Speaker 1: Ephemeralist production of My Heart three D audio for full
Speaker 1: exposure listen with that phones for a lot of us.
Speaker 1: With the new year comes an opportunity to take stock,
Speaker 1: consider what you have, what you want, what you may
Speaker 1: not need anymore, and maybe do a little cleaning. It's
Speaker 1: a moment where people are confronted with a question at
Speaker 1: the heart of this show, how do we as societies
Speaker 1: and as individuals decide what to keep and what to
Speaker 1: throw away? What defines trash varies from person to person.
Speaker 1: It's an activity more than it is a category, so
Speaker 1: it should be understood as a dynamic category rather than
Speaker 1: as the thing or a kind of thing. And my
Speaker 1: name is Susan Strasser. I am the Richards Professor Emerita
Speaker 1: of American History at the University of Delaware, which just
Speaker 1: really means that I'm retired from the University of Delaware.
Speaker 1: And I'm the author of Never Done, a History of
Speaker 1: American Housework. Second book was called Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Making
Speaker 1: of the American mass Market and Waste and Want a
Speaker 1: Social History of Trash. If we were to see the
Speaker 1: way most people in the United States lived before eighteen nine,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't look familiar to us at all. By twenty
Speaker 1: things would look old fashioned to us, certainly, but they
Speaker 1: would look familiar. And what that is about is the
Speaker 1: creation of the mass market, the creation of industrial products
Speaker 1: that per meated domestic life, and that really got fundamentally
Speaker 1: transformed during those decades around the turn of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: people related to material goods in very, very different ways.
Speaker 1: The likelihood was that almost everything that you wore, or
Speaker 1: eight or sat on were created by yourself, or by
Speaker 1: somebody in your family, or by somebody that you knew.
Speaker 1: Soap and candles were industrialized pretty early in the cities,
Speaker 1: but they were not necessarily industrialized in the country because
Speaker 1: they were made of leftover materials. You make soap from ashes,
Speaker 1: the ashes make lie, and from spare fat. When you're butchering,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have spare fat to use. Bottles were very valuable.
Speaker 1: Commercial glass manufacturer was pretty slow compared to other industries,
Speaker 1: so bottles were refilled. Housekeeping manuals advised people when they're
Speaker 1: clearing the table to check and see what can be
Speaker 1: eaten again. And there was not a lot of shame
Speaker 1: apparently involved in taking things off people's plates and keeping
Speaker 1: it to feed people later, and across the social hierarchy,
Speaker 1: people knew how to sew. Rich women sewed, poor women sewed,
Speaker 1: middle class women sewed, All women sewed. If you could
Speaker 1: afford to, you might hire somebody to make your fancy
Speaker 1: dresses or your coat, But even wealthy women sewed their
Speaker 1: underwhere their nightgowns, kids clothes. The idea that you just
Speaker 1: get rid of things when they're torn, or when they're broken,
Speaker 1: or when they're dirty was just unknown, and that was
Speaker 1: partly because people understood the value of the labor that
Speaker 1: went into making them. This is at a point before
Speaker 1: there were very many general stores, and even if there
Speaker 1: were general stores, how do you get to the general store.
Speaker 1: An average farmer might have a horse, but the horses
Speaker 1: working on pulling the plow. The horse is not free
Speaker 1: to go into town because somebody decides that they want something,
Speaker 1: So in a primarily agricultural society, they don't go to town.
Speaker 1: The way people got stuff was that people came around
Speaker 1: selling stuff, and they came around in the countryside peddler's
Speaker 1: door to door salesman, slipping both new goods and material
Speaker 1: for reuse. We're an integral part of a newly developing economy.
Speaker 1: The kinds of things that the peddlers would carry would
Speaker 1: be just basic things to live with, things to cook with,
Speaker 1: things to build with, little things that we would not
Speaker 1: even think of, sewing pins, hairpins, nails, the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff we would think you would buy in a hardware store.
