Introduction: The Waste of Conflict. The Conflicts of Waste

Human history is a history of waste. As long as people have used clothes, tools, shelter, toys, and weapons, have eaten, defecated, lived, and died, they have produced and left behind organic and non-organic material. ¹ This has been true throughout human history, but during the last century, human-generated waste has evolved into an altogether new phenomenon. The scale has been staggering. According to Krausmann et al., humanity has extracted a total of 3400 Gt of materials from the terrestrial sphere since 1900, of which approximately 72% have been returned to the environment as waste and emissions. ² Nothing similar has happened before, and this development has led some scholars to define communities of the 20th and 21st centuries as the ‘Society of Waste,’ which has put people, individually and collectively, in conflict with the global environment, with other species, and with one another. ³

In recent years, waste has attracted the attention of activists and social scientists. A burgeoning body of literature testifies to this research, including the existence of several specialist journals such as Worldwide Waste or Discard Studies and reference publications such as handbooks or encyclopedias. ⁴ The history of waste forms part of this evolving discipline, and for some years it has been growing into more than a niche field for specialist historians. Some pivotal publications have addressed episodes that involved waste as disaster, notably with regard to toxic waste and its long-term legacy. ⁵ However, increasingly, studies regard waste not as the material of exceptional risk events, but as a component of everyday social and economic practices of modern societies. For example, publications have addressed aspects such as urban waste ⁶ and recycling. ⁷ Most literature focuses on high-income countries in Europe or North America, which have produced most waste. ⁸ Since the 1990s, a growing body of literature has focused on areas in and around Europe that had been called ‘peripheral’ during the Cold War. ⁹ And increasingly, studies addressing other areas, notably India or China, are also contributing to historiography. ¹⁰

Three major themes have emerged that describe waste as a formative element of the world since the early twentieth century:

The most obvious point regarding waste in this and the last centuries is that there has been so much more of it than ever before. Globally, a combination of rising incomes, urbanization, the development of new, cheap materials, and changing lifestyles has driven the growth of products that were designed to be used for only limited periods of time, possibly only once, producing a totally unprecedented amount and variety of waste, whose subsequent treatment required massive infrastructures and additional resources and organization. ¹¹ The most important driver of this development has been the unprecedented increase in efficiency of economic processes transforming natural resources into consumer goods. The same combination of mechanization, use of fossil fuels, division of labor, and sophisticated logistics that has formed the basis of rising living standards also underlies the production of goods that are sufficiently cheap and abundant to be readily disposable. Unfortunately, the capitalist processes that have been so successful at creating large quantities of material and making it available to many ordinary people have rather failed at addressing the waste that has been created at the same time. ¹²

The expansion of the world of goods in the Industrial Revolution produced a wide variety of post-consumer wastes, but nothing epitomizes this unbalanced efficiency better than the design and manufacture of single-use disposable products and packaging in the twentieth century, producing vast amounts of materials whose purpose was to become waste after only the briefest of uses. ¹³ Another important strand was the insatiable need for fuels and resources in this productive economy, which required mining along with its large amount of problematic waste. ¹⁴ Thirdly, cities have provided a focal context for waste. By definition, cities describe places of high population density, based on non-agricultural activity producing non-organic waste. They provide the ideal combination of problematic waste situations: large amounts of garbage coupled with an absence of sustainable disposal sites. Today, humans annually produce over two billion tons of municipal solid waste alone. ¹⁵

Not surprisingly, therefore, cities have also been the places that first negotiated collective waste management strategies. Records about waste management strategies appeared in Mesopotamian cities in the thirteenth century. ¹⁶ Initially, attention focused on human waste, whose accumulation in urban areas required some form of management, either by organizing sales as fertilizer, conceptualizing human waste as a valuable agricultural resource (the dominant Asian model), or by organizing street cleaning, seeing human waste as a worthless and dangerous (the dominant European model). ¹⁷ The ambiguity between the two categories showed in urban transition of waste removal. Hamburg was a case in point. Until 1869, private contractors paid for the right to remove waste from its streets and yards, which could be sold as fertilizer to nearby farmers. However, the combined effects of rising amounts of alternative fertilizer (guano) and a declining ratio of marketable excrement due to the increasing installation of flushing water closets, made urban waste lose lucrative value. In the 1870s, the municipality had to pay for waste removal, and in 1886 authorities established a public waste removal service. ¹⁸ Other cities faced similar problems. New York had already had its first street-cleaning law in 1657, limiting the legal disposal of waste to a few designated places, and it received a Department of Street Cleaning in 1881 which developed an effective street-cleaning policy a few years later. ¹⁹ Public engagement for waste removal was largely driven by concern about community health. In nineteenth-century Europe, urban epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, typhoid, and other diseases grew more severe, destabilizing urban societies and spurring the development of waste management practices to remove wastewater and solid waste in order to reduce disease transmission. By the 1920s, efforts in many cities produced substantial reductions in urban mortality and also scrutiny of the growing trades to salvage metals, textiles, and other discarded materials as potential threats to public health. ²⁰ Indeed, cities as industrial centers have also been conducive to the growing production of hazardous waste, that is, waste that is harmful to human and non-human health. ²¹

