Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The first consumer society to get a grip on waste was Japan. With limited geological options for landfill and few raw materials of its own, Japan might be thought naturally prone to recycle. In the booming 1960s, however, waste was spinning out of control – between 1967 and 1970, it jumped up by half, from 650 to 920 grams per person per day. What Japan managed in the early 1970s was first to reduce its garbage and then keep a lid on it. It is a lesson in how waste regimes from different historical eras could be effectively combined. Incineration and recycling have complemented each other. By the 1980s, Japan was recycling 50 per cent of its paper – twice as much as in the mid-1950s – and more than 90 per cent of its beer bottles. The average sake bottle was re-used twenty times. In cities, a third of waste was gathered by private collectors – and thus does not appear in national statistics. In their lorries, traders would roam the streets and shout ‘Chirigami kōkan’, handing out tissues and toilet paper in exchange for old newspapers. Alongside, and subsidized by their city, civic and neighbourhood groups were collecting cans, bottles, metals and old textiles.

  In Machida City, near Tokyo, public officials in the 1980s went from door to door once a year to explain source separation – the city separated seven materials: paper, glass, cans, bulk waste, non-combustible hard plastic and scrap metal, and combustible waste (including kitchen waste). In third and fourth grade, children had dedicated lessons on the system. Over a hundred civic groups were active, collecting 70 per cent of the city’s aluminium cans – a major achievement in the land of the vending machine. Bulky furniture and bicycle parts went to a recycling centre, where disabled citizens made them fit for new life.55

  Getting people to sort their rubbish, cities found, was much more effective than charging them for their waste. Nagoya in 1998 set itself the target to reduce its waste by a quarter. ‘Challenge 100’ urged each citizen in this city of 2 million to reduce their daily garbage by 100g. A recycling crusade got under way. Schools opened centres for recycling. Over 2,000 meetings were held to explain sorting. There was ‘naming and shaming’ for those who refused to do it, with stickers identifying those who had not properly sorted their garbage; Tokyo introduced transparent bin bags that put residents’ civic and environmental standards on public display. Glass and cans had to be taken to collection stations. The retailer had to come to pick up fridges and other appliances. Paper went to the kerb, but with newspaper separated from magazines and cardboard. Milk and juice cartons had to be unfolded and dried out before they could be taken to the supermarket or the local government office. All these various efforts helped reduce CO2 emissions by a third, thanks to the diminished inflow of material.56 In 2000, a new national recycling law came into effect and shifted the balance from incineration to the recovery of packaging materials. In the countryside, most livestock waste made it back on to the field; in some areas, there was too much waste for farmland to take.57

  Just how much Japanese households actually reduced their waste is a subject of debate – one waste survey found that bins ended up 10 per cent lighter because people, in addition to composting, burnt some of their waste in their backyard. Few lived by the pledge of civic campaigns to stop buying what was likely to be wasted.58 Still, compared to Europe and the United States, these campaigns look pretty impressive. Not that there were no success stories elsewhere. In Los Angeles, for example, the School District eliminated trays in their food service to discourage pupils from piling up extra food which would later end up in the bin – it cut waste by half a million tons. American communities introduced Pay-As-You-Throw (PAYT) or Save Money and Reduce Trash (SMART) schemes. In Sweden, municipalities which operated pay-by-weight schemes saw a 20 per cent drop in the household waste collected, although, interestingly, it had no effect on recycling behaviour.59 In Italy, several cities in 2002 started to ban the distribution of unsolicited advertisements; placing a flyer under a windshield in Turin lands a fine of up to €500.60