Speaker 1: There was another kind of peddling that was organized by
Speaker 1: tin manufacturers. Tin was used for small metal goods, stuff
Speaker 1: like funnels, watering cans, and tin manufacturers would organized peddlers
Speaker 1: to go out in the countryside and sell their tin wear.
Speaker 1: All of these people took stuff in trade two either
Speaker 1: sell back to the person who had sold them the tinware,
Speaker 1: or in some cases the tinware manufacturer might have hired someone.
Speaker 1: I had the really great opportunity to look at the
Speaker 1: papers of tin manufacturer, and he was called a master peddler.
Speaker 1: His name was Marillo Noise. My father was a peddler.
Speaker 1: His name he was your no and he hired peddlers
Speaker 1: to sell his tin and to bring stuff back. You
Speaker 1: don't want to do what manufacturers now do, which is
Speaker 1: to pay for stuff to just go one way. So
Speaker 1: Marilla Noise got really interested in what he could collect
Speaker 1: from the households where his peddlers were going that he
Speaker 1: could then sell. And he collected paper, rags, rubber bones,
Speaker 1: and he collected metal. He had these little booklets that
Speaker 1: would fit into his pocket. In those booklets he would
Speaker 1: say things like, oh, so and so told me about
Speaker 1: a manufacturer in New Jersey who's using old leather. So
Speaker 1: then he goes to New Jersey and he visits the
Speaker 1: manufacturer and he finds out what kinds of old leather
Speaker 1: the manufacturer can use and he's using, and then he
Speaker 1: can give his peddlars instructions to be bringing back that
Speaker 1: stuff as well. He would send the peddlers out to
Speaker 1: sell the stuff that he had loaded the wagons with,
Speaker 1: but he also expected them to come back with full cards,
Speaker 1: so that the price of keeping the peddler and the
Speaker 1: horse alive would be distributed over both directions. The expansion
Speaker 1: of peddling signals an important shift in American society towards
Speaker 1: a culture of consumerism. The development of consumer culture requires
Speaker 1: people to come to believe that stuff can come to
Speaker 1: them and that we can get what we want. If
Speaker 1: the peddlers hadn't been able to take stuff back, then
Speaker 1: there wouldn't have been as much peddling, there wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been as much new manufactured stuff out in the countryside.
Speaker 1: It literally brought that system that was a two way
Speaker 1: system and brought things, brought goods, brought stuff into people's lives.
Speaker 1: I feel like I could see the workings of a
Speaker 1: nineteen entree recycling system that so many things that could
Speaker 1: not be used in the household did get sent back
Speaker 1: to factories to be used again to make other things.
Speaker 1: Metal is an obvious thing because it can be melted down.
Speaker 1: But rags, for example, we're used in papermaking. Before the Revolution,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a lot of paper made in the United States,
Speaker 1: so there was a lot of energy put into creating
Speaker 1: domestic paper manufacturers and saving rags cotton rags and linen
Speaker 1: rags for making paper. That's recycling, that's making something out
Speaker 1: of something that's previously manufactured. It's really difficult for us
Speaker 1: to imagine the spareness of life. The very idea to
Speaker 1: get a tea kettle, something that will boil your water,
Speaker 1: that's a separate object from the pot you're cooking your
Speaker 1: beans in. Those very ideas were really new for most people,
Speaker 1: especially given that the houses that survived the ones that
Speaker 1: we tour as tourists, or the houses of the most
Speaker 1: fabulously wealthy people in America, even they were sitting in
Speaker 1: the dark at night. Whale oil, which was the major
Speaker 1: source before kerosene, it was expensive. Candles were expensive. There's
Speaker 1: a French saying I've seen it translated in a lot
Speaker 1: of nineteenth century books, about something being not worth the candle.
Speaker 1: Is this book good enough for me to pay for
Speaker 1: the candle that's gonna light my ability to read it?
Speaker 1: Or am I going to put it away and go
Speaker 1: to sleep and maybe look at it tomorrow. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not like people were lighting up their lives the way
Speaker 1: we light up our lives. And I think we have
Speaker 1: a hard time imagining just how spare life was for everybody.
