ABSTRACT
With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would fi nger this scrap of rubbish or that — a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby’s hair — never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. (George Orwell, 1984)
In Chapter 3, I showed that waste has been, and remains, crucially important to industrial development in the modern world. Not only did it make a signifi cant contribution to the scientifi c and industrial revolutions, it plays a continuing role in technological development — from the high technology of the space programme to the cosmetic surgery industry and the recycling of wastes ‘into nutritive human foods’. In Chapter 4, I showed that the proposition that contemporary society is gripped by a uniquely throwaway mentality is not supported by any evidence. On the contrary, the evidence shows that, when placed in the appropriate contexts, contemporary patterns of household waste disposal are not markedly dissimilar to past patterns of household waste disposal. At least in these two cases there is a hint that the core claim of the throwaway society thesis — that post-war consumerism has generated a profl igate disregard for the material world so that modern consumers now callously discard what would have been saved by our not-so distant forebears — fails to grasp the central importance and complex roles that waste plays in industrial and social organisation. Neither the numbers nor the evidence of disposal practices add up to the profl igate conclusion.
