Waste and Want

May 23, 2013 David Bates rated it 4 of 5 stars

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser is about a nexus which unites a broader story of economic transformation - Strasser’s subject is trash. Defining trash conceptually as something which is out of place and unusable to us Strasser uses it as the lynchpin of an examination of the journey of American society from largely self-sufficient colonial agriculture to modern consumer culture. The transition away from a self-sufficient attitude toward goods, in which much of the stock of the household was per...more Waste and Want by Susan Strasser is about a nexus which unites a broader story of economic transformation - Strasser’s subject is trash. Defining trash conceptually as something which is out of place and unusable to us Strasser uses it as the lynchpin of an examination of the journey of American society from largely self-sufficient colonial agriculture to modern consumer culture. The transition away from a self-sufficient attitude toward goods, in which much of the stock of the household was personally made, carefully repaired, and reused somehow if irreparable, matched the development of the economy.
Expanding wage labor opportunities meant both the loss of the skills to make and repair and the opportunity to buy. During the 19th century labor was cheap and materials expensive, so it was profitable for manufacturers to solicit households for their scrap materials. Often all these trends came together in the form of a peddler who would call on a house and trade with the wife, taking her rags and other household excess and selling goods in return, with some cash changing hands to cover any imbalance. Expanding charitable giving proved a durable way of legitimizing the waste which came from consuming. Old clothing could be given to the poor or to servants personally by the paternalistic well to do of the early Republic. Used clothes markets also helped to cope with the excess, absorbing clothing which was unwanted and selling it cheaply south to slave masters who were unwilling to divert the labor necessary for the making of clothes by hand. In the expanding cities of the late 19th century the most impoverished staffed their own reclamation efforts – junk piles filled with the rags, tin, bones and broken goods collected by hand and sold to factories.

By the early 20th century however the cost of material inputs was sinking as resources extraction became more mechanized and efficient. Manufacturing offered increasing varieties of sophisticated products to consumers and advertising began to emphasize the cheapness and convenience of disposable toiletries and other household goods. Disposable plates, napkins, cups and towels offered the kind of access to labor savings which would previously only hiring a servant could accomplish. Consumption became its own means of efficiency rather than being regarded as inherently inefficient. The vision of a domestic life divorced from some of the backbreaking chores of domestic labor connected to social aspiration – this was the kind of life which women of higher status were supposed to lead.

The recurrence toward reusing resources during the scarcity conditions that brought about the scrap drives of World War II only illustrated the diminished societal understanding of utilizing waste. Many drives foundered on the hostility of voters to junk dealers, resentful and suspicious of those who dealt in waste. The drives organized and carried out by so many grassroots organizations did not want to see their charity work turned to profit for speculators holding out materials for the highest price. Yet the volunteers themselves did not have the expertise or desire to break down the items they collected into a usable form. Baby strollers, wagons and other items were not acceptable in an assembled state as inputs for manufacturers, yet many scrap drivers resisted sending their collected materials anywhere else and their efforts became counterproductive due to their ignorance of the details of recycling and their disdain for those who did know. Recycling became more prevalent with the environmental movement of the 1960s. Indeed, the “how-to lore of the counterculture contained instructions for making things at home . . . and for rescuing industrially produced wastes: cable spools became coffee tables, and bottles could be sawed in half to make drinking glasses.” Nevertheless, as Strasser points out, future prospects for some kind of sustainable system are dim. “Powerful institutions play for high stakes in such debates. Garage sales flourish, but everybody has more stuff; bigger houses, mini-storage, and overflowing trash cans go together.”
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Apr 28, 2013 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
© 2000 Susan Strasser
368 pages

Consider your trash can. In all likelihood, you cannot imagine not using it. What else would you do all with the trash generated in the course of day to day living? And yet trash cans haven't always been a fixture in our homes; until the 19th century, people invariably fond uses for whatever extraneous materials they produced, so much so that waste was an anomaly But now, disposing of it is a mammoth task, handled by the go...more Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
© 2000 Susan Strasser
368 pages

Consider your trash can. In all likelihood, you cannot imagine not using it. What else would you do all with the trash generated in the course of day to day living? And yet trash cans haven't always been a fixture in our homes; until the 19th century, people invariably fond uses for whatever extraneous materials they produced, so much so that waste was an anomaly But now, disposing of it is a mammoth task, handled by the government and large corporations. In Waste and Want Susan Strasser reveals how waste rose to such heights, and despite its subject matter it manages to be charming rather than 'offal'.