Speaker 1: In the late eighteen hundreds, there was a wave of
Speaker 1: migration in the United States away from the countryside and
Speaker 1: towards cities. It became possible to feed the country with
Speaker 1: fewer people and jobs in factories looked attractive, and city
Speaker 1: life looked attractive to a lot of people, and that's
Speaker 1: why they went in the countryside. It's much easier to
Speaker 1: figure out what to do with stuff if you don't
Speaker 1: want it. There's some corner of the farm where you
Speaker 1: can dump things. There's just a lot more ability to
Speaker 1: get rid of stuff, to the extent that you even
Speaker 1: want to get rid of stuff, because there's also more
Speaker 1: ability to use things. The example of making soap is
Speaker 1: a good one in the city. If you're living in
Speaker 1: an apartment, you may have ashes, you may have fat,
Speaker 1: but where are you gonna make soap. You may not
Speaker 1: have the space to use things, and you certainly don't
Speaker 1: have space to dump things. So it becomes more and
Speaker 1: more an issue for people living in cities as to
Speaker 1: what they're gonna do with things that they don't want.
Speaker 1: There's lots of written evidence about people throwing stuff out windows,
Speaker 1: But what are you going to do with things? Vary it,
Speaker 1: burn it, throw it in a ravine if there's a
Speaker 1: ravine nearby, throw it in a body of water. Those
Speaker 1: were the choices. With more people in their trash packed
Speaker 1: together in tighter spaces, came increasing risks of disease. The
Speaker 1: whole question of public health starts to become salient as
Speaker 1: there's this huge series of epidemics yellow fever, cholera in
Speaker 1: city after city throughout the nineteenth century, and people don't
Speaker 1: yet have the germ theory of disease. They don't quite
Speaker 1: yet know about viruses and bacteria, but they do start
Speaker 1: developing an understanding that filth has something to do with disease,
Speaker 1: that bad water has something to do with disease, that
Speaker 1: filth has something to do with bad water. More people
Speaker 1: got sick where people were crowded in that they could
Speaker 1: see They could see it perfectly clearly. In the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century in cities, there were sewers, but there were
Speaker 1: also out houses. There were people living in tenements where
Speaker 1: the one flush toilet would be in the courtyard. Sewers
Speaker 1: and water were the things that created the whole notion
Speaker 1: of what a municipal concern might be about infrastructure and
Speaker 1: about public health. These concerns would be addressed by a
Speaker 1: major advancement that we all too often take for granted today,
Speaker 1: municipal trash collection. What it looked like was those same
Speaker 1: people who had campaign to get sewers and water into
Speaker 1: cities started campaigning to get municipal trash collection. We're talking
Speaker 1: about the nine these in the biggest cities, New York
Speaker 1: because it was the biggest city. The problem was the
Speaker 1: biggest and it kind of led the way in municipal
Speaker 1: services for collecting waste. Now, what they did with the
Speaker 1: trash ones that was collected, we may not have such
Speaker 1: happy feelings about. In New York, it was put on
Speaker 1: barges and taken out into the ocean and dumped in
Speaker 1: the ocean. It was used to create landfill. The ashes, particularly,
Speaker 1: but also other kinds of trash were used for landfill.
Speaker 1: The thing is trashes then and now hard to get
Speaker 1: rid of the most obvious things to do with stuff
Speaker 1: you don't want just to burn it, to bury it,
Speaker 1: or to dump it. Those are the big three that
Speaker 1: you can do on your farm, or you can do
Speaker 1: in a big way in a big city. But if
Speaker 1: you're burning all the trash for a big city, then
Speaker 1: you need some kind of fancy incinerator. You can't just
Speaker 1: do it in the backyard. They were not attractions that
Speaker 1: people wanted to have in their midst So facilities were
Speaker 1: built on the edges of town, and facilities were built
Speaker 1: where people were too poor to effectively complain about the
Speaker 1: hazards to their health. We're here today on a march
Speaker 1: to the Detroit incinerator Um, and we're calling for clean air,
Speaker 1: particularly for the communities that are close to the incenterator
Speaker 1: and are particularly affected by the particular from the burning trash.
