Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 1: Dust and AshesChapter 1: Dust and ashesWaste used to be something of the past, a part of life turned to dust and ash. Formuch of the 19 th Century, dust and ash was all that went into the domestic dust bin.Everything else was separated and recycled one way or another. Even shit – politelyknown as ‘night soil’ – was taken out along with organic wastes to fertilise fields. Or atleast some of it was. The rest was thrown into the streets where waste pickers competedwith dogs, pigs and crows for anything of value.The business of waste was neither clean nor orderly. In the rapidly growing cities ofthe industrialising world, the luxurious houses of the elite classes rose above the filthand contrasted with the jerry built tenements housing the mass of working people.In Manchester, at the centre of imperial Britain’s industrial revolution, about onesixth of the population lived in cellars “with walls oozing human waste from nearbycesspools” [Pichtel 2005: 26]. Elsewhere poor people were crowded around narrowcourts with their excrement heaped in the middle. According to a report of the PoorLaw Commissioners “whole courts up to the very doors of the houses were coveredwith filth …” [quoted in Pichtel 2005: 27]. Such conditions were replicated in the ‘oldworld’ of Europe and the ‘new world’ in America.Waste pickers, scavenging for bones, clothes and coal, were amongst the poorest. Mostdid not have a secure roof over their heads and worked and lived in the filth of thecity, vulnerable to diseases and periodic epidemics of cholera and dysentery. Epidemicswere not confined to the poor, however, and once the link between disease and dirt wasmade, 1 middle class activism demanded sanitary improvements from city authorities.This marked the origins of modern waste management and the construction of what USresearcher Heather Rogers describes as “a border separating the clean and useful fromthe unclean and dangerous” [2005: 3]. Moreover, cleanliness was found to be good forbusiness. The middle classes no longer deserted the city in the face of epidemics andclean streets enhanced property prices, made for easier transport of goods and workersand for an altogether more pleasurable shopping experience. From the start, cities1 The link was made by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and Ignaz Semmelweis in second half of the 19 th century.Wasting the Nation - groundWork - 9 -