Once a week, I usually ask if tonight is the night we take the trash out to the curb. If it is, we gather up all the wastebaskets and empty them into a larger bag with the other trash and put it in the big trashcan and roll it to the curb (even though we don’t have “curbs”) for the trash truck to pick up. We have a lot of wastebaskets in our house — I think I counted 10 or 11. Sometimes some of these wastebaskets don’t have much, or anything, in them but we check them anyway. I use one or more of these trash containers multiple times every day. And, like a lot of things, these containers have just become fixtures that we take for granted. I’m not sure who invented the wastebasket or trash can, but in the big scheme of things, I think it’s important to all of us — for a lot years, or centuries, people had to manage without them. For years and years, people just threw the trash in the streets, or buried it in holes and, unfortunately, even dumped their trash into bodies of water.
During my extensive research, I found that ancient people’s garbage was very different from our trash today. Early in human history, waste was mostly ash from fires, wood, bones, and vegetable waste. The edible portions of any waste was used to feed animals, and what remained was put into the ground to decompose. When archeologists excavated ancient rubbish dumps, they found minuscule amounts of ash, broken tools, and pottery — meaning early civilizations reused and repaired what they could, rather than dumping it.
About the earliest activity that resembles our trash service today was in 200 AD. To cope with the growing population’s garbage, the Romans came up with a “sanitation force,” consisting of teams of two men walking along streets to pick up and toss the garbage into a wagon that transported it to a remote location.
Even though laws were passed to prohibit it, trash continued to be dumped in streets and in front of houses. Around 1757, Ben Franklin started the first street cleaning service and encouraged the public to dig pits to dispose of their waste.
In 1864, health officials in Memphis, Tennessee became aware of a possible connection between the spread of Yellow Fever in the Memphis area and the garbage being dumped throughout the city. To minimize the threat of disease, residents were instructed to take their garbage to specific locations on the edge of town.
By 1908, dumping waste in the most convenient location was still permitted — people would dump in the ocean, wetlands, or any available wasteland. Most small towns used piggeries, which were small pig farms that consumed food waste. It took 75 pigs to eat about one ton of food waste each day. Whatever wasn’t food waste was usually burned or buried.
After a lot of trial and error, incinerators became more popular and about 300 were in operation in the U. S. and Canada by 1914. Horse-drawn carts were still used to collect trash and take it to the incinerators, but were soon replaced with motor vehicles.
By the 1920s, “reclaiming,” or filling in wetlands near cities with garbage, ash, and dirt became a popular method of disposal.
The first American mass-produced hydraulic rear-load refuse packer compacting truck was introduced in the late 1930s. It was called the Load Packer and was patented in 1938 by Garfield Wood, but because resources were needed for WW II, it wasn’t widely used until the late 1940s.
By 1945, about 100 cities in the U.S. were using sanitary landfills — before then, many used the oceans as dump sites. And burning trash in the yard was still common.
By 1968, about one-third of the U.S. started sorting their garbage, and recycling became a mainstream concept.
In 1970, The Clean Air Act was passed in the United States, making many of the early incinerators without air-pollution controls shut down. The no-burn ban began and people slowly stopped burning trash in their yards. And by 1975, all 50 U.S. States had solid waste regulations, even though they differed from state to state.
So today I grumble about which things can be recycled and which get thrown away and what has to get thrown away separate from the other stuff… but — without all those wastebaskets in our house, that job would be even harder and more confusing. Andy Rooney once said that wastebaskets should be inconspicuous and that any list of the ten greatest inventions should save a place for wastebaskets. Andy Rooney was a wise man….
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