Speaker 1: And I should say that in those early municipal household
Speaker 1: trash collections, there was separation of different kinds of trash
Speaker 1: to be used for recycling. The same kinds of things
Speaker 1: that people had been recyclinging for many decades were separated out.
Speaker 1: Do people start thinking about their materials in a different
Speaker 1: way because of trash collection. Once you have a municipal
Speaker 1: trash collection, then throwing something away becomes a possibility. Before
Speaker 1: municipal trash collection, you either store it in your house
Speaker 1: or you somehow or other get it out of your house.
Speaker 1: And if you're going to get it out of your house,
Speaker 1: you have to figure out where out of your house.
Speaker 1: And municipal trash collection gives you a brand new option,
Speaker 1: which is just get rid of it. It makes it
Speaker 1: a black box. Before then you've got to figure out
Speaker 1: what to do with it. And if you're gonna take
Speaker 1: it down to the river and dump it in the river,
Speaker 1: you're going to dump it in the river, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna know that it went in the river. If you
Speaker 1: put it in the can and you take the can
Speaker 1: to the curb. Who knows what happens to it. It's gone.
Speaker 1: There's not the sense of reciprocity about it. There's not
Speaker 1: the bargaining about I mean, when the peddler comes around
Speaker 1: and you've got your bit of rags and your bit
Speaker 1: of rubber and your bit of metal, and you are
Speaker 1: looking at the tea cattle and the pins and some nails,
Speaker 1: there's a whole bargaining process that's going to go on
Speaker 1: between you and the peddler to figure out who gets
Speaker 1: what and what gets exchanged. Once you have municipal trash collection,
Speaker 1: there's no exchange. It's literally about getting rid of stuff.
Speaker 1: These new systems of disposal dovetail not coincidentally with major
Speaker 1: developments and mass manufacturing. It simply became possible to buy
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff that hadn't been possible to buy before.
Speaker 1: And some of it is because there's more and more
Speaker 1: stuff being manufactured in factories, and some of it is
Speaker 1: because there's all kinds of new distribution methods. Even people
Speaker 1: in the countryside can buy things from the Sears catalog
Speaker 1: and the Montgomery Ward catalog and get them shipped to
Speaker 1: their houses. What are you reading these years catalogs. That
Speaker 1: sounds exciting, you'd be surprised. The Post Office actually made
Speaker 1: it possible for things to be shipped to your house
Speaker 1: even if you lived in the country Rural Free Delivery RFD,
Speaker 1: so you didn't have to come into town and pick
Speaker 1: something up at the train station. It would be shipped
Speaker 1: to your house suddenly, and really it was sudden. All
Speaker 1: of the goods of the new manufacturing were available to
Speaker 1: consumers if they used these companies, and they did use
Speaker 1: those companies, and they used those companies for the same
Speaker 1: reasons that people use Amazon, because everything was available and
Speaker 1: it was easy to get. In the nine twenties, lots
Speaker 1: and lots of appliances started to be produced, and many
Speaker 1: of these had been patented earlier, but it wasn't until
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties and the relative prosperity of the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties that the large numbers of people started to buy
Speaker 1: these things. At first, it was small appliances, things like
Speaker 1: toasters and irons. By the end of the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: refrigerators were available to wealthy people. Everything in its place.
Speaker 1: That's easy with my printed air cold pantry. Even after
Speaker 1: the depression, started. They were sold on the installment plan
Speaker 1: with the promise that you could save money. You could
Speaker 1: buy things on sale and keep them longer in your refrigerator.
Speaker 1: We think of the depression as a time when nobody
Speaker 1: had anything, but if there's a twenty unemployment rate, that
Speaker 1: means of the people have jobs. It's not like more
Speaker 1: people had lots and lots of money, but they did
Speaker 1: have some money, and both refrigerators and radios were appliances
Speaker 1: that became big during the thirties. Another consumer good flooding
Speaker 1: the market in this era was, of course, the automobile.
