ABSTRACT
As a society we have become adversely sensitive to waste and its effects in a way which would seem incomprehensible to those who lived in any city in the UK a century ago. Waste is now something to be removed from households as efficiently and regularly as possible and, once removed, never to be seen or smelled again. It has become someone else’s problem. After all, that’s what we pay our council tax for, isn’t it? It was not always so. Charles Dickens’ novel, Our Mutual Friend, centres around a dispute over the ownership of ‘the Mounds’, Victorian examples of landraise by the deposit of refuse in central London.2 Their proprietor, Nicodemus or ‘Noddy’ Boffin (otherwise known as the Golden Dustman), happily lives alongside them, in his house known as ‘Boffin’s bower’.
