of children were well aware of the tremendous labor involved in weaving cloth. Even after mass-produced fabrics became available, clothing was still stitched, often by hand, at home. For this reason, clothing often symbolized a bond between the producer and the wearer. It was never simply discarded, but rather mended, passed on to others, taken apart and refashioned into new garments, or made into quilts or rugs. As a last resort, it would be used as bandages or sold to the ragman.
The phenomenon of the ragman, as Strasser describes him, is particularly fascinating. This was a person who would make the rounds of rural homes with a motley collection of manufactured goods for sale, such as tin dishpans or soap. For payment, he would accept rags, fats, and bones. These items he would ship off to warehouses to be used as raw materials for paper, soap, and fertilizer. As Strasser puts it "The very distribution system that brought manufactured goods to consumers took recyclable materials back to factories."
Despite these widespread collection networks, early Nineteenth Century factories suffered continuously from a shortage of raw materials, and labor was also relatively scarce in North America. This led to the development of new industrial processes that relied on mass production techniques, which became dependent on new materials rather than recycled ones. This change, combined with the increasing urbanization of society, began to result in garbage and other unwanted items piling up inside and outside people's houses, soon leading to the need for municipal waste collection services. But no sooner had cities organized a collection system than a new problem cropped up: "Paradoxically, the more trash collection there was, the more trash was generated," as Strasser observes. In just the 4 years between 1903 and 1907, the amount of garbage collected by the city of Pittsburgh, for example, increased by 43%. Cities tried various methods to deal with these huge and growing mounds of garbage, from dumping the stuff in water, to piling it up in poor people's neighborhoods, to incinerating it. Significantly, what all of these methods had in common was that sorting of garbage by composition, such as organic material, metal, and glass, was no longer relevant. Cities which once universally required refuse sorting by households rescinded their laws, and it wasn't until the landfill crises of the 1990s that such laws began to be considered again as part of mandatory recycling programs.
This book is filled with many other thought-provoking and interesting topics, such as the history and impact of the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and the patriotic scrap collecting campaigns of the World Wars. Strasser's style is clear and interesting, academic without being stuffy. This is a great resource for anyone interested in material culture, ecology, or American history.
Well written, without technical jargon and extremely well organized. Strausser has turned a sow's ear into a silk purse. Excellent discussion of the why and how of our detritus disposal through the ages right up through the Hippie revival of the 70's and the Recycling Exchange on the internet today.
I can highly recommend this book to anyone with even a slight interest in the cycle and re-cycle of our castoffs. The integral involvement of the homemaker in early days was a genuine eye-opener and a sparkling promise of future possibilities for us all.