by Joseph Aaron Friedman

Created on: October 04, 2009   Last Updated: October 08, 2009

This is Not Our Father's Garbage

"The truth knocks on the door and

You say 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling."

-Robert M. Pirsig-

Throughout history, humankind in all its vanity has distinguished itself from lower life forms in a number of different ways. To name a few: we hunt with weapons, we wear clothing, and we have garbage. While the first two items on the list evolved from our intellect and instinct for survival, the later, is the byproduct of those same traits. As our population increases, so does the trail of waste we leave behind.

Since the onset of automated industrialization, we have converted from a society of economical; throw nothing-away preservers, to a society of consumer-based wasters. We have become the antithesis of common sense, the affliction of our own accountability, and the obliterators of our very environment. In other words, we have seen the problem, and it is us. So, the fact remains, somebody made a mess, and somebody has to clean it up but how?

In her book Gone Tomorrow The Hidden Life of Garbage, Heather Rogers examines the history of our techniques of dealing with the circumstances from the onset of the industrial revolution, to today. In one instance, she refers to a garbage crisis in New York City in 1894, where one Colonel George E. Waring, Jr was placed to head the sanitation concerns. Waring employed the use of uniformed street cleaning crews, banned unlicensed scavengers from rummaging through trash piles, and required citizens to engage in source separation, an early form of recycling requiring the separation of ashes and food scraps from other materials.

The segregated trash was then hauled off to Jamaica Island for further separation. Rogers cites an account of the procedure as witnessed by a journalist of the day: One picker selects manila paper, another shoes, another bottles, cans and metals another cloth and rags, until finally fully sixty percent of the material which New York householders consider worthless is picked out as worth saving (Rogers 54).

This process worked. Soap, candles, and fertilizer were made from whatever could not be reused. Waring was on the right track, and other large cities had noticed his work, however, in New York, the administration was voted out of office the next election and the newly reinstated Tammany administration ousted him.

Today, we face the same problems, only on a much larger scale. One would think that in over one hundred years we might

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