Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Strasser’s modest book is an examination into the short history of trash… which is also a history of how the image of household status became, through post-industrial capitalism, attainable for the average American family… and how that image in its purity, shed its excess into garbage bins, trash cans, landfills, and the ocean.
Strasser examines how we go to where we are with our attitudes of what is disposable, what is usable, and what is wholly taken for granted, mostly examining from the mid 1800s our attitudes towards what we consider today to be trash.
What may be surprising to many, such as I was, that as of the start of the 20th century the cycle of trash was completely different (mainly there being a cycle). One richer family’s disposal was in fact “up for grabs” by an entire industry which relied on wasting as little as possible. While her detailed descriptions and references as to how people recycled, reused parts, and the importance of odds and ends (such as strings, rags, metals, and foodstuffs) is interesting I found it most compelling to see how the development of late industrial capitalism here in the United States also meant the splitting of consumer and producer ends of the cycle.
In other words, as finished material became more abundantly available, so recycling, and the industry of recycling began to disappear. This industry was previously supported by the poor and the very poor, picking through richer people’s junk, selling these choice parts to junk men, who then introduced the materials back into industry by sorting and shipping back to factories. This grid of consumers feeling material back into producers did not stop even up until World War 2, as it was so prevalent.
You see the ramping up of production starting around the boom of the 1920s, when new things became more desirable as status symbols. Previously to that, things were made by engineers and mechanics, with very little attention to design and color. When the ’20s hit and department stores needed to sell sell sell to survive, they pressured design into products. With this, planned obsolescence became the trend as obsolescence of style or function became inherent within the system of production. In fact, much of what was produced after the Great Depression was to replace what was already functional!
While much of whether planned obsolescence was desirable or not was debated for some time. From the side of business, waste wasn’t seen as throwing away functional things… waste was seen as not buying the newest thing and allowing industry to progress!
How progress can be done through style obsolescence, isn’t something that is discussed in this book, Strasser is more interested in presenting us the history, without judgement.
Today we do get a recognition that the abundance and conveyance of a throwaway society isn’t necessarily a good thing. There is a funny (and sad) exchange between the mayor of New York trying to justify discarding NYC’s waste in the state of Virginia and the governor of Virginia. The seeds of our recycling program come from observations of one alarmed citizen writing books in the 50s… and while recycling today is more of a moral duty than one in which we expect to get paid (as the past individuals who did recycle then), today we pay the price for our laziness and our pursuit of the image of what a perfect household should look like… the history of waste is somewhat less a history of capitalism’s development as it is a history of how the image of status created the anti-septic, spotless kitchen (home) with its perfectly clean and refined interiors all made from the latest, most stylistic fashions.
I can’t recommend this book as a great page turner, or a mystery novel (as we do know where we are today) but this book is definitely an interesting page turner, one which will open your eyes to seeing the very things that surround us daily — our stuff, our junk — and allow us a foundation to understand that life doesn’t have to revolve around disposable anythings.
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