Changing infrastructures shaped waste streams. In the United States, the rise of automobility in the 1920s led to new businesses designed to quickly and conveniently feed motorists. Roadside fast-food restaurants such as White Castle, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonalds, in contrast to older restaurants, delivered their foods in single-use disposable bags, cups, and cartons, with disposable napkins and cutlery that did not require the consumer to return any material at all to the restaurant once the purchase was completed. This model grew as the highway system in the United States expanded, becoming ubiquitous in American society by the end of the 1950s. ²²

One set of materials in which this waste challenge played out was plastics. The spectacular growth of plastic products, including many quickly discarded single-use items, resulted in massive amounts of non-degradable waste, whose long-term environmental effect is still unclear. ²³ Innovations in plastics production meant that a wide variety of durable materials synthesized from petroleum were affordable and available to manufacturers. Fast-food restaurants adopted durable plastics ranging from polystyrene foam to more rigid polyethylene terephthalate and polypropylene over paperstock for their cups, bottles, drinking straws, bags, and boxes. Corporations prioritized mass disposability, directing design departments to value single-use disposable designs in a wide range of products and packaging that transformed waste streams. ²⁴

From the United States, this lifestyle spread over large parts of the world. Indeed, in many ways, a high-waste way of living became a much-coveted marker of wealth, progress, and modernity, which often went hand in hand with power.

Having waste presupposes being sufficiently affluent to be able to afford enough things that are superfluous and can be thrown away. So, unsurprisingly it is the wealthy who produce most waste. The asymmetry is perhaps most glaring (and best documented) with regard to climate-changing emissions. A recent Oxfam report revealed that the richest 1% of humanity, including billionaires and millionaires, accounted for 16% of all CO₂ emissions in 2019, as much as the bottom 66%. ²⁵ Other inequalities are less dramatic but still substantial. In 2016, waste generation averaged 0.46 kg per day in sub-Saharan Africa to 2.21 kg per day per capita in North America. ²⁶ In 2019, the waste of electrical and electronic equipment, the fastest growing form of waste in the twenty-first century, amounted to 16.2 kg per capita generated in Europe compared to 2.5 kg in Africa. In practical terms, this difference was a function of how many electrical and electronic devices people owned: on average, Europeans owned 1.6 laptops, 0.4 washing machines, 16 lights, and 0.7 refrigerators per capita in high-income households, as compared to 0.1 laptops, 0.001 washing machines, 4 lights, and 0.02 refrigerators per capita in low-income households. ²⁷

Generally speaking, waste flows from rich to poor, as landfills, dumpsites, and other disposal places tend to be primarily in the poor countries of the world, and poor areas of each country. ²⁸ Such differences also affect not only waste production but also disposal. In places where public waste has broken down, such as in the South African city of Makhanda, the affluent parts of the community have been able to organize ways to dispose of their waste, which were not open to the poor. ²⁹

Thus, globally and nationally, the wealthier parts of society not only produce more waste, but they also have more say regarding how it is managed. In other words, waste serves as a marker of power relations, both between and within countries. As the unwanted side of growing wealth and, in contrast to its positive aspects, waste tends to be passed onto those on the lower end of wealth, influence, and knowledge. However, on the global scale, this simple division is increasingly blurred, as efforts within high-income countries to reduce their use of resources are more than compensated by the increasing use of resources from upper-middle-income countries. ³⁰ Incorporating waste management into the history of the last century, it is highly informative about the transformations of the world during that period: what happens to waste, is always a function – and therefore informative of – inter-related economic, social, environmental, political, and technical circumstances.

