Trash

With an unprecedented amount of new stuff being made, bought and sold everyday, we’re more likely than ever to throw things away. But where is away? Featuring historian Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ephemeralist production of My Heart three D audio for full
exposure listen with that phones for a lot of us.
With the new year comes an opportunity to take stock,

(00:23):
consider what you have, what you want, what you may
not need anymore, and maybe do a little cleaning. It's
a moment where people are confronted with a question at
the heart of this show, how do we as societies
and as individuals decide what to keep and what to

(00:45):
throw away? What defines trash varies from person to person.
It's an activity more than it is a category, so
it should be understood as a dynamic category rather than
as the thing or a kind of thing. And my
name is Susan Strasser. I am the Richards Professor Emerita

(01:07):
of American History at the University of Delaware, which just
really means that I'm retired from the University of Delaware.
And I'm the author of Never Done, a History of
American Housework. Second book was called Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Making
of the American mass Market and Waste and Want a
Social History of Trash. If we were to see the

(01:32):
way most people in the United States lived before eighteen nine,
it wouldn't look familiar to us at all. By twenty
things would look old fashioned to us, certainly, but they
would look familiar. And what that is about is the
creation of the mass market, the creation of industrial products

(01:58):
that per meated domestic life, and that really got fundamentally
transformed during those decades around the turn of the twentieth century,
people related to material goods in very, very different ways.
The likelihood was that almost everything that you wore, or

(02:23):
eight or sat on were created by yourself, or by
somebody in your family, or by somebody that you knew.
Soap and candles were industrialized pretty early in the cities,
but they were not necessarily industrialized in the country because
they were made of leftover materials. You make soap from ashes,

(02:47):
the ashes make lie, and from spare fat. When you're butchering,
you're gonna have spare fat to use. Bottles were very valuable.
Commercial glass manufacturer was pretty slow compared to other industries,
so bottles were refilled. Housekeeping manuals advised people when they're

(03:13):
clearing the table to check and see what can be
eaten again. And there was not a lot of shame
apparently involved in taking things off people's plates and keeping
it to feed people later, and across the social hierarchy,
people knew how to sew. Rich women sewed, poor women sewed,

(03:43):
middle class women sewed, All women sewed. If you could
afford to, you might hire somebody to make your fancy
dresses or your coat, But even wealthy women sewed their
underwhere their nightgowns, kids clothes. The idea that you just

(04:08):
get rid of things when they're torn, or when they're broken,
or when they're dirty was just unknown, and that was
partly because people understood the value of the labor that
went into making them. This is at a point before
there were very many general stores, and even if there
were general stores, how do you get to the general store.

(04:31):
An average farmer might have a horse, but the horses
working on pulling the plow. The horse is not free
to go into town because somebody decides that they want something,
So in a primarily agricultural society, they don't go to town.
The way people got stuff was that people came around

(04:52):
selling stuff, and they came around in the countryside peddler's
door to door salesman, slipping both new goods and material
for reuse. We're an integral part of a newly developing economy.
The kinds of things that the peddlers would carry would

(05:12):
be just basic things to live with, things to cook with,
things to build with, little things that we would not
even think of, sewing pins, hairpins, nails, the kind of
stuff we would think you would buy in a hardware store.

(05:43):
There was another kind of peddling that was organized by
tin manufacturers. Tin was used for small metal goods, stuff
like funnels, watering cans, and tin manufacturers would organized peddlers
to go out in the countryside and sell their tin wear.

(06:07):
All of these people took stuff in trade two either
sell back to the person who had sold them the tinware,
or in some cases the tinware manufacturer might have hired someone.
I had the really great opportunity to look at the
papers of tin manufacturer, and he was called a master peddler.

