Get to work! New non-fiction books: The first plastic debris described in the ocean was millions of used condoms

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Cardboard packaging, bags of Styrofoam beads and decorated Christmas trees: they are now again piling up on roadsides, waste from Christmas. Every year during this time we create about a fifth more waste. And in many trash baskets there are homemade items from godfather (paper), too small socks from grandma (clothes) and an empty bottle of wine from uncle (glass) – “Oh, you are merry, oh you are a blessed / gift-giving Christmas!”

“According to a World Bank study, approximately 2.01 billion tons of municipal waste were generated in 2016,” writes German historian Roman Kester (48) in his recently published book on the history of man-made waste. And unless humanity takes drastic action, about 3.4 billion tons of household waste will be generated worldwide by 2050, says Kester, who wrote his doctorate on household waste. Waste and Society in West Germany 1945–1990.”

“Garbage is not something rich societies can afford,” writes a scholar of economic, technological and environmental history. “Waste is actually a side effect of why societies are rich.” In poor countries, people rummage through trash to find reusable materials; in rich countries people collect paper or glass for other reasons. Kester: “Since the 1970s, recycling has become a major topic of environmental policy debate.”

In fact, the view of waste has changed over the course of history: “In the pre-modern era, waste was primarily a practical problem,” writes Kester. “They were lying around, smelling bad and blocking traffic.” In the industrial era, beginning in 1850, they were a hygienic problem, contributing to the development of diseases such as typhoid fever and cholera. After World War II, the risk of infection became increasingly under control, but toxins in waste increasingly polluted the environment.

The sea increasingly served as a dumping ground: from the 1960s, the British dumped the radioactive remains of their nuclear power plants into the Irish Sea, and the Soviet Union chose the Arctic Sea as its “dumping ground”. And the first report of plastic in the ocean came from the British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), who discovered white objects on the beach in Santa Monica (USA) that looked like dead caterpillars – millions of used condoms from a drainpipe in Los Angeles.

Although urban sewer systems are an achievement of industrialization, waste was once often fed to pigs, the “garbage collectors of pre-modern cities.” If earlier rag pickers worked to produce paper, then in 1870 the waste began to be burned. “It should be made clear that the past does not provide a recipe for sustainable waste reduction today,” writes historian Koester—which he believes would mean much could be gained from current discussions.

Source: Blick