This connection was clear enough in the rapidly growing consumer industry. Manufacturers responded to public concern over the waste they had produced by shifting responsibility to the public. In the United States, a coalition of beverage producers founded the trade group Keep America Beautiful, which demonized individual consumers who discarded cans into the environment as litterbugs. ³¹ Keep America Beautiful also promoted the rise of municipal recycling programs as supposed solutions for the waste problems produced by single-use disposable packaging. ³²

The volume and variety of discards produced in this system led to increased international flows of waste by the 1980s. Philadelphia's municipal waste management strategy involved incinerating garbage and sending the fly ash across the Delaware River to be landfilled in the adjoining state of New Jersey. After that state refused to accept more ash in 1984, Philadelphia attempted to ship the ash on the Khian Sea to several Caribbean nations, then expanded the quest for a sink to Africa, Europe, and Asia before the ship's crew admitted to dumping ash into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In 1987, waste from New York traveled up and down the Atlantic Coast on the Mobro 4000 barge, leading to media coverage of a ‘garbage crisis’ as no community in the United States or the Caribbean wished to host the exported waste. ³³

These incidents contributed to a recognition of the growing scale of international shipping of ash, electronic wastes, and other hazardous wastes by the end of the 1980s. Efforts to establish a treaty to control the trade resulted in the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal and subsequent efforts to regulate the trade of electronic wastes, plastics, and other discards. ³⁴ The European Union attempted to address single-use disposable packaging beginning with the passage of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive of 1994, which worked to shift the economic burdens of managing wastes from the public sector back to the manufacturers. However, single-use disposable packaging continues to provoke conflicts, raising questions about environmental justice, producer responsibility, and the viability of waste management systems. ³⁵ In 2017, China restricted imports of waste plastics and paperstock with its Operational National Sword policy. The restriction immediately threw European and North American recycling systems into crisis as they had grown dependent upon the export market to manage non-metallic collections. Conflict remains a defining characteristic of waste management practices in the modern world. ³⁶

These tensions between the individual and the collective, between the rich and the poor, mean that the history of waste is also the history of conflicts between different groups of people: waste can make visible conflicts that exist for different reasons, and it can also itself create new conflicts.

An under-researched area of waste history is its connection with warfare. Advances in material science accelerated by military needs during the Second World War shaped the wastes produced by these businesses. Aluminum production grew during the war as the light, durable metal could increase the range of bombers and fighter planes. Within the United States, the network of hydroelectric dams and aluminum smelters on the West Coast that produced military aircraft allowed postwar civilian use of the metal to include single-use disposable cans and foil. Beverage distributors such as Coors and Coca-Cola substituted aluminum for steel in their cans because the lighter metal reduced transportation costs. ³⁷

Some wartime products became staple elements of civilian life after the war. Others burdened the environment as unwanted waste that all stakeholders liked to remove from sight and mind as far as possible. Perhaps the most egregious leftover material of conflict is that resulting from chemical warfare. Chemical warfare agents have been employed in many conflicts including the First World War, the Iran–Iraq War, and the Persian Gulf War but also as a means of governmental repression, such as the use of Cyclone B by the German government against Jewish citizens during Holocaust or of Sarin by the Iraq government against Kurdish communities. ³⁸ In most cases, little is known about the whereabouts of these toxic materials once the conflict is over. The Second World War forms an exception with a solid list of analyses of the military materials discarded after 1945.

Between 830,000 and five million tons of chemical munition had been left over at the end of the Second World War. Some of it was burned but dumping it into the seas was considered a safer method. Therefore, Soviet forces dumped German mustard gas, arsenic, and other chemicals, formerly used in aircraft bombs and artillery shells, into the Baltic Sea while the Americans and British did so in the Skagerrak strait between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In subsequent years, several countries continued to dump waste from chemical weapons programs into the sea. ³⁹ The US Army had an ocean disposal program between 1964 and 1970, which remained largely unnoticed by the public until its last mission in 1969, when it aroused substantial political and media attention and sharp protests. ⁴⁰

In various ways, the papers in this special issue bear out these themes.

The papers by Dario Fazzi and Rohini Patel in this collection analyze two cases related to the US management of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons used during the Vietnam War. Fazzi's paper poses important questions about Agent Orange incineration endorsed by the US government as a possible solution to a hazardous waste crisis, subsequently leading to criticism about this practice, especially the Ban the Burn campaign that led to the abandonment of Agent Orange incineration. Fazzi reveals the important role of scientists and experts who accused one another of producing inadequate studies that led to a lack of objectivity. Ironically, ocean incineration was intended to minimize risks related to hazardous wastes, yet it generated widespread socio-political concern due to scientific studies revealing potential threats to the marine environment and stressing citizens’ rights to clear air and water, environmental safety, and public health.

