Talking Trash: The History Of Our Garbage

Around 5000-4000 BC we find ourselves at the rise of Mesopotamia, the first urban civilization. Mesopotamia as you may think of is was known for its prosperity and its history in the development of the first written language, and subsequently literature, math and astronomy, and many other inventions like the wheel. But your image may not have included the fact that the landscape of Mesopotamia was largely made up of trash.

In fact, they would pile up trash in the streets which would gradually raise the level of the road. It is said that every once in a while they would put a new layer of clay on the road over the trash, so people would have to build stairs down to their homes or even build new doors that were at the level of the street!

They did have large dumping locations, with one of the largest being 7 and a half acres long and 7 meters deep – but it was unsure how all of the trash made it to one place since they didn’t have official municipal waste systems.

And let’s tack on to this that there was the issue of physical trash (like the unused urn for your oil) along with human waste and wastewater that they usually dumped into their water systems or onto the streets as well. Can you imagine the smell on their morning stroll?

The first official rudimentary landfills are said to have existed for over 5000 years In Knossos, Crete. Around 3,000 BC archaeological evidence showed that there were large dirt pits where citizens would fill until full of their trash and then cover up with dirt. This actually made sense to do back then, but it wasn’t regulated or widely adopted.

Finally in 500 B.C. Athens, Greece established the first municipal dump and created laws about their trash. They required garbage to be thrown away at least one mile from the city walls. They also established a law that made it illegal to throw garbage on the streets. As the clean freak I am, I would be so stoked!

And the Romans around this time built the first sewer systems to move their waste into the Tiber River. They were actually really proud of it and named it Cloaca Maxima which means “Greatest Sewer” it is still being used today. In 200 AD, the Romans designed the first official sanitation organization, where they would send groups of two to pick up trash from the streets.

Continuing our little magic carpet ride across time and space – we can see Monte Testaccio, a famous mound in Rome. It is composed of the accumulation of trash in the Tiber floodplain – constructed almost wholly from the fragments of nearly 25 million clay amphorae ( the vessels used to carry oil) during the renaissance period. Later on, Rome used these shards of clay as a quarry for road construction and even to construct the vaulted ceilings of St Peter’s Basilica.

Monte Tesaccio is still visible today – situated in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Rome surrounded by hip restaurants and nightclubs! And archaeologists are still using the trash they find there to gain more information about the culture during that time.

For the most part, though, people lived with their trash. It was prevalent no matter what they did with it – for lack of trying or otherwise. They used it, reused it at some point, or piled it in areas where people could still see the impacts of their waste.

Pompeii is an interesting example of how different cultures used to deal with trash. Archaeologist Allison Emmerson found that instead of the “out of sight out of mind” methods we use today – the people of Pompeii lived among their trash and would collect it in piles and sort it for recycling or reuse. Preserved trash was discovered outside of the walls of the city and even piled in the public burial tombs that were located throughout the streets.

It is suggested that their perception of trash as disposable was just different than ours – not that they were unorganized or didn’t know how to deal with it.

But they weren’t the first to reuse or recycle. Dating back to 2000 B.C. China developed methods of composting and recycling things like bronze for future use. And in 1031 Japan had the first recorded instances of paper recycling to maximize output and save resources. People throughout time reused materials due to lack of resources and the long process it took to create something new.

Fast forward to the Middle Ages, and people were still struggling to manage their waste effectively. People threw their garbage in the streets. They had pigs eat the waste, which inevitably caused them to fall ill. And with waste, there came rats, which caused devastation like the bubonic plague. Otherwise known as “The Black Plague,” which killed 25 million people in just 5 years.

It was then that you see the implementation of laws that prevent people from dumping their waste in public waterways and streets. In Britain, they implemented laws to have people keep their trash inside until people they deemed “rakers” picked it up weekly and put it into a cart for disposal. Forging the way for waste management workers as we know them today. At the beginning of 15th century Germany, prisoners were used for transporting waste into fields as fertilizer – showing who they emphasized to do the dirty work.

But even with new measures most people generally would burn, dispose of their trash by dumping it nearby or in waterways, or just let it pile up!

It wasn’t until the period between the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe when the modern Age of Sanitation began and people started to worry about public health and cleanliness because of the overwhelming amounts of trash.

There were still issues in England going on around mass scavenging and unsanitary urban conditions due to the trash which was spreading cholera and typhus. Coal production increased which is why scavenging of the waste increased. There were “Dustmen” who would sell anything including discarded ashes and things I don’t even want to mention to make a buck! So to clean things up, they implemented the Public Health Act of 1875. They implemented the first concept of a movable garbage receptacle where you would store ash waste and it was picked up weekly. You’d even be charged if your bin was empty!

Coming across to America – we finally started implementing some changes. In 1654, New Amsterdam, now New York City made it illegal to throw their trash into the streets. In 1757, the first American municipal street cleaning operation was started by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and he encouraged people to dig pits and for their trash.

With the boom of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, there was a huge uptick in garbage. We started to produce synthetic materials that couldn’t be decomposed. Things like plastic, paper, and even some metals.

Mass production meant that people could buy the next best thing at a cheaper price. Out with the old, in with the new.

Trash dumping continued to be popular in America, until 1864, when health officials connected the spread of Yellow Fever in Memphis, Tennessee with massive garbage piles throughout the city. This outbreak killed 20,000 people so laws were then enacted for residents to take their garbage to specific locations on the outskirts of town and trash dumping wasn’t allowed on the streets.

And remember those pigs I talked about cleaning up the streets? Even up until the late 19th century early 20th century you could find piggeries across the US, like the biggest one in Worcester, Massachusetts, that would let pigs by the thousands roam to consume up to 10 tons of waste daily. (You think we would’ve learned this isn’t a great idea for people or pigs!) The pigs started to foul up the water sources and they even died themselves from food-borne illnesses.

Needless to say that eventually this process ended and we made the shift towards sanitary landfills (the 1900s) and incinerators that had been developed at the end of the 19th century in London. We also finally picked up the use of garbage bins!

But things just stayed the same for a while, and we were mostly just dumping where we could. “The amount of packaging produced and disposed of increased 67% after World War II.” and we officially became known as a throwaway society.

The EPA says that from 1946-1970 we dumped almost 89,000 containers of radioactive wastes into our oceans. Like are you kidding me?? And to make matters worse, we then saw a boom in plastic use in the 1960s. In 1965 the Solid Waste Disposal Act was passed to promote healthier air and better technologies and regulations for municipal and industrial waste systems.

The Clean Air Act was passed in the US in 1970 to regulate air conditions. This shut down incinerators without air pollution controls. But we still use incinerators today, and 23 states in the US classify incineration of trash as “renewable” But the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives say that, “three to five times more energy can be saved through alternative strategies such as waste prevention, reuse, recycling, and composting than can be generated by burning.” And these incinerators are located in areas that are disproportionally made up of low-income, People of Color- making the air toxic for people in those areas.