(06:30):
His name was Marillo Noise. My father was a peddler.
His name he was your no and he hired peddlers
to sell his tin and to bring stuff back. You
don't want to do what manufacturers now do, which is

(06:51):
to pay for stuff to just go one way. So
Marilla Noise got really interested in what he could collect
from the households where his peddlers were going that he
could then sell. And he collected paper, rags, rubber bones,

(07:13):
and he collected metal. He had these little booklets that
would fit into his pocket. In those booklets he would
say things like, oh, so and so told me about
a manufacturer in New Jersey who's using old leather. So
then he goes to New Jersey and he visits the
manufacturer and he finds out what kinds of old leather

(07:37):
the manufacturer can use and he's using, and then he
can give his peddlars instructions to be bringing back that
stuff as well. He would send the peddlers out to
sell the stuff that he had loaded the wagons with,
but he also expected them to come back with full cards,

(07:59):
so that the price of keeping the peddler and the
horse alive would be distributed over both directions. The expansion
of peddling signals an important shift in American society towards
a culture of consumerism. The development of consumer culture requires

(08:21):
people to come to believe that stuff can come to
them and that we can get what we want. If
the peddlers hadn't been able to take stuff back, then
there wouldn't have been as much peddling, there wouldn't have
been as much new manufactured stuff out in the countryside.

(08:44):
It literally brought that system that was a two way
system and brought things, brought goods, brought stuff into people's lives.
I feel like I could see the workings of a
nineteen entree recycling system that so many things that could
not be used in the household did get sent back

(09:08):
to factories to be used again to make other things.
Metal is an obvious thing because it can be melted down.
But rags, for example, we're used in papermaking. Before the Revolution,
there wasn't a lot of paper made in the United States,
so there was a lot of energy put into creating

(09:32):
domestic paper manufacturers and saving rags cotton rags and linen
rags for making paper. That's recycling, that's making something out
of something that's previously manufactured. It's really difficult for us
to imagine the spareness of life. The very idea to

(09:57):
get a tea kettle, something that will boil your water,
that's a separate object from the pot you're cooking your
beans in. Those very ideas were really new for most people,
especially given that the houses that survived the ones that
we tour as tourists, or the houses of the most

(10:20):
fabulously wealthy people in America, even they were sitting in
the dark at night. Whale oil, which was the major
source before kerosene, it was expensive. Candles were expensive. There's
a French saying I've seen it translated in a lot

(10:42):
of nineteenth century books, about something being not worth the candle.
Is this book good enough for me to pay for
the candle that's gonna light my ability to read it?
Or am I going to put it away and go
to sleep and maybe look at it tomorrow. Yeah, it's
not like people were lighting up their lives the way

(11:06):
we light up our lives. And I think we have
a hard time imagining just how spare life was for everybody.
In the late eighteen hundreds, there was a wave of
migration in the United States away from the countryside and

(11:30):
towards cities. It became possible to feed the country with
fewer people and jobs in factories looked attractive, and city
life looked attractive to a lot of people, and that's
why they went in the countryside. It's much easier to

(11:52):
figure out what to do with stuff if you don't
want it. There's some corner of the farm where you
can dump things. There's just a lot more ability to
get rid of stuff, to the extent that you even
want to get rid of stuff, because there's also more
ability to use things. The example of making soap is

(12:16):
a good one in the city. If you're living in
an apartment, you may have ashes, you may have fat,
but where are you gonna make soap. You may not
have the space to use things, and you certainly don't
have space to dump things. So it becomes more and

(12:37):
more an issue for people living in cities as to
what they're gonna do with things that they don't want.
There's lots of written evidence about people throwing stuff out windows,
But what are you going to do with things? Vary it,
burn it, throw it in a ravine if there's a
ravine nearby, throw it in a body of water. Those

(13:01):
were the choices. With more people in their trash packed
together in tighter spaces, came increasing risks of disease. The
whole question of public health starts to become salient as
there's this huge series of epidemics yellow fever, cholera in

(13:27):
city after city throughout the nineteenth century, and people don't
yet have the germ theory of disease. They don't quite
yet know about viruses and bacteria, but they do start
developing an understanding that filth has something to do with disease,
that bad water has something to do with disease, that

(13:50):
filth has something to do with bad water. More people
got sick where people were crowded in that they could
see They could see it perfectly clearly. In the early
twentieth century in cities, there were sewers, but there were
also out houses. There were people living in tenements where

(14:14):
the one flush toilet would be in the courtyard. Sewers
and water were the things that created the whole notion
of what a municipal concern might be about infrastructure and
about public health. These concerns would be addressed by a

