Litterbug World

By Ariane Conrad Hyde, LiP Magazine. Posted April 1, 2005.

Heather Rogers' film, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, explores the "sinister success" of capitalism by looking at the life cycle of our waste. In the span of 20 minutes, the film examines the realities of planned-in obsolescence and waste-by-design in our market economy, asking deep questions from a fresh perspective. In the film, Rogers contends that recycling is far from an actual solution, and is at best a Band-Aid approach—a much harder look, she argues, needs to be taken at our addiction to waste. She recently spoke to us about her film, her forthcoming book of the same name (to be published in Fall 2005 by New Press), and the limits of "green capitalism."

Ariane Conrad Hyde: What inspired or motivated you to make Gone Tomorrow?

Heather Rogers: Two things: I wanted to know what happened to my garbage, because it seemed like it disappeared, but I knew that it didn't. I wanted to find out where it went. I also realized that "waste disposal" is a process through which the market's relations to labor and nature is made apparent. [The film] is a way of understanding that garbage is something everyone makes—everyone can relate to it. It's a way of connecting daily life and our daily interaction with waste to larger environmental crises.

In your film, you document several of the major shifts that occurred in the attitude towards garbage in the U.S. Can you talk a little bit more about the most significant shifts?

It's not so commonly known anymore, but in the 19th century there was a huge amount of re-use going on. A lot of it came from the fact that people couldn't afford to buy manufactured goods because they were so expensive. One of the big shifts came with the Industrial Revolution, when commodities suddenly became much cheaper. The spatial component of the Industrial Revolution transformed the way people lived, so that suddenly people were leaving the countryside and concentrating in cities, to go work in the factories. They didn't have places to save and store their waste like they had in the countryside, so it wasn't as easy to save fat, for example, or scraps of materials to re-use and repair. That, in conjunction with commodities becoming cheaper, meant that people bought more of the things they needed instead of making them themselves. At the same time, there was a transformation in land use practices, because garden markets also grew up around cities, and geography became more important to farming. Formerly, the colonial land use and farming practices entailed using a plot of land until it was exhausted, then moving on to another plot of land. But with the growth of cities, and needing to be close to cities in order to market fruits and vegetables to the people in the cities, farmers had to suddenly start tending their soil in a different way--they started fertilizing. Wastes were sent out of the cities to the country, and produce and hay was sent from the countryside to the city. There was what Richard A. Wines, who wrote a great history of fertilizer (Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation), refers to as an "extended recycling system" between the city and the countryside.

Then, after the Industrial Revolution, that connection between where resources come from, and where they go, and the symbiotic relationship between production, consumption and wasting began to break down. Commodities became much more affordable, and people started consuming a lot more. The 1841 version of Catherine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy explains how to make candles and soap; her 1869 edition of the same book tells you to just buy those things instead of making them yourself. So there was this big shift in the use and re-use of discarded materials and resources. But even though there were these transformations going on, industry still used a lot of waste like metal and rags from households. A lot of the collection work was done by men with carts who would go around to houses in the city and the countryside collecting waste from people—waste that had been sorted, like rags and different kinds of paper, board, metal and rubber. They would take those things to the city and sell them to factories, so there was still this connection between what people discarded and what was produced. There was a direct line where household discards could be re-used in the manufacturing process.

The next big shift came with World War II. During that time, there was a massive streamlining and perfecting of the production process. Along with that came mass production and the concomitant mass consumption. The byproduct of all that was a lot of waste. One of the great inventions of the postwar period was the disposable commodity. A lot of disposable commodities like paper towels and cups and disposable cans and bottles had been invented in the early years of the 20th century, but weren't marketed for various reasons. One reason for that was that producers didn't understand how profitable it was to make things that got immediately thrown away, and production wasn't as perfected as before World War II. After the war, there was real forced production, and cooperation between labor and capital—enforced by the government. And businesses had to cooperate with each other in unprecedented ways; they had to share information and they had to give in to this overarching discipline of churning out the goods for the U.S. military. When they emerged from that, they were so highly productive that, suddenly, making commodities that were meant to be thrown away made sense. It was economical, it was feasible, and there weren't controls on natural resources like there were during the war. So there was this boom in disposables—packaging was part of it—and the market share of disposable packaging has only grown since then. Also, obsolescence was a key development after World War II. It meant that durable goods began to be made to die faster than they previously had.

VHS tapes of Gone Tomorrow can be ordered through AK Press. Ariane Conrad Hyde is a Berkeley-based poet, writer and fundraiser for social change.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Environment! Sign up now »