Getting stuffed

The roots of our waste problem go the heart of consumer culture.

‘After the party, the clean-up.’ That was the caption on the front pages of the morning after the Jubilee, underneath photos of council workers clearing everything from sandwich packets in St James’s Park to (we are told) 50,000 champagne bottles from the fringes of the Mall.

The photos would have been even more striking if paired with the same shot of the morning after the Coronation celebrations (when similar numbers thronged the streets). Litter then would would have been noticeably thin on the ground — not (just) because of some greater sense of civic pride on the part of the citizenry, but also the sheer lack of packaged goods available to throw away (apart, perhaps, from the champers). The last 50 years have seen not only a massive increase in the amount of waste generated, but a dramatic shift in its content.

In the early 1950s, 95% of UK households had open fires, on which rubbish such as paper and food scraps was burned. As a result, that era’s dustbins largely consisted of ash and cinders - materials which hardly figure in today’s centrally-heated lifestyle. And the post-war generation was naturally thrifty, because they were accustomed to doing without. Granny’s ingrained habit of saving wrapping paper, pieces of string and jam jars became a joke in many households as goods became freely available again. Today we are surrounded by skilfully-marketed abundance — and the lifespan of our goods has shrunk, as daily life has speeded up. Not only do we buy more, but we buy it more often.

We’re less frugal, too — who even remembers Monday’s shepherd’s pie made from the leftovers from Sunday’s roast, or uses bones to make stock? Research in the USA estimated that one-fifth of every loaf purchased is thrown away because it has gone stale or mouldy, while we buy growing numbers of ready-prepared fresh sandwiches, along with canned or bottled drinks, whose bulk when empty could almost have been designed to fill a bin.

Professor Bill Rathje of Arizona University’s wonderfully-named Garbage Project found that we waste more fresh food than processed food, and he named the cause: Fast Lane Syndrome. Busy shoppers buy fresh foods such as salads and vegetables, with every intention of making home-cooked, healthy meals. They also buy some ready prepared meals, as a back-up. Inevitably, they run out of time and, at the end of the week, the prepared foods have been eaten (and their packaging discarded) while the fresh foods, spurned in favour of the easy stuff, have wilted away.

The newspapers we buy (and almost immediately throw away) have increased by more than 300% in weight over the last 20 years, thanks to an increasing number and range of supplements (like, er, this one...).

We have enough disposable income to buy cheap fashionable clothes and discard them with the arrival of the next style, and to replace our non-upgradeable, irreparable home electronics with ever-cheaper, more powerful alternatives. (The prospect looms of a waste mountain of video machines as we switch to cool new DVDs...).

In the not so immortal words of The Buzzcocks: "Life is long and full of stuff." And the more we have, the more we chuck...

19 July 2002

Maggie Thurgood