(14:35):
major advancement that we all too often take for granted today,
municipal trash collection. What it looked like was those same
people who had campaign to get sewers and water into
cities started campaigning to get municipal trash collection. We're talking

(14:58):
about the nine these in the biggest cities, New York
because it was the biggest city. The problem was the
biggest and it kind of led the way in municipal
services for collecting waste. Now, what they did with the
trash ones that was collected, we may not have such

(15:20):
happy feelings about. In New York, it was put on
barges and taken out into the ocean and dumped in
the ocean. It was used to create landfill. The ashes, particularly,
but also other kinds of trash were used for landfill.
The thing is trashes then and now hard to get

(15:44):
rid of the most obvious things to do with stuff
you don't want just to burn it, to bury it,
or to dump it. Those are the big three that
you can do on your farm, or you can do
in a big way in a big city. But if
you're burning all the trash for a big city, then
you need some kind of fancy incinerator. You can't just

(16:07):
do it in the backyard. They were not attractions that
people wanted to have in their midst So facilities were
built on the edges of town, and facilities were built
where people were too poor to effectively complain about the

(16:27):
hazards to their health. We're here today on a march
to the Detroit incinerator Um, and we're calling for clean air,
particularly for the communities that are close to the incenterator
and are particularly affected by the particular from the burning trash.
And I should say that in those early municipal household

(16:49):
trash collections, there was separation of different kinds of trash
to be used for recycling. The same kinds of things
that people had been recyclinging for many decades were separated out.
Do people start thinking about their materials in a different
way because of trash collection. Once you have a municipal

(17:12):
trash collection, then throwing something away becomes a possibility. Before
municipal trash collection, you either store it in your house
or you somehow or other get it out of your house.
And if you're going to get it out of your house,
you have to figure out where out of your house.
And municipal trash collection gives you a brand new option,

(17:32):
which is just get rid of it. It makes it
a black box. Before then you've got to figure out
what to do with it. And if you're gonna take
it down to the river and dump it in the river,
you're going to dump it in the river, and you're
gonna know that it went in the river. If you
put it in the can and you take the can

(17:53):
to the curb. Who knows what happens to it. It's gone.
There's not the sense of reciprocity about it. There's not
the bargaining about I mean, when the peddler comes around
and you've got your bit of rags and your bit
of rubber and your bit of metal, and you are
looking at the tea cattle and the pins and some nails,
there's a whole bargaining process that's going to go on

(18:15):
between you and the peddler to figure out who gets
what and what gets exchanged. Once you have municipal trash collection,
there's no exchange. It's literally about getting rid of stuff.
These new systems of disposal dovetail not coincidentally with major

(18:37):
developments and mass manufacturing. It simply became possible to buy
a lot of stuff that hadn't been possible to buy before.
And some of it is because there's more and more
stuff being manufactured in factories, and some of it is
because there's all kinds of new distribution methods. Even people

(18:58):
in the countryside can buy things from the Sears catalog
and the Montgomery Ward catalog and get them shipped to
their houses. What are you reading these years catalogs. That
sounds exciting, you'd be surprised. The Post Office actually made
it possible for things to be shipped to your house

(19:20):
even if you lived in the country Rural Free Delivery RFD,
so you didn't have to come into town and pick
something up at the train station. It would be shipped
to your house suddenly, and really it was sudden. All
of the goods of the new manufacturing were available to

(19:42):
consumers if they used these companies, and they did use
those companies, and they used those companies for the same
reasons that people use Amazon, because everything was available and
it was easy to get. In the nine twenties, lots
and lots of appliances started to be produced, and many

(20:03):
of these had been patented earlier, but it wasn't until
the nineteen twenties and the relative prosperity of the nineteen
twenties that the large numbers of people started to buy
these things. At first, it was small appliances, things like
toasters and irons. By the end of the nineteen twenties,
refrigerators were available to wealthy people. Everything in its place.

