Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash

Susan Strasser: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

Much is written about trash: the technicalities of its removal,1 its history,2 the mob and corporate control of the carting industry,3 even the archaeology of artifacts as a window to understanding past societies.4 In her new book, historian Susan Strasser takes a different tack and asks a different question. She uses the research methods of historians to interpret the social implications of sorting trash in different periods. By offering a social history rather than a technocratic vision, Waste and Want is a refreshing history of trash.

Susan Strasser is a consummate researcher, although one reviewer criticized her for focusing on the production of the disposable feminine napkin Kotex, originally the commodity form of left-over cellucotton, "the material...developed for bandages during World War I."5 (p. 163) Strasser describes the sorting, sale, barter, and reuse of a wide variety of commodities over time, material by material over the last 150 years.

Strasser tells us of Morillo Noyes, an 1880s Burlington, Vermont manufacturer of tin ware, who bought, sold, and bartered for items like rags and rubber obtained from households.

Noyes's extensive memoranda and barter lists provide a peek into the daily workings of the early industrial "recycling" system. Although the word did not yet exist, the process - the return of household wastes to manufacturers for use as raw materials - was inherent to production in some industries, central to the distribution of consumer goods, and an important habit of daily life. Indeed, the disposition of...