  But these have been specific initiatives that lacked the integrated Japanese approach to reduction, re-use and recycling, which combined municipal subsidies, commercial dealers, civil society and moral pressure. European attempts to tackle waste have been far less able to rely on civic groups and neighbourhood activism, with the exception, perhaps, of Switzerland. Elsewhere, some localities have managed to co-opt residents in addition to charging them for garden waste and separate food-waste collections; the Somerset Waste Partnership in England is an example. Stirling, in Scotland, hands out yellow and red cards to residents who ignore its ‘Bin Lids Down’ rules: the first time, an over-full wheelie bin would not be collected; a repeated offence was punished with a £50 penalty. Such measures lowered waste by 5 per cent on some estates. For every Somerset and Stirling, though, there is a Cumbria or Barking, with loads of waste and little recycling.61 Efforts to stem the tide of unsolicited mail and print publicity have been largely disappointing. In 1999, the Brussels region launched an ‘anti-pub’ campaign, to much fanfare. A few years on, barely one in ten people was taking part. Across the European Union, instead of receding, the avalanche of paper and plastic has continued to swell. In the United States, the drop in newspaper sales has been all but made up for by the rise in office-type paper, making a mockery of the much lauded ‘paperless office’.62 Europe has so far turned the famed waste pyramid on its head: almost all the money flows into recycling. Waste reduction has received minuscule support.

  Food waste illustrates the many factors that conspire against change. Europeans throw out 90 million tonnes of food a year. The average American household today puts around 600 grams of food in the bin every day, worth $600 a year. Around 25 per cent of food bought ends up in the bin, not the stomach, experts estimate. The poor do it as well as the rich, although slightly less so. Whichever way we look at it, this is a perverse state of affairs at a time when millions go hungry and the planet is heating up; if Britons were to buy only the food they would actually eat, they would cut CO2 emissions by 17 million tonnes – equivalent to taking every fifth car off the roads.

  Wasting food is nothing new. In fact, it is quite normal under capitalism. In the 1930s, millions of gallons of milk were poured into rivers and grain was burnt when demand and trade collapsed. What is new in recent decades is that food is wasted while demand is high, a result of buying too much, not too little. Instead of the ‘under-consumption’ that so troubled progressives a century ago, we are today dealing with a new kind of over-consumerist waste. Food is also lost at different points on the way from farm to fork. With affluence and development, waste has shifted from producer to consumer. In rich societies today, one quarter of edible food is wasted. Before the Second World War, it had been 3 per cent; kitchen waste was mainly peel and bones, rarely a whole head of lettuce or a half-eaten steak. Farmers and retailers are still not entirely innocent, of course. Two-for-one specials encourage over-shopping. An obsession with cosmetically perfect fruit and vegetables and poor demand management are responsible for 10 per cent wastage in the food chain in the United Kingdom. Still, there is no doubt that so-called ‘post-harvest loss’ has declined with development. In developing countries, about half the avocados grown are lost before they reach market; for citrus, the percentage is even higher. By contrast, only 10 per cent of horticultural and perishable crops suffer that fate in Britain and the United States. More than ever, the real culprit is the consumer.63

  Why does so much edible food end up in the bin? In the media, it has been tempting to point the finger at thoughtless consumers who simply do not care about the world. But this misses the social and technical forces at play. A recent close-up look at households in Manchester found that most people felt guilty when they emptied parts of their fridge into the bin.64 Nonetheless, on the next shopping trip, they would once again buy too much. An explanation for this behaviour can be found in the kind of food that ends up in the bin. Most of it consists of lettuce, fresh fruit and vegetables.65 A wilted leaf or a brown spot is often enough to consign food to the
bin. The arrival of the fridge has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, refrigeration vastly improved food preservation and helped families to save money while enjoying nutritious food year around; in Scandinavia, women household economists were keen advocates of the freezer, which gave families a chance to store salmon, venison and fruit for the long winter.66 On the other hand, it was an invitation to buy and store more, making meal planning a more complicated affair than in the past. And it raised expectations about the fresh appearance of food and sticking to sell-by dates. There is always a forgotten piece of cheese hiding in the back of the fridge or an exotic vegetable which looked appetizing in the shop but just did not fit the dinner plan. More than half the food wasted in the United Kingdom is because it is not used in time. Another third is the result of people cooking and serving too much. Pets these days get only a few scraps from such over-provisioning. In that sense, there has been a major disruption in the ecology of modern cities, where animals once had been one stage in the elimination of waste, with swill being served to pigs. Today’s pets create waste.67

