ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, waste, pollution, dirt and detritus were shown to be germane to and embedded in the very fabric of historical societies. The so-called ‘crisis’ of waste has been central to the lived realities of our ancestors for centuries: it has, in short, a very long pedigree and has taken many different forms — from fi lth-encrusted clothing and households through industrially-polluted living conditions to discarded consumer remnants. The brief historical survey in Chapter 1 was not intended as a defi nitive statement of the reality of historical waste. Rather, its aim was to suggest that waste has been represented as a problem, in various different guises, for a very long time. Always, in these representations, some things are emphasised and some things are all but ignored — whether it be the ‘smoake’ of London or Paris’s excrement-spoiled cabs, the miasmatic ordure that inspired Chadwick’s urban reforms, the fi lthy streets of urban Britain and America or the massifi cation of consumption and the demise of the eco-friendly bricoleur — the representation of waste always exceeds a critique of the waste that is its ostensible target. Any assessment or critique of waste, I suggest, is always a form of social criticism that espouses an evaluation of the society in which the alleged waste is situated. Indeed, to invoke a ‘crisis of waste’ in any systematic sense is effectively to invoke a moral and sociological appraisal of how things are in society in general — and how they might otherwise be.
