Long ago, people left their waste where it fell and moved on, just like the animals. Later on, they started disposing of it where the stink of rotting organic matter wouldn’t bother them.
By law, residents of the city of Athens had to dump garbage one mile from the city. It’s not hard to imagine a lot of trash went only the minimum distance.
Before you knew it, influencers were digging holes and building simple shelters around them. The idea went viral and a new trend swept the world. The smart ones took gravity and prevailing winds into account and their descendants became scientists. Those who didn’t became part of the We Never Thought of That tribe that spread across the world.
The History of Garbage
Before regulations
Commoners in cities tossed their garbage from windows into the street where dogs, birds, and rats would fight over it. Before sewers, human excreta was collected in bowls and jars and chamber pots and ladies’ stand-up bourdaloues.* Indoor toilets hadn’t been invented yet, so commoners emptied their night soils into the street, too. The old slosh and splat, some say.
In the 1400s the city of Paris made street cleaning mandatory by hiring workers to remove the garbage from the city
This sorta worked. The workers removed the garbage from the city and piled it at the edge of the city limits. “We Never Thought of That,” said city officials.
Cholera was the scourge of Europe in 1854
Cholera is an acute bacterial infection of the small intestine. Watery diarrhea (also known as rice water and fluid stools) and the severe dehydration that goes with losing all that water are caused by contaminated food and water. Left untreated, cholera kills more than half of those infected.
Within just three days, more than 100 people living on or near Broad Street in London’s Soho District were dead
Many of the ill were taken to the Middlesex Hospital. Florence Nightingale quit her Harley Street job and went there to tend the hundreds of afflicted. In her notes, Nightingale talked of treating a steady stream of fallen women who worked the neighborhoods.
Through interviews, a physician named John Snow identified the public water pump as the source of the outbreak
His map shows how he tracked the severe cases and found they clustered around the town water supply, a pump in the square where locals came for water. He convinced local officials to remove the pump’s handle. They did, and the cholera stopped, but not before killing 616 people in and around Broad Street. Physician John Snow had identified the source of cholera as the public water supply and not mysterious vapors.
1842 was called the “Age of Sanitation”
It was around this time that scientists linked garbage to human disease. Prior to that, physicians and scientists stuck to the belief put forth by a Greek physician named Hippocrates (yep, the Oath Man). That theory held how illnesses were caused by miasmas, misty particles of bad air. These tiny specks were believed to arise from swamps and piles of putrid decomposing organic matter.
Public debate arose after the publication of The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population in 1842 Report
It was written by a social reformer who demonstrated a link between poor sanitation and the spread of disease. Edwin Chadwick took up Snow’s germ theory. His report said that government should provide clean water, better drainage systems, and waste removal for all its citizens. His great innovation was the use of simple statistics to make his argument real.
As life went on, collectors began to pick up waste and carry it away in open wooden carts
The first were built to tip back when unhitched from the horses. In 1910, the tipping bed on these new “dump trucks” was motorized.
Garbage trucks evolved with improvements like covering the beds to keep trash from blowing out. In 1938, a hydraulic compactor was invented so trucks were able to carry far more trash. As a bonus byproduct, it helped control odors and reduce the spread of pests. Robotics have now replaced most of the garbage truck jobs and garbagemen don’t hang on the back and sides anymore.
On February first, 1968, while on their daily route, two city sanitation workers climbed into the back of a moving garbage truck to get out of the rain
The front page headline in next morning’s Memphis Commercial Appeal said Garbage Truck Kills 2 Crewmen: Packing Unit Is Apparently Activated by Accident, Crushes Employees.
Echol Cole and Robert Walker were the crewmen
The Commercial Appeal reported that the crew chief, Willie Crain, heard the unit begin to operate as he was driving the loaded truck south along Colonial, headed for the Shelby Drive dump and stopped as quickly as he could.
The previous evening’s Memphis Press-Scimitar said “It was a common practice for these workers – they were called ‘garbage packers’ – seeking refuge in the rear compactor of garbage trucks, riding with the filth in the compactor area in bad weather from stop to stop. And without adequate union support and (with) heavy biases favoring white workers, these men did everything possible to work in any kinds of weather: shine, rain, sleet or snow.”
While writing her book, At The River I Stand, Joan Turner Beifuss had this to say:
“The truck, a barrel-type unit called wiener-barrel by the men, in which garbage thrown in the sides was mashed toward the back by a hydraulic ram, had completed the day’s route and was heading toward the dump. The rain had been heavy. Cole and Walker had not worked as garbagemen for very long. Instead of using the steps and handholds on the outside of the truck, they were standing inside next to the ram. Somehow the electrical apparatus on the compressor shorted out, perhaps by a shovel shaking loose and falling across the wires. The mashing mechanism began to work. Neither man could stop it. The stop button was on the outside.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. came to town a few weeks later
He was there to support the 1,300 sanitation and sewer workers striking because of unsafe equipment and unfair treatment, especially for the black worker majority.
James Earl Ray, an illiterate fugitive, had a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster hunting rifle
He poked it out of his rooming house window and shot Nobel Peace Prize Laureate King to death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Did you know?
Thirty-one years later, a Memphis jury unanimously concluded that various United States governmental agencies had conspired to murder King and frame burglar, armed robber, and prison escapee Ray for the assassination.
Stats corner
- Depending on where you look, you’ll find the average American (the one with 1.8 cars and 1.2 kids) throws out 4 or 5 or 7 pounds of trash every day. Sticking with big round numbers, that’s around 2,000 pounds of waste per year. This adds up to nearly 300 million tons. That’s twice the average for the rest of the world, which means once again that we’re #1. U-S-A! U-S-A!
- The Lorraine Motel is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum.
- “Stick out your can, here comes the garbage man.” The Harlem Hamfats had a hit in 1936 with My Garbage Man, back in the days of sexual innuendo. Here’s a 30-second clip.
- Deonar, India, has 16 million tonnes <sic> of rubbish in a 300-acre heap 18 stories high. A 2016 fire burned for months. Investigators found there were more than 800 million tonnes spread across 3,000 such mountains of trash.
Mark your calendar
Now’s the time to make your plans for Waste & Recycling Workers Week. Starting on June 17th, the week-long celebration “recognizes the hard work and dedication shown by the men and women of the waste and recycling industry.”
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* If you’re interested in learning more about the bourdaloue, stop by janeaustensworld.com
Bonus: Here’s a peek at a case study done long ago
A company that builds homes had trouble with poor sales at their latest development, close by I-95 and near what the locals call Mount Trashmore. Investigators asked homeowners to describe their feelings about living close enough to a landfill to smell it.
- Group A was homeowners from the surrounding area who had bought houses within a defined area, within a defined price range, and had been living there for a defined time period.
- Group B was homeowners who had bought houses in the struggling community and were currently living there.
Guess who said what?
- Not worth it at any price.
- It depends on how much cheaper the home is.
- The smell’s not so bad.
- You get used to it after a while.
- What smell?
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