(20:30):
That's easy with my printed air cold pantry. Even after
the depression, started. They were sold on the installment plan
with the promise that you could save money. You could
buy things on sale and keep them longer in your refrigerator.
We think of the depression as a time when nobody
had anything, but if there's a twenty unemployment rate, that

(20:54):
means of the people have jobs. It's not like more
people had lots and lots of money, but they did
have some money, and both refrigerators and radios were appliances
that became big during the thirties. Another consumer good flooding

(21:16):
the market in this era was, of course, the automobile.
Henry Ford, who not only introduced the assembly line and
a certain new kind of manufacturing in that respect, he
also introduced a theory of employment that he called the
five dollar day. He wanted to pay workers well enough

(21:42):
that they could buy automobiles, but not everybody has a
million dollars to ride the economy is what they want.
He envisioned a time when it would not just be
rich people, and over the course of the twenties, automobiles
got cheaper and the used automobile market started to develop,

(22:06):
So by the end of the twenties it's fair to
say that there are large numbers of people brought in
cars with this version, and consumer culture came an onslaught
of disposable goods. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
paper cups starts to be the first big thing because

(22:27):
people are out in cities more and they're drinking publicly.
She knows that dickte cups, they were a lot of
extra glasses to waste. She knows that dicknecup means there's
less of breaking glasses. And you know too that drinking
from a Dicte cup is more sanitary because everyone has
his own individual cups. Again, there's this concern about public

(22:52):
health as the germ theory starts to be accepted, So
there's the introduction of paper cups for sanitary purposes. Other
kinds of paper goods and disposable goods are being introduced,
but they're not super popular. They really require a whole

(23:15):
different mindset. The idea that you have something, you use
it once, and you throw it away. That's like a
brand new idea. And there are certain kinds of disposable
things like bottles, caps and razor blades that we don't
think of. But starting in the eight nineties, bottle caps

(23:37):
and razor blades, start to give people the idea that
this one time used then toss it might be a
good way to live your life. In a moment of
changing attitudes around creation and disposal, everything got ratcheted up

(23:57):
during more time. One of its is to remember about
World War One is that the United States was not
in it for very long. The Republic must awaken, the
people must understand our safety lies in pull realization. The
faith of the nations and the safety of the world
will be decided on the western battlefront of Europe. The

(24:20):
United States didn't get into it until nineteen seventeen, and
the war was over in nineteen eighteen. They were instituting programs,
but they never really got a chance to get that far.
World War two they were full blown. Only men went
to war, so there was a huge amount of propagandizing

(24:42):
around various kinds of what we would call recycling drives
that were called scrap drives at the time. I want
to report about another great American army and rolling one
in every four American the Army of organized education, boys
and girls collect crap to build up our national stockpiles.

(25:04):
There were school curricula that we're developed if this many
pots and pans can make this many airplanes, then how
many part you know that kind of word problem. They
organized kids in their scout troops to collect materials, and

(25:24):
they militarized the talking about it. Practically all of us
have fats. Fats make ncroistans for shows. My father, who
was a physicist, during World War Two he served as
an army research facility. He said that he didn't really
think that the kinds of explosives that the household fats
could be used for actually were very common kinds of explosives,

(25:49):
so he, even during the war, thought that that fat
collection thing was mostly for propaganda purposes. More than a
million people are crowded into Washington in wartime, say, with
a peacetime population of half a million. The city was
never planned to accommodate such a huge, ever growing army
of workers. But Washington in wartime is people, people intent

(26:10):
on contributing their personal effort, people seeking information and advice
and sometimes papers others to see history in the making.
It was a way of mobilizing the whole population to
be behind the war effort as much as it was
a way of collecting materials that could be used to

(26:32):
advance the war effort. You couldn't buy a new washing
machine or a new car during the war because the
factories that produced washing machines and cars had been converted
for war production. So people were experiencing these kinds of shortages.
And this was after ten years of depression. So now

(26:57):
people have money. They have money because they're working in
the war factories. The economy is amped up, but there's
not stuff to buy, and the propaganda is saying you
should buy war bonds. The presidents now have the added
burden of printing billions of dollars worth of war bonds
and steps to pay for the planes, hips and guns
that our defenders must have. Your husband's and your brothers

(27:20):
and your uncle's are off there in Germany and Japan
and doing their part, and you've got to do your part.
And your part is to not buy stuff and give
your medal to the government and not complain about it.
Saving is as easy as squandering. You'll give us the scrap.

