The problem isn’t that the Victorians designed bad sewers. Instead, it’s the seduction of disposability, as well as the ad campaigns and corporate incentives that have cultivated and sustained its allure since the early 20th century. None of this was inevitable. At the dawn of disposability, many found the practice distasteful. The two world wars slowed the march of throwaway culture too, since wartime requires careful stewardship of materials. Mind you, recycling isn’t inherently righteous: the historian Anne Berg has shown, in dreadful detail, how the Nazis excelled at re-use, making a virtue of collecting not only inert materials but also human remains. Rationing continued throughout western Europe (and across the Iron Curtain) well into the 1950s, as societies struggled to rebuild amid chronic shortages. In the early 1970s, environmentalists advocated for continued frugality, recasting the moral frame of recycling in planetary terms.
Nevertheless, disposability carried the day. The geographer Max Liboiron argues that American industry – deliberately, and with great dedication – promoted disposability through a variety of manufacturing, packaging and distribution strategies, ranging from planned obsolescence to fast fashion. Contrary to popular discourse, humans are not inherently wasteful; rather, Liboiron notes, that claim ‘came into being at a particular time and place, by design’. By 1963, a packaging industry executive could triumphantly praise his colleagues in plastics:
You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages – and now, even plastics cans. The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.
The film The Graduate (1967) immortalised the triumph of polymers for a popular audience. In the movie’s best-known sequence, a middle-aged Mr McGuire pulls the young college graduate Ben aside at a cocktail party to offer some career advice:
McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.Ben: Yes, sir.McGuire: Are you listening?Ben: Yes, I am.McGuire: [Dramatically.] Plastics!Ben: [Pauses.] Exactly how do you mean?McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?Ben: Yes I will.McGuire: Shh, enough said. That’s a deal.
The exchange became a generational trope, with ‘plastics’ cast as a symbol of the consumerism that the hippies yearned to flee. But escape proved impossible. By the late-1980s, even dissent had become commodified; just consider the proliferation of Che Guevara paraphernalia in shops peddling ‘counterculture’ curios.