  Some may blame a decline in cooking skills and household management for the rise in food waste, but this would be too easy. Culinary skills are far more widely diffused today than a century ago. What has changed is the variety of food, the rhythm of meal times and the pressures of social life. When the pioneering archaeologist of waste, William Rathje, was digging with his students through people’s bins in Arizona in the 1970s, they spotted a close correlation between the diversity of diets and the amount wasted. Mexican-Americans who routinely used the same ingredients threw away 20 per cent less food than their neighbours. The more people ate the same thing day after day, the less they wasted. Rathje called it the first principle of food waste. The pull of variety has been reinforced by the diffusion of cosmopolitan taste and ethnic cuisines. Who now dares to serve guests ordinary bread, cold cuts and an apple? Children, too, have acquired greater voice over their culinary preferences, which can clash with the carefully planned menu of healthy food brought home from the supermarket. On top of it all, food in the fridge has to compete with unforeseen opportunities to eat out. A sudden call from friends, going out for pizza or a curry, and the fresh fish and vegetables planned for that evening are forgotten and later binned. This is one reason single households, with less structured meal and leisure times, tend to produce more food waste.

  Hard times might be expected to be a cure for all this, but this is probably naïve. Rathje, in the 1970s, found that the amount of meat thrown away went up during a recession, as people bought discounted larger packets and cheaper cuts of meat but then did not know how to prepare them.68 In recent years, campaigners have tackled misconceptions about ‘best before’ dates and tried to educate people to check their cupboards and plan their meals for the week before filling up the shopping trolley. Supermarkets started to advise customers on how to store fruit in the fridge, and some companies introduced re-sealable packs for fish fingers. Small loaves of bread appeared on the shelves. After a ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ initiative in one British community, avoidable waste in bins went down by 15 per cent.69 This is a step in the right direction but hardly a giant leap. Some of the recent decline, furthermore, may be a result of the recent recession and people buying less fresh fruit and vegetables. Food waste needs to be recognized as a by-product of the busy lifestyle, with its competing, multiple demands on time, as we have discussed in Chapter 10. Individual morals and lack of information are not the primary problem. The sad truth is not that people do not understand or care about the food they waste. They care about world hunger and global warming, yet their fragmented social schedules override personal ethics and lead them to waste regardless.

  Rather than being the natural end point of affluence, the ‘throwaway era’ of the 1950s and ’60s was merely one stage in a longer transformation of people’s relationship to their waste. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are both wasting more and recycling more. Indeed, we are more directly implicated in handling and sorting our rubbish than our Victorian forebears. It is not certain that all developing societies will necessarily follow the trajectory of American and European cities in the past and replace ‘backward’ rag-and-bone men with ‘modern’ technological solutions. In Colombia and Brazil, authorities have recognized scavengers as valuable partners in waste management and organized co-operatives since the 1980s; in India today, over 3 million waste pickers recycle almost 7 million tons of scrap a year, saving municipalities Rs452 million.70 In the rich West, however, a wondrous new constellation has appeared. The sifting and separating once done by lowly rag-and-bone men is now done by all citizens. Rich and poor alike are getting their hands dirty, separating old bottles from cardboard and smelly food. Recycling has turned an old hierarchy of value upside down. Since ancient times, handling and sorting rubbish has been the fate of the lowest of the low, hence the stigma of the ‘untouchables’. Today, it is a sign of environmental awareness that marks one out as a responsible citizen. Instead of sending their collective rubbish to highly sophisticated sorting machines, the richest people on the planet insist on doing it themselves and for free, as if wanting to defy the economic law of the division of labour. Recycling is no longer treated as backward or traditional. It has become the ally of high-octane consumption, a kind of ersatz sacrament that cleanses us of our stuff. A new steady state of waste has emerged. Instead of ‘waste not, want not’ the new maxim is to use more, recycle more.

