Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 1: Dust and AshesSurveying England’s biggest tip, Andrew O’Hagan observes: “A dumped bath, a heapof carpet, a thousand empty bottles of orange squash, a hundred thousand legs of lamb,a million bottles of shampoo: it was all the stuff of life and it was all evidence of death”[2007]. The business of burying or cremating 2 the wastes of consumer abundancewas and is accompanied by the stench of industrial scale rot and decay. Writing forGreenpeace, Robin Murray of the London School of Economics observes:Throughout the twentieth century, waste was the terminus of industrialproduction. Like night cleaners, the waste industry had the task of removingthe debris from the main stage of daily activity. Some of the debris hadvalue and was recycled. Most was deposited in former mines, gravel pits andquarries or, via incinerators, was ‘landfilled in the air’. The principle was tokeep it out of sight. Whereas consumer industries seek publicity, this postconsumerindustry prided itself on its invisibility. [Murray 2002: 5]The sheer scale of waste is staggering and this is just what we throw away. For everybin of consumer waste, says Annie Leonard [2008], another seventy are dumped bycorporations in the process of production – from mining and extraction to manufacture,distribution and marketing. This waste is kept on the other side of the boundarybetween clean and unclean. It lies behind the bright new goods displayed in bright cleanshopping malls and must be concealed from the consumer. Increasingly, the dirty partof the ‘value chain’ is located in ‘developing countries’ while the economies of ‘postindustrial’nations are said to become cleaner as their economies are ‘dematerialised’.The wastes of manufacturing at the lowest possible cost fill the air and poison the waterin the rapidly growing mega-cities of the East. And upstream from manufacturing,mining waste is dumped right next to the mines, smothering the land, choking therivers and laying waste to the people who used them and must be thrust aside.Meanwhile, what is thrown away and supposed to disappear overflows the dumps, itleaches into the water, it blows on the wind, it contaminates the food chain. Everywhere,countries and municipalities are running out of space for landfills and both landfillsand incinerators are meeting with determined opposition from local communities.Ultimately, says O’Hagan, we find that “there is no such place as ‘away’”. What wethrow away comes back to us, our past catches up with us.2 Cremation was indeed the word used for incineration in the 19 th Century.Wasting the Nation - groundWork - 11 -