Patel's paper investigates the intricate story of Agent Orange and Johnston Atoll further by looking into the history of the disposal site for chemical munitions waste and its links to social and geographic formations via the lenses of race and class. Patel looks at this global story from a North American point of view, pointing out that indigenous, black, or otherwise marginalized groups have been more likely to be near toxic industrial sites. This correlation reflects how land has been organized and used, and how it has been degraded and disposed of, all of which have historical roots in racial capitalist and settler–colonial relations. The Johnston Atoll, a military base during both world wars, is a prime example of toxic geographies and imperial ruinations. Both papers reveal how waste sits squarely at the center of dynamics that connect conflict-related policies with longer-term developments of power asymmetries and the way they play out in a (post-)colonial world.

The two papers by Iryna Skubii and Viktor Pál in this special issue re-situate the discussion about power and waste both from the institutional-political-scientific and race-class-gender realms of conflict by looking at waste relations on the other side of the Cold War. Iryna Skubii's paper connects these issues to the question of scarcity and reuse of material during Soviet famines in Ukraine during Stalinism, a time of conflict not only between two political blocks but also between Soviet authorities and their own citizens. Historically, the degree to which people have sought to retrieve value from waste material has always depended on circumstances. The materials themselves play an important role, with those of pre-industrial times generally more recyclable than more complex materials of more recent times. ⁴¹ For much of human history, scarcity made recycling a normal way of life, not considered a specific attitude. ⁴² In more recent times, growing affluence has substantially reduced this behavior, though scarcity induced by war has led to intense revivals of reuse and recycling. ⁴³

Skubii presents a case in point, as she looks into human and animal consumption and the agricultural cycle during famines when discarded resources were turned into a widespread food base for survival. While power asymmetries in Fazzi's and Patel's papers provoked reactions ranging from protests to resigned acceptance, Skubii describes how they forced people to revisit the definition of waste itself, defining material formerly considered inedible as ‘food’ and incorporating mass consumption of surrogates, plants, domestic and wild animals, and carrion, into their diet. In the process, Skubii focuses on the role of waste and discarded food resources, zooming in on the impact of famine conditions on human food practices in a political-economic regime starkly different from the rest of the world at the time.

Meanwhile, Victor Pál takes the idea of waste in systems other than Western, democratic systems further and explains how reform communism worked not only to satisfy workers' needs, thus eliminating fears of hunger and scarcity, but also to widen the waste stream and to create communism's own post-consumer waste crisis. Pál demonstrates that ideology had a lot to do with this process, and the impulse to invest in the beverage industry came not only from socialist consumerism, but was also fueled by the communist fight against alcoholism and the creation of the goal to create a new socialist human within a larger competition of world views.

Finally, Iris Borowy, explores the role of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in curtailing waste production. While numerous IGOs tackled the waste issue, including the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the European Nuclear Energy Agency, a rather surprisingly important role was played by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military association on the Western side of the Cold War. Under prodding by US President Nixon and approaching security in more comprehensive than narrowly military terms, NATO established the Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) in 1969 which conducted a ‘pilot project’ on particularly problematic waste. In the course of several years of collecting, discussing, and processing information, the CCMS turned ‘hazardous waste,’ a concept that, so far, had existed as one of many into a widely accepted term. Borowy demonstrates the discrepancies between problem awareness and agency regarding the environmental costs of waste management: while policymakers readily understood that waste production needed to be curtailed and that such a reduction required a fundamental restructuring of the international economic system, lack of authoritative knowledge, unclear responsibilities and, above all, a deep commitment to economic growth as the central development goal drowned out all voices questioning the broad framework of waste production. While the spread of toxic waste was frightening, the prospect of economies that stopped producing ever-increasing material prosperity was even more terrifying.

Collectively, these papers shed an unusual light on the twentieth century world through a collection of cases, in which conflicts have tended to exacerbate challenges of waste, either by increasing the quantity of weapons and their (often toxic) remains, or by creating contexts in which the confrontation with adversaries often relegated environmental, social and health-related consideration to the backstage. This effect held true both within direct military confrontations and as part of ideological and/or economic competition. Collectively, these papers demonstrate the wide spectrum of ways in which waste has been constructed within contexts of conflict, ranging from inevitable side effects of economic and/or military activities to eyesores and threats or, ironically, to a last resort to survive. But it is always an entity that gets incorporated into an overall situation shaped – or dominated – by an overriding conflict. Waste becomes one element through which conflicts are negotiated, while also serving as a symptom of the conflict of humans in unequal power relations with their natural surroundings.