Waste and Want

"I can’t say enough good about this book. It’s one of the great social histories written in the last twenty years. It broadly focuses on something that I wish more Americans and more Chinese would think about, and that is the history of American wastefulness. One of the things Strasser does which is so valuable is she resurrects the history of American thriftiness. It’s very funny to bring this up with some people, because we all have this image of the wasteful American – but that wasn’t broadly true even 75 years ago. The US was a colony, and even though it had access to a lot of raw materials it was a very poor place. When you’re out on the frontier, you use everything you have. And that ethic of reuse and thriftiness – which I guess you could say is a Protestant ethic – persisted in American culture into the 1950s, until the development of the modern American consumer and modern American marketing. Strasser talks about how the American housewife had traditionally been the centre of thrift in a household, but marketers transformed her into a consumer who was using disposable products and generating waste on a scale that no household in human history has seen before. One of the most famous chapters in the book – one that makes some people cringe a bit – concerns the development of the disposable sanitary napkin, which believe it or not has a fascinating history that traces American development from a society that re-uses into one that disposes. The other thing that Strasser covers is the profit motive that’s long driven the recycling industry. On the scrap metal side of things, Strasser writes about the scrap metal drives during World War Two, the idea that we all needed to help the American military industrial complex collect metal to make weapons to help our boys overseas. Strasser points out that it was a very well intentioned idea, but wasn’t actually very effective at getting the metal delivered to the factories that needed it. A much more attractive, profitable and efficient way of doing this was to let the small scrap businesses do it, which had a profit motive. It’s an absolutely magnificent book, and anyone interested in the subject should read it. It’s very well written as well. Right. How we got hooked on goods, and started filling up our landfills. It was a slow process, but you really started to see the beginnings of it in the 1920s, with companies building for obsolesence. The question of whether American automobile companies built their cars to wear out is a controversial one. But by the 1950s something had changed. American wealth had reached a point where they could waste more, and that drove the development of this wasteful consumer culture."