A Crisis of Waste? by Martin O'Brien

Author:Martin O'Brien [O'Brien, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Urban
ISBN: 9781135900281
Google: hh5NATxu81AC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-12T05:45:00+00:00

DISPOSABLE HISTORY

As well as the problems of classification and counting that I have mentioned above there is another major difficulty in providing an accurate picture of the post-consumer waste situation over time. That difficulty arises because there is no accepted base-line evidence on historical changes either in rates of household waste disposal or in the ratios of the various discarded materials. What evidence does exist, like data on contemporary waste disposal, is compromised by the use of different classification systems and by attention to different substances found in domestic dustbins. The differences reflect changing understandings of what the waste problem comprises as much as changes in the quantities and kinds of materials that have found their way into dustbins over time. Historical estimates of household waste arisings diverge in their classification systems as much as they differ from contemporary systems. In relation to changing understandings of the character of the waste problem, the available research pays attention to different dustbin contents over time. I will explore this in more detail below, but a useful illustration of the problem is provided by Talbot (1919) who presented research on dustbin contents that included the category ‘shells (oyster, etc.)’ and the catch-all category ‘vegetable matter.’ Skitt (1972), on the other hand, presenting data on dustbin contents for 1935, excluded the category ‘shells’ and produced a composite category of ‘vegetable and putrescible’ matter. Over time this latter has been given a further nuance by referring to ‘garden waste’ as well as ‘kitchen waste’. Talbot included ‘bones,’ as does Murray, whilst Flintoff and Millard (1969) and DEFRA have no such category and none of these more recent studies includes ‘shells.’ The differences in classification — and the emergence of the category ‘garden waste’ — are worthy of some comment since they indicate important social changes in the contexts of household waste generation and municipal waste management as well as intellectual shifts in grasping the implications of those processes.

As I noted above, recent government statistics (DEFRA, 2003) on municipal waste indicate that a little under 29 million tonnes of municipal rubbish was collected in England in 2000–2001. Of this, almost 3 million tonnes was non-household waste, almost 4.5 million tonnes was collected via civic amenity sites and 2.8 million tonnes was generated by household recycling schemes. In fact, the total waste collected via the dustbin was only 16.8 million tonnes. This figure represents a very small fraction (about 3.5%) of the total (industrial, commercial, agricultural, etc.) annual waste arisings in the UK. DEFRA calculates that, via the dustbin, in 2001 each English household disposed of 15.5 kilograms of rubbish each week. This is equivalent to just over 2.2 kilograms or 4.4 pounds per household per day. If the total English dustbin waste for 2001 is divided by the population of England at 2001 (a little over 49 millions), it transpires that waste-generation per person is 749.6 pounds per annum or approximately 2.05 pounds per day. It is highly instructive to compare this with the figures provided by the National Salvage Council (NSC) for 1918–19 (quoted in Talbot, 1919: 143–4).

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