Speaker 1: Henry Ford, who not only introduced the assembly line and
Speaker 1: a certain new kind of manufacturing in that respect, he
Speaker 1: also introduced a theory of employment that he called the
Speaker 1: five dollar day. He wanted to pay workers well enough
Speaker 1: that they could buy automobiles, but not everybody has a
Speaker 1: million dollars to ride the economy is what they want.
Speaker 1: He envisioned a time when it would not just be
Speaker 1: rich people, and over the course of the twenties, automobiles
Speaker 1: got cheaper and the used automobile market started to develop,
Speaker 1: So by the end of the twenties it's fair to
Speaker 1: say that there are large numbers of people brought in
Speaker 1: cars with this version, and consumer culture came an onslaught
Speaker 1: of disposable goods. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: paper cups starts to be the first big thing because
Speaker 1: people are out in cities more and they're drinking publicly.
Speaker 1: She knows that dickte cups, they were a lot of
Speaker 1: extra glasses to waste. She knows that dicknecup means there's
Speaker 1: less of breaking glasses. And you know too that drinking
Speaker 1: from a Dicte cup is more sanitary because everyone has
Speaker 1: his own individual cups. Again, there's this concern about public
Speaker 1: health as the germ theory starts to be accepted, So
Speaker 1: there's the introduction of paper cups for sanitary purposes. Other
Speaker 1: kinds of paper goods and disposable goods are being introduced,
Speaker 1: but they're not super popular. They really require a whole
Speaker 1: different mindset. The idea that you have something, you use
Speaker 1: it once, and you throw it away. That's like a
Speaker 1: brand new idea. And there are certain kinds of disposable
Speaker 1: things like bottles, caps and razor blades that we don't
Speaker 1: think of. But starting in the eight nineties, bottle caps
Speaker 1: and razor blades, start to give people the idea that
Speaker 1: this one time used then toss it might be a
Speaker 1: good way to live your life. In a moment of
Speaker 1: changing attitudes around creation and disposal, everything got ratcheted up
Speaker 1: during more time. One of its is to remember about
Speaker 1: World War One is that the United States was not
Speaker 1: in it for very long. The Republic must awaken, the
Speaker 1: people must understand our safety lies in pull realization. The
Speaker 1: faith of the nations and the safety of the world
Speaker 1: will be decided on the western battlefront of Europe. The
Speaker 1: United States didn't get into it until nineteen seventeen, and
Speaker 1: the war was over in nineteen eighteen. They were instituting programs,
Speaker 1: but they never really got a chance to get that far.
Speaker 1: World War two they were full blown. Only men went
Speaker 1: to war, so there was a huge amount of propagandizing
Speaker 1: around various kinds of what we would call recycling drives
Speaker 1: that were called scrap drives at the time. I want
Speaker 1: to report about another great American army and rolling one
Speaker 1: in every four American the Army of organized education, boys
Speaker 1: and girls collect crap to build up our national stockpiles.
Speaker 1: There were school curricula that we're developed if this many
Speaker 1: pots and pans can make this many airplanes, then how
Speaker 1: many part you know that kind of word problem. They
Speaker 1: organized kids in their scout troops to collect materials, and
Speaker 1: they militarized the talking about it. Practically all of us
Speaker 1: have fats. Fats make ncroistans for shows. My father, who
Speaker 1: was a physicist, during World War Two he served as
Speaker 1: an army research facility. He said that he didn't really
Speaker 1: think that the kinds of explosives that the household fats
Speaker 1: could be used for actually were very common kinds of explosives,
Speaker 1: so he, even during the war, thought that that fat
Speaker 1: collection thing was mostly for propaganda purposes. More than a
Speaker 1: million people are crowded into Washington in wartime, say, with
Speaker 1: a peacetime population of half a million. The city was
Speaker 1: never planned to accommodate such a huge, ever growing army
Speaker 1: of workers. But Washington in wartime is people, people intent
Speaker 1: on contributing their personal effort, people seeking information and advice
Speaker 1: and sometimes papers others to see history in the making.