  Where does all the waste and recycling go? The PET bottles, paper and the TV sets and computers that are no longer wanted have to end up somewhere if the local landfill is shut. Between 2000 and 2010, the fifteen member states of the European Union raised the packaging waste they recycled from 33 to 46 million tonnes and doubled the amount of plastic packaging recycled, from 2.2 to 4.3 million tonnes.71 Rich societies today recycle more than ever, but they also send more of their waste across their borders than ever before. In essence, this is nothing new. In the nineteenth century, there was a lively international trade in second-hand clothes and rags. But this fades into insignificance when compared to today’s transboundary movement of waste, and the money as well as the environmental consequences involved; in the EU, the export of plastic waste jumped from 1 million tonnes in 1999 to almost 6 million tonnes in 2011, while the export of copper, aluminium and nickel wastes doubled.

  The revival of recycling since the 1980s, then, has come with a curious paradox. At the same time as affluent consumers have been giving their household waste greater personal attention – sorting their bottles and separating plastic and paper – the overall waste stream has increasingly moved out of sight and out of mind. Contrary to popular wisdom, however, the flow has not been down a one-way street, from the rich North to the poor South. The European Union exports most of its plastic waste to China, but the bulk of its more precious metal waste (copper, aluminium, iron and steel and precious metals) travels from one European country to another. Hazardous waste is almost entirely (97 per cent) traded within the EU, most of it ending up in wealthy Germany. Similarly, in the United States, the majority of recycled or refurbished electronic products are sold there. Some American and European televisions and circuit boards end up in Ghana and Nigeria, but Africa also sends its own electronic waste to Korea and Spain; the Middle East sends its to Korea.72

  Shifting one’s waste to distant places is not necessarily a bad thing. Recovered plastic and scraps of precious metal can save virgin resources and reduce the pollution that would otherwise be caused by their extraction. The PET bottle collected in a European town returns as a warm fleece jacket made in China. The problem is that such a virtuous “open loop” is only one aspect of the global waste trade which also involves a more destructive stream of hazardous materials and used goods from the rich world ending up in countries that lack the technologies and regulations to recycle them appropriately. Precious materials are lost, leading to further depletion of virgin resources. European cars, for exa
mple, have catalytic converters that are rich in platinum group metals. Since 2000, all vehicles scrapped in the EU had to have the platinum recycled from their converters. Yet 100,000 used cars are shipped every year from the port of Hamburg to Africa and the Near East, where, ultimately, the platinum ends up in scrapyards or in the ground.

  Even more worrying is the considerable illegal trade in hazardous electronic waste, which causes serious environmental pollution if improperly recycled. In Guiyu, the Chinese centre for e-scrap recycling in Guangdong province, workers melt printed circuit boards over charcoal to remove the microchips from the molten lead, before trying to recover copper and gold with the help of acid (see Plate 71). The majority of children in the region suffer from respiratory diseases. In 2000 and 2001, China and Vietnam banned the import of used electrical equipment, but both made an exception for products that would be rebuilt for re-export. This has opened the door to a large and profitable smuggling trade across their border.73 Europe has even stricter regulations on the treatment of electronic waste, but a lot of it continues to travel under the radar of European inspectors, disguised as used goods. Spot checks in Denmark and the German port of Hamburg in 2006 suggest that, each year, 250,000 tonnes of used TVs, computers, screens and fridges are shipped from Europe to non-OECD countries. Although hard numbers are impossible to come by – several European countries do not report illegal shipments at all – many containers probably include appliances that are either dead or beyond repair and thus are true waste. According to the Secretariat of the Basel Convention (which introduced an international check on the movement of hazardous waste in 1992), one third of all the electronic equipment Europe sent to Ghana in 2010 did not work, and was thus illegal.74

  It is hard not to conclude that rich consumers today may recycle more but, with a habit of swapping old models for new, they also dump more of their lifestyle on distant places.