Waste and Want
A Social History of Trash
Disposability had to be sold to people who were already expert at saving everything.
Strasser traces how American households stopped mending and started discarding. Before mass production, the housewife was the centre of household thrift, and rags, bones, fat and metal all had onward buyers. Manufacturers then had to teach people to throw things away, and disposability was sold as hygiene and modernity. The book reads the trash can as an artefact of marketing, and shows that recycling is a return to an older habit rather than a new virtue.
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Adam Minter
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.
Interview · February 2014
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