Speaker 1: It was a way of mobilizing the whole population to
Speaker 1: be behind the war effort as much as it was
Speaker 1: a way of collecting materials that could be used to
Speaker 1: advance the war effort. You couldn't buy a new washing
Speaker 1: machine or a new car during the war because the
Speaker 1: factories that produced washing machines and cars had been converted
Speaker 1: for war production. So people were experiencing these kinds of shortages.
Speaker 1: And this was after ten years of depression. So now
Speaker 1: people have money. They have money because they're working in
Speaker 1: the war factories. The economy is amped up, but there's
Speaker 1: not stuff to buy, and the propaganda is saying you
Speaker 1: should buy war bonds. The presidents now have the added
Speaker 1: burden of printing billions of dollars worth of war bonds
Speaker 1: and steps to pay for the planes, hips and guns
Speaker 1: that our defenders must have. Your husband's and your brothers
Speaker 1: and your uncle's are off there in Germany and Japan
Speaker 1: and doing their part, and you've got to do your part.
Speaker 1: And your part is to not buy stuff and give
Speaker 1: your medal to the government and not complain about it.
Speaker 1: Saving is as easy as squandering. You'll give us the scrap.
Speaker 1: We will turn it into tanks, we will turn it
Speaker 1: into plane we'll turn it into jeeps, we'll turn it
Speaker 1: into guns. Then our fighting men will have enough and
Speaker 1: on time. The American consumer economy brought with it a
Speaker 1: new buzzword, convenience. The twentie century promises life is going
Speaker 1: to be easy for everybody. When we think about it,
Speaker 1: it's really about the physical body. We shouldn't have to
Speaker 1: work very hard, we shouldn't have to use our muscles
Speaker 1: very much. We should live like the kings and queens
Speaker 1: of old. That's what convenience is about. We should be
Speaker 1: able to exchange money for this feature of goods that
Speaker 1: will make our lives easy. The products are going to
Speaker 1: make it that way, and disposable products are particularly going
Speaker 1: to make it that way. If something is disposable, you
Speaker 1: don't have to wash it, you don't have to clean it,
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about it. You can toss
Speaker 1: it away. Where is a way? Nobody knows where a
Speaker 1: way is. A big part of this shift in thinking
Speaker 1: was demonstrated and how manufacturers began packaging their products. Manufacturers
Speaker 1: stop selling you a thing, and they start selling a
Speaker 1: new kind of product, which is that thing in its package.
Speaker 1: From their standpoint, the advantage of selling ivory soap in
Speaker 1: a wrapper is that you can write ivory on the
Speaker 1: outside of it, and then the consumer is going to
Speaker 1: go to the store and ask for Ivory soap, and
Speaker 1: the retailer has to get it from Procter and Gamble,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to personal size. Ivory so white
Speaker 1: looks pure, even smell pure, my pleasure loving side a
Speaker 1: door did in the bath. So that's the reason why
Speaker 1: that new kind of product comes into being, because the
Speaker 1: product in a package can be branded, and the product
Speaker 1: outside of a package cannot be branded. Woven into these
Speaker 1: trends was the concept of fashion, fashion and material goods
Speaker 1: suggests that there's something beyond the way that the product
Speaker 1: does its job that you should be paying attention to.
Speaker 1: Luxury is a warm towel gently touching your skin, making
Speaker 1: you feel soft, special, even a little bit spoiled. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of introduction of things that used to be
Speaker 1: available in black or in white, and now they're available
Speaker 1: in color. No longer do you have to have just
Speaker 1: white towels. Now you can have towels and a whole
Speaker 1: lot of different colors. And it may be the fashion
Speaker 1: this year to have blue towels. So it becomes a
Speaker 1: way of selling more goods by making things that are
Speaker 1: not yet rags, but they're out of fashion, they're no
Speaker 1: longer good see these two portable radios, Well watch this letter. Sorry, Brandy,
Speaker 1: you old file portable to have to go, But look
Speaker 1: at our new r C A Victor portable radio tangled
Speaker 1: up with fashion is a term you hear a lot today.
