W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

As a garbologist who systematically studies household discards, what most people consider conveniences are inconveniences to me. Chief among them is the kitchen garbage "disposer" (more commonly called "disposal" today), which grinds up a portion of the Garbage Project's data before we can even look at it. Disposers did not become a standard feature of new homes until the 1970s—by coincidence, the same era that the Garbage Project started in earnest. As a result, I have spent some time looking into these devilish gizmos and the potential they have had to change nearly everyone's garbage life.

Overall, it seems to me that there are two kinds of technological innovations. The type that really change the basic spin of the world, like the car or the Internet, are usually called "_______'s Folly" (as in "Fulton's"). The other type are promoted as instruments that will revolutionize the world, but usually don't do more than add a dose of convenience along with a gaggle of repair specialists and add-on devices.

Here I should note that I am not the only one threatened by the garbage disposer. One of its earliest promises was to fire the garbage collector. Let's see if we should be looking for a new line of work.

The first garbage disposer designed for use in a household kitchen sink was a descendant of the large grinders and shredders that municipalities employed beginning in the 1920s to prepare some solid waste for disposal in municipal sewer systems. The household disposer came on the market in 1935; it was 20 inches in length, weighed 75 pounds, and bore the trademark of General Electric (GE). Although the Second World War delayed the device's refinement, in the postwar years other companies joined GE in the garbage-disposer business, and the machines themselves grew smaller and lighter—and more appropriate for widespread household installation.

Enthusiasts like Morris M. Cohn, a conscientious public servant in Schenectady, NY, and the editor for many years of the garbage-industry journal Wastes Engineering, claimed that garbage disposers would eliminate garbage cans the way flush toilets had eliminated outhouses. Cohn, whose books include Sewers for a Growing America and By the Magic of Chemistry: Pipe Lines for Progress, had begun tirelessly promoting the idea of a household garbage disposer in the early 1930s, and it was largely as a result of his encouragement that GE took the steps that led to the introduction of the first commercial model.

Cohn's remarks in an article in Sewage Works Engineering make plain that he heartily approved of the actions of the town of Jasper, IN, which became the first community in the United States to vote to place itself entirely in the hands of this new technology. As historian Suellen Hoy recounts in a 1985 article titled "The Garbage Disposer, the Public Health, and the Good Life," which was published in the journal Technology and Culture, this town of 6,800, with a bothersome open dump and a recent history of hog cholera that had been traced to infected slops, set about in August 1950 installing GE garbage disposers in all of the town's household kitchen sinks; at the same time, Jasper discontinued all public collection of wet garbage and prohibited the discarding of wet garbage in garbage cans.

"Somebody had to stick his neck out and do things like this," said Jasper's mayor, Herb Thyen. "Otherwise progress ceases."

By October, the new technology was in place everywhere, and Jasper began its new life as a town without a garbage collector. The initial results were encouraging. There was no deleterious effect on the sewer system, as some had feared, and there were fewer flies in town (according to a before-and-after "flies per grill" count made on automobiles).

As a side benefit, Hoy reports, the installers of the garbage disposers found and corrected numerous instances of defective amateur wiring.

GE began distributing a brochure whose cover featured a young boy looking up at his father (book open on knee, pipe in mouth) and asking: "Dad, What was garbage?" Of course, the collection of non-wet garbage would still be necessary, but the universal availability of disposers to deal with organic household debris would keep the volume to a minimum.

Inspired by Jasper's example, a number of other communities in the Midwest took up what became known as "The Jasper Plan." And, it must be said, the efficient disposal of garbage was not the sole impetus. Garbage disposers promised not only to get rid of garbage, more or less effortlessly, but also palpably to improve the quality of life.

The garbage disposer symbolized the American Ideal. "In essence," Hoy writes,

This "hunk of better living" touched a responsive chord in a generation of