Throughout most of human history, material goods have been too precious to waste. Every article represented hours of hard labor, where that work was invested in the sewing of clothing, the milking of cows, or the manufacture of pottery. Economy forced prudence, not to mention self-reliance: people made their own candles out of cooking fat because they needed candles, and like all skill made objects they were not easy to come by, being either rare or expensive. If an item broke, it was repaired; if beyond repair, it was put to future use. Clothes were extensively modified to extend their lives, and passed down through the generations (as were most household items). Cloth remains too small to be used in clothing could be sewn into quilts. Food scraps were fed to animals, who converted refuse into more food -- and if nothing else, the items were burned as fuel in the family hearth. Even if a given family didn’t possess all the skills and time required to recapture the value of every scrap, local economies thrived on communal recycling. But all that changed with industrialization.

Although the first factories, like paper mills, inserted themselves into the garbage cycle seamlessly -- using refuse like rags to produce paper -- soon the industrial process broke a circle of endless reuse to the one-directional “waste stream”, the stream that has turned into a torrent by the 21st century and is fast filling up landfills, incinerators, and the open ocean. This disruption began as industrialization became increasingly efficient through economies of scale: large operations that relied on waste for their manufacturing (like the paper mills) demanded too much to be satisfied by communities: instead, they had to be fed by other factories, and the trash of the common people fond itself without an outlet. Transformations in the home (like gas stoves) removed the use of garbage as fuel. Factories also made consumer goods cheaply: as they became abundant, they lost value. Why repair when you can replace? In the 20th century, companies seized on that idea and encouraged it, first through changes in fashion (cars replaced by new models every year, the only real distinction being aesthetics), and then through Planned Obsolescence, wherein items were manufactured with the intent of their breaking down within a relatively short time frame and requiring replacement. (They could be repaired, at first, but then someone hit on the bright idea of engineering every part in a given machine so that they would all begin breaking down at roughly the same time…)

The results? Trash -- lots of it. Dealing with the trash has required new technologies and systems of organization to cope with it. The pressing demand for waste management is mitigated (ever so much) by recycling, but our pitiful attempts at reusing resources are nothing like those our ancestors managed. Recycling is a meager flame overwhelmed by the mighty ocean of garbage that consumerism encourages and our economy relies on. The amount of waste necessitated by modern life is staggering: next time you visit a grocery store or supermarket, consider how almost every item in the store comes in a cardboard box, and inside it may be goods wrapped in plastic. We cannot possibly find uses for so many boxes, and what on earth would we do with even one ice-cream wrapper, let alone the dozens or hundreds we are liable to rip off in a year?

Waste and Want is a fantastic little bit of history and indirect social criticism. While garbage is on the cover, it’s really a history of us, of how we relate to the world through our use of its material resources and how that has changed. It’s a fun read, sure, but by its end one can’t help but be impressed by the fact that waste is an issue we must think about. Environmentalism aside: in this era of austerity, how can we possibly justify throwing way so many resources and even consuming more resources to manage the waste? It behooves us to act more responsibly, and as the 21st century progresses I can only hope that our worsening economic condition will force a rebirth the prudence of our forebears.
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Jan 03, 2008 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love this book. Thought provoking look at the anthropology of waste. My grandparents have had the same television for over 20 years; is my 4 year-old laptop really that ancient?

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Apr 21, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday life-throwing things out-and how it has transformed American society.

Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture-the trash it produces-and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning.

Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexisten...more

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Feb 11, 2012 Talia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Terrific book, very well-written and well-researched. I loved this book's historical take on trash--focusing not on actual disposal practices (what "Gone Tomorrow" tried but failed to do), but instead on how we define trash, and how that definition is shaped by the times and the resources/technologies available to us.

From the intro chapter: "Everything that comes into the end-of-millennium home--every toaster, pair of trousers, and ounce of soda pop, and every box and bag and bottles they arrive...more Terrific book, very well-written and well-researched. I loved this book's historical take on trash--focusing not on actual disposal practices (what "Gone Tomorrow" tried but failed to do), but instead on how we define trash, and how that definition is shaped by the times and the resources/technologies available to us.

From the intro chapter: "Everything that comes into the end-of-millennium home--every toaster, pair of trousers, and ounce of soda pop, and every box and bag and bottles they arrive in--eventually requires a decision: keep it or toss it. We use it up, we save it to be used later, we give it away, or at some point we define it as rubbish, to be taken back out, removed beyond the borders of the household. As everyday life and ordinary housework have changed over time, so has this process of defining what is rubbish, as well as the rubbish itself, the contents of the trash..."