Speaker 1: Obsolescence the idea that the product, for various reasons is
Speaker 1: destined to become obsolete. The idea that obsolescence is baked
Speaker 1: into the product really comes from all of us living
Speaker 1: lives that are surrounded by products of technological processes that
Speaker 1: are beyond on what we can understand. Phones when they
Speaker 1: were originally introduced, were made to last. Then Bell Systems
Speaker 1: started introducing fashion phones and different princess phones, different kinds
Speaker 1: of phones. Now there's this proliferation of options, and it's
Speaker 1: possible to understand that you have a funky old phone
Speaker 1: or you have the newest and fanciest phone. There's such
Speaker 1: a range of phone possibilities that literally didn't used to exist.
Speaker 1: Contrary to what you might imagine, not every manufacturer was
Speaker 1: greedily rubbing their hands behind the idea of planned obsolescence.
Speaker 1: Henry Ford was really opposed to the notion of changing models.
Speaker 1: To change the model of an automobile requires changing the
Speaker 1: whole auction process. Every change is going to mean a
Speaker 1: change not just in what gets sold, but a change
Speaker 1: in how it's made. So General Motors gets this idea
Speaker 1: of having an annual model change. That new model can
Speaker 1: be advertised and people can get excited about the new model.
Speaker 1: There he comes now and his very old mobile. It's
Speaker 1: a futuramic Goals mobile with the newest push button features,
Speaker 1: automatic windows, automatic top, just pull a handy control and
Speaker 1: before you've had time to admire the smooth, blowing futuramic
Speaker 1: lines of this real post War Olds mobile, the top
Speaker 1: is down automatically. And furthermore, they start producing cars in
Speaker 1: colors and Ford is just still chugging along, producing a
Speaker 1: Model T that gets technologically better. As the years go
Speaker 1: on and Ford starts losing market share and General Motors
Speaker 1: is gaining it. By the end of the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: Ford realizes he can no longer do this, and he
Speaker 1: closed down his auto plants to produce the new model
Speaker 1: A Ford. Now he's producing in color, and he's got
Speaker 1: several different models, and it becomes the model for everything
Speaker 1: else too. When is Apple going to reveal its new
Speaker 1: computers and it's new iPhone, there's like all this hub
Speaker 1: around the introduction of all the new stuff. One of
Speaker 1: the biggest takeaways from Waste and Want, Susan's book on
Speaker 1: the History of trash is that all of this production, consumption,
Speaker 1: and disposal is inextricably connected. You can't separate trash in
Speaker 1: a consumer culture from the production process, from the distribution process.
Speaker 1: It's all of a piece. My major interest is in
Speaker 1: the relationship that we in our private lives have with
Speaker 1: the economic system and the production system, and the advertising
Speaker 1: and marketing systems. And now there's a new camera by
Speaker 1: Code Act. It's just the nicest one I know to
Speaker 1: have around the house. And the distribution system and the
Speaker 1: system is not just about the parts that we see.
Speaker 1: In the same way that we don't see what happens
Speaker 1: to our trash after it goes away, we also don't
Speaker 1: see where our stuff came from before it got to
Speaker 1: the store or to the website. It's not like we're
Speaker 1: incapable of starting to imagine that the stuff we use
Speaker 1: gets produced. We kind of know it, But the whole
Speaker 1: business of production, unless we happen to know people who
Speaker 1: work in the factory, it's like a black box to us.
