ABSTRACT
Waste or rubbish is what people throw away because they no longer need it or want it. Almost everything we do creates waste and as a society we are currently producing more waste than ever before. (https:// www.wasteonline.org.uk/topic.aspx?id=20)
Those who condemn our own era for its conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste should at least bear in mind that throwing away perfectly good objects seems to be one of those inexplicable things, like ignoring history, that human beings have always done. (Rathje & Murphy, Rubbish!)
In spite of waste’s central place in modern production and consumption, it is commonly asserted, in ‘developed’ countries at least, that there is a ‘crisis’ of waste and a failure of waste management policy. Moreover, the crisis is said to arise from the fact that contemporary consumer societies have developed a ‘disposable’ mentality in a ‘throwaway’ culture, and now discard items that, once, would have been reused, recycled or held in ‘stewardship’ by our ancestral make-do and menders. These claims are so commonplace, so much a part of the commonsense of public and private life, that few have examined whether or not they are true and, with some exceptions (see Rathje & Murphy, 1991, for a rare discussion), little evidence has been provided to test their veracity. In fact, these claims, for the United Kingdom at least, have less evidential foundation than might be expected. They have the effect of misrepresenting what is happening in relation to waste in the contemporary world and they also gloss the past. In the simplest terms, it is not proven that contemporary consumers waste more than their historically miserly counterparts. Nor is it true that, in the past, our grandparents and their grandparents ‘stewarded’ objects and reused, recovered or recycled more than happens today. Instead, the available evidence appears to show that contemporary consumers waste little more than their historical counterparts. This fact goes against the grain of both public and expert opinion but there are two sets of questions that can
help to clarify why the consumerism = waste crisis argument stands in need of a critical assessment.