Particularly interesting to me was an early section of the book "Any Rags, Any Bones" on peddlers in the late 1800s who used to both sell goods and buy items that poor families had saved or stored at their houses--hides of dead animals, rags, bones, and later metal and rubber. Because the peddlers traveled with carts, they could haul away stuff as well as they could bring new goods to the countryside. This two-way exchange (where a family comes to assign a value to their scraps instead of just reusing all of their own materials) was an early kind of "recycling", and the exposure to new goods that these cashless transactions with peddlers created is something that Dr. Strasser sees as a critical step in a developing consumer economy.

Loved also learning more about the historical context of the birth of the Salvation Army and its thrift stores, as well as the birth of the modern sanitary napkin industry (Kotex, developed as it was, to do something with a surplus of cellucotton that had been used for bandages during World War 1). Previously women used to pin homemade pads made from cloth in their rag bags, and wash and reuse them many times.

From p. 170: "The success of the sanitary napkin is better understood, however, as a demonstration of the principle that products depend on cultural context for success, let alone triumph. The successful introduction of the most obviously desirable new product rests on groundwork laid by other products and cultural practices. New needs emerge where none existed before, and time-honored habits change. It is true that women bought sanitary napkins, not modernity. But the product exemplified, and was made possible by, modern attitudes and practices. Its success relied on a general acceptance of relatively new ideas and practices relating to cleanliness and convenience, which supported the notion that throwing things away not only was all right but could make a positive contribution to the quality of life..."

Strasser liberally quotes from advertising literatature and lots of women's home manuals and guides across the ages. It's fabulous stuff...I wish I could take one of her classes at the University of Delaware (http://www.udel.edu/History/bio/stras...). (less)

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Apr 18, 2010 Ashley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: social-issues, non-fiction, 2010-books

Not a bad read - it was times a little too in-depth and at times not in-depth enough. I found the exhaustive discussions of rag collecting and reuse to be utterly boring, but the discussion of Kotex and Kleenex's proliferation in the consumer market were fascinating to me. Overall, I think Strasser did a pretty nice job covering the social aspect of trash and our attitudes toward it over the years and how it has changed.

Historically, people religiously used and re-used all items until they were...more Not a bad read - it was times a little too in-depth and at times not in-depth enough. I found the exhaustive discussions of rag collecting and reuse to be utterly boring, but the discussion of Kotex and Kleenex's proliferation in the consumer market were fascinating to me. Overall, I think Strasser did a pretty nice job covering the social aspect of trash and our attitudes toward it over the years and how it has changed.

Historically, people religiously used and re-used all items until they were literally unuseable - women took apart their dresses and re-sewed them into new designs, ashes were filtered to recoup coal that could be used, and soap was routinely made at home. All scraps of fabric were saved for use as bandages, napkins, quilts, etc. All food scraps were thrown outside the house for stray animals to dispose of. In 1842, there were an estimated 10,000 hogs wandering the streets of Manhattan.

With the rise of the consumer culture, there was much tension between the old-school thinkers and the younger generations who embraced disposability. As it was described by one woman of the times, "The same thrill that women have always had over new clothes, women are now obtaining over replacements, changes, reconstructions, new colors and forms in ALL types of merchandise." There was even the assertion that by "cling[ing:] to the the old one will discourage designers from designing new ones, discourage inventors from making fast machinery, and discourage business men from offering new things. There is nothing civilized or cultured in this."

This persuasive theme of merits of consumption comes up again and again over time. In the words of a top advertising agent of the times: "Wearing things out does not produce prosperity, but buying things does." America seems to be in a perpetual cycle of binging and purging - during lean times, recycling and thrift become mainstream but during times of prosperity, just the opposite is true. For example, between Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII, liquid assets of individuals nearly tripled. During WWII, the goverment created scrap drives for everything from tin for munitions to cooking fats for explosives and rubber that was previously obtained from Japan.

As mentioned earlier, I found the stories of Kotex and Kleenex especially fascinating, especially the fact that per capita consumption of Kleenex in 1940 was less than one box a year (I feel like I go through a box a week sometimes!). I found the overall cycle of binging of purging goes back a long time; it's by no means a recent phenomenon. Since garbage is most often associated with poor persons - at least since the rise of consumer culture - I found the concept of increased consumption by the wealthy can increase the standard of living for the poor seen in the markets for secondhand goods may have some merit, but isn't a cure-all. Overall this was a pretty good, thought-provoking read. Definitely has made me think twice everytime I head to the garbage can. (less)

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Feb 11, 2009 Deborah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

This book explains what people (mainly in the 1800's) used to do with trash. For example, it talks about how people would make old clothing over into new outfits, turn sheets, use cooking fats to make soap, fix broken items because they knew how those items worked and had spare parts around, and so on. She also details how these attitudes changed over time from then to now.