Speaker 1: It's like something we just don't know about. On the
Speaker 1: other end, once we take it to the curb, we
Speaker 1: see the guys come by, we see them put it
Speaker 1: in that truck, and then what happens. We don't know
Speaker 1: it's gone. So stuff comes, stuff goes. Do we make
Speaker 1: more trash now than we used to? Certainly we must
Speaker 1: write we make much more trash than we used to,
Speaker 1: the whole world of packaging and disposals for starters, But
Speaker 1: also we have so many more technologically complicated goods in
Speaker 1: our lives. Appliances, communications, things, computers, phones, all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: What happens to our trash now? It varies from place
Speaker 1: to place. Baltimore has a big incinerator that is a
Speaker 1: waste to energy incinerator. Landfills are becoming problematic in the
Speaker 1: United States because there isn't space for them without places
Speaker 1: that are close to the largest metropolitan areas, So the
Speaker 1: stuff has to be shipped long distances to get to
Speaker 1: places where there are landfill facilities. Literally, what happens to
Speaker 1: stuff depends on where you are in the time leading
Speaker 1: up to writing this book, What were the attitudes conversations
Speaker 1: about trash and the environment? You sort of remember in
Speaker 1: your site, guys, trash is kind of a foreboting topic.
Speaker 1: When I first told people I was writing a book
Speaker 1: about trash, most of them laughed, and people still laugh.
Speaker 1: It's a little hard for me to feel that my
Speaker 1: life's work is so funny, But I think that it's
Speaker 1: precisely my life's work to take these issues of daily
Speaker 1: life that are regarded as private and as trivial and
Speaker 1: bring them out into the light and examine them in
Speaker 1: ways that help people to understand that they're not private
Speaker 1: at all, and that therefore, by definition, they are not trivial.
Speaker 1: My only other question, it's just about hope. Like sometimes
Speaker 1: you've walked down the street, you look at all the
Speaker 1: trash everywhere, at least I live in a city, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's full of track, it's real trashy, overflowing trash cans,
Speaker 1: litter everywhere, under bridges in streets. And then also like
Speaker 1: just being in the time in place that I grew up,
Speaker 1: and just position in the middle of this consumer world
Speaker 1: where I feel like I'm being Everything is branded and
Speaker 1: I'm being sold to all the time, and I'm always
Speaker 1: being told that I need new products and different products.
Speaker 1: And then I got to change this product for that product.
Speaker 1: It can feel like overwhelming and I don't know you're responsible.
Speaker 1: What do you use to not feel hopeless in that situation?
Speaker 1: Like what grounds you to uh make smart decisions about
Speaker 1: consumption and waste. The study of history, it's sort of
Speaker 1: like traveling. You go to a foreign country and you
Speaker 1: discovered that there are other ways to be human. And
Speaker 1: I feel that way about the study of the past
Speaker 1: as well, that there are other ways to be human
Speaker 1: than the ways that we live in the twenty one century.
Speaker 1: And frankly, the environmental issues that go way beyond climate change,
Speaker 1: that have to do with pollution of various kinds, that
Speaker 1: have to do with the eradication of so many species.
Speaker 1: We have to find other ways of being human than
Speaker 1: the ways that we have because this one isn't working.
Speaker 1: This one is destroying the planet that we live on.
Speaker 1: This one is eating our launch. We're not going to
Speaker 1: go backwards in time. We're not going to live the
Speaker 1: way people did in the nineteenth century. We don't want to,
Speaker 1: and we have been raised in the first centuries. Can't
Speaker 1: We don't know how. But for me, the study of
Speaker 1: the past suggests that there will be other ways to
Speaker 1: be human in the future. This episode of Ephemeral was
Speaker 1: written and assembled by Max and Alex Williams, with producer
Speaker 1: Trevor Young, and special thanks to our friend Sarah Wasserman.
Speaker 1: Susan Strasser is the author of Never Done, a History
Speaker 1: of American Housework, Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Making of the American
Speaker 1: mass Market, and Ways and Want a Social History of Trash.
Speaker 1: Find them wherever books are sold and learn more about
Speaker 1: everything she's up to over at susan strasser dot Net,
Speaker 1: links and more on our website ephemeral dot Show. If
Speaker 1: you like this episode, share it with a friend, rate
Speaker 1: and review us wherever you listen, and shoot us a
Speaker 1: comment on social media at ephemeral Show. It just maybe
Speaker 1: the thing that keeps us from getting thrown in the
Speaker 1: trash and For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.