(27:40):
We will turn it into tanks, we will turn it
into plane we'll turn it into jeeps, we'll turn it
into guns. Then our fighting men will have enough and
on time. The American consumer economy brought with it a

(28:10):
new buzzword, convenience. The twentie century promises life is going
to be easy for everybody. When we think about it,
it's really about the physical body. We shouldn't have to
work very hard, we shouldn't have to use our muscles
very much. We should live like the kings and queens

(28:32):
of old. That's what convenience is about. We should be
able to exchange money for this feature of goods that
will make our lives easy. The products are going to
make it that way, and disposable products are particularly going

(28:53):
to make it that way. If something is disposable, you
don't have to wash it, you don't have to clean it,
you don't have to worry about it. You can toss
it away. Where is a way? Nobody knows where a
way is. A big part of this shift in thinking
was demonstrated and how manufacturers began packaging their products. Manufacturers

(29:18):
stop selling you a thing, and they start selling a
new kind of product, which is that thing in its package.
From their standpoint, the advantage of selling ivory soap in
a wrapper is that you can write ivory on the

(29:38):
outside of it, and then the consumer is going to
go to the store and ask for Ivory soap, and
the retailer has to get it from Procter and Gamble,
especially when it comes to personal size. Ivory so white
looks pure, even smell pure, my pleasure loving side a

(29:58):
door did in the bath. So that's the reason why
that new kind of product comes into being, because the
product in a package can be branded, and the product
outside of a package cannot be branded. Woven into these
trends was the concept of fashion, fashion and material goods

(30:23):
suggests that there's something beyond the way that the product
does its job that you should be paying attention to.
Luxury is a warm towel gently touching your skin, making
you feel soft, special, even a little bit spoiled. There's

(30:45):
a lot of introduction of things that used to be
available in black or in white, and now they're available
in color. No longer do you have to have just
white towels. Now you can have towels and a whole
lot of different colors. And it may be the fashion
this year to have blue towels. So it becomes a

(31:06):
way of selling more goods by making things that are
not yet rags, but they're out of fashion, they're no
longer good see these two portable radios, Well watch this letter. Sorry, Brandy,

(31:26):
you old file portable to have to go, But look
at our new r C A Victor portable radio tangled
up with fashion is a term you hear a lot today.
Obsolescence the idea that the product, for various reasons is
destined to become obsolete. The idea that obsolescence is baked

(31:50):
into the product really comes from all of us living
lives that are surrounded by products of technological processes that
are beyond on what we can understand. Phones when they
were originally introduced, were made to last. Then Bell Systems
started introducing fashion phones and different princess phones, different kinds

(32:15):
of phones. Now there's this proliferation of options, and it's
possible to understand that you have a funky old phone
or you have the newest and fanciest phone. There's such
a range of phone possibilities that literally didn't used to exist.

(32:39):
Contrary to what you might imagine, not every manufacturer was
greedily rubbing their hands behind the idea of planned obsolescence.
Henry Ford was really opposed to the notion of changing models.
To change the model of an automobile requires changing the

(32:59):
whole auction process. Every change is going to mean a
change not just in what gets sold, but a change
in how it's made. So General Motors gets this idea
of having an annual model change. That new model can
be advertised and people can get excited about the new model.

(33:20):
There he comes now and his very old mobile. It's
a futuramic Goals mobile with the newest push button features,
automatic windows, automatic top, just pull a handy control and
before you've had time to admire the smooth, blowing futuramic
lines of this real post War Olds mobile, the top

(33:41):
is down automatically. And furthermore, they start producing cars in
colors and Ford is just still chugging along, producing a
Model T that gets technologically better. As the years go
on and Ford starts losing market share and General Motors
is gaining it. By the end of the nineteen twenties,

(34:04):
Ford realizes he can no longer do this, and he
closed down his auto plants to produce the new model
A Ford. Now he's producing in color, and he's got
several different models, and it becomes the model for everything
else too. When is Apple going to reveal its new

(34:26):
computers and it's new iPhone, there's like all this hub
around the introduction of all the new stuff. One of
the biggest takeaways from Waste and Want, Susan's book on
the History of trash is that all of this production, consumption,
and disposal is inextricably connected. You can't separate trash in