I found the book very interesting and also easy-to-read. I've added it to my personal library for future reference.

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May 12, 2013 Adam Minter rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the great social histories that I've ever read. Strasser's narrative not only explains how we wasted, but how our thinking about waste has evolved since the industrial revolution. That may sound dry, but it's written so well, and with such scintillating insight, that I think somebody who isn't even interested in the subject would be entranced with it after this book. Few books will change how you look at history and the present so completely as this one. A gem.

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Apr 07, 2010 Shellie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: npr-review, random-sampling, non-fiction

This is not an entertaining book, it really is the history of trash, but I was very entertained. It's about how American's have dealt with garbage over the years. It really is an interesting book filled with historical tidbits, great for trivia games.

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May 20, 2012 Cristy Davies added it · review of another edition

I found this fascinating. The household moves from a unit of production whose waste is sold and reused (bones, rags, etc.) to a pure unit of consumption creating ever more waste. Thought provoking and relevant.

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Jan 11, 2009 Ariane rated it 2 of 5 stars

professor strasser sure knows her way around original source materials. But a litany of quotes from Women's Housekeeping through the ages does not satisfying reading make.

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Sep 03, 2012 Elena rated it 3 of 5 stars

The book started off too slow, too much emphasis and repetition about what used to happen to textiles. It got more interesting after that.

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Jan 08, 2010 Melissa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: work-related, history-stuff, kidlit-history

Add to the list of "I never thought the history of ____ would be so interesting."
Read as background material for an upcoming exhibit at the museum, this is one of the most readable histories I've read in a while. Strasser starts with rag shops, peddlars, and takes us all the way to the recycling boom of the 1970s. She explores class, industry, personal habits, corporations, and marketing. One of the best passages was about the development of Kotex.
Great, great stuff with all sorts of fun tidbits...more

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Nov 21, 2009 Elizabeth Newell added it

A really interesting book on the how waste was created, viewed, and disposed of/reused in the history of the US.

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Feb 04, 2012 Mark Greene rated it 4 of 5 stars

eye-opening

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Nov 15, 2012 Jodi rated it 2 of 5 stars

It took me FOREVER to finish this book. It was sooooo dull in parts but I persevered just because there were sections I found fascinating. It was just way too long and read like someone's dissertation. The pages and pages on the collection and disposal of rags was enough to make me toss the book aside. But I did enjoy learning more about the development of things like feminine products and the consumer culture. Two and half stars.

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Oct 11, 2011 kathryn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, cities-planning-etc

more about consumption and history of objects and how we use them..was good. lots of facts-not really a storytelling style (which is fun in some nonfiction) but also not too dry. a lot of info on rag pickers and peddlers, I would be interested in reading a bit more on them. also, the full history of how sanitary napkins was a nice example of how a disposable product was also advertised as liberating.

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Feb 12, 2012 Kristen added it

need to keep reading this sometime, but it was due at the library... interesting book!

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Apr 04, 2013 Jada Roche rated it 3 of 5 stars

Not sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't really all that interesting. Writing was dry and felt like fact were just being rhymed off. I love this type of thing usually so I was disappointed by thi.

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Apr 30, 2011 Patty rated it 4 of 5 stars

Our relationship with the stuff we don't want or need any more is reviewed from early American history til modern times.

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May 06, 2011 Cara added it

Shelves: did-not-read

Just couldn't do this one right now. So much history! But I have to say I didn't make it past the first chapter!

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Mar 15, 2009 Jz rated it 1 of 5 stars

Premise was interesting, but the writing was a huge-turn off. Blech.

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May 22, 2013 Peter Wilhelm marked it as to-read

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May 20, 2013 Elizabeth marked it as to-read

Shelves: want-to-read-but-don-t-own, conservation

May 17, 2013 Andrea marked it as to-read

Shelves: non-fiction

May 16, 2013 Octave Buoom Hoola Hoopa Lagoon rated it 3 of 5 stars

May 15, 2013 Rach marked it as to-read

May 13, 2013 Julie Eend marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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