(34:52):
a consumer culture from the production process, from the distribution process.
It's all of a piece. My major interest is in
the relationship that we in our private lives have with
the economic system and the production system, and the advertising

(35:15):
and marketing systems. And now there's a new camera by
Code Act. It's just the nicest one I know to
have around the house. And the distribution system and the
system is not just about the parts that we see.
In the same way that we don't see what happens
to our trash after it goes away, we also don't

(35:40):
see where our stuff came from before it got to
the store or to the website. It's not like we're
incapable of starting to imagine that the stuff we use
gets produced. We kind of know it, But the whole
business of production, unless we happen to know people who

(36:03):
work in the factory, it's like a black box to us.
It's like something we just don't know about. On the
other end, once we take it to the curb, we
see the guys come by, we see them put it
in that truck, and then what happens. We don't know
it's gone. So stuff comes, stuff goes. Do we make

(36:27):
more trash now than we used to? Certainly we must
write we make much more trash than we used to,
the whole world of packaging and disposals for starters, But
also we have so many more technologically complicated goods in
our lives. Appliances, communications, things, computers, phones, all of that stuff.

(36:54):
What happens to our trash now? It varies from place
to place. Baltimore has a big incinerator that is a
waste to energy incinerator. Landfills are becoming problematic in the
United States because there isn't space for them without places

(37:17):
that are close to the largest metropolitan areas, So the
stuff has to be shipped long distances to get to
places where there are landfill facilities. Literally, what happens to
stuff depends on where you are in the time leading
up to writing this book, What were the attitudes conversations

(37:38):
about trash and the environment? You sort of remember in
your site, guys, trash is kind of a foreboting topic.
When I first told people I was writing a book
about trash, most of them laughed, and people still laugh.
It's a little hard for me to feel that my

(37:58):
life's work is so funny, But I think that it's
precisely my life's work to take these issues of daily
life that are regarded as private and as trivial and
bring them out into the light and examine them in

(38:22):
ways that help people to understand that they're not private
at all, and that therefore, by definition, they are not trivial.
My only other question, it's just about hope. Like sometimes
you've walked down the street, you look at all the
trash everywhere, at least I live in a city, you know,

(38:43):
like it's full of track, it's real trashy, overflowing trash cans,
litter everywhere, under bridges in streets. And then also like
just being in the time in place that I grew up,
and just position in the middle of this consumer world
where I feel like I'm being Everything is branded and
I'm being sold to all the time, and I'm always

(39:03):
being told that I need new products and different products.
And then I got to change this product for that product.
It can feel like overwhelming and I don't know you're responsible.
What do you use to not feel hopeless in that situation?
Like what grounds you to uh make smart decisions about
consumption and waste. The study of history, it's sort of

(39:29):
like traveling. You go to a foreign country and you
discovered that there are other ways to be human. And
I feel that way about the study of the past
as well, that there are other ways to be human
than the ways that we live in the twenty one century.
And frankly, the environmental issues that go way beyond climate change,

(39:51):
that have to do with pollution of various kinds, that
have to do with the eradication of so many species.
We have to find other ways of being human than
the ways that we have because this one isn't working.
This one is destroying the planet that we live on.
This one is eating our launch. We're not going to

(40:14):
go backwards in time. We're not going to live the
way people did in the nineteenth century. We don't want to,
and we have been raised in the first centuries. Can't
We don't know how. But for me, the study of
the past suggests that there will be other ways to
be human in the future. This episode of Ephemeral was

(40:38):
written and assembled by Max and Alex Williams, with producer
Trevor Young, and special thanks to our friend Sarah Wasserman.
Susan Strasser is the author of Never Done, a History
of American Housework, Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Making of the American
mass Market, and Ways and Want a Social History of Trash.

(41:03):
Find them wherever books are sold and learn more about
everything she's up to over at susan strasser dot Net,
links and more on our website ephemeral dot Show. If
you like this episode, share it with a friend, rate
and review us wherever you listen, and shoot us a
comment on social media at ephemeral Show. It just maybe

(41:26):
the thing that keeps us from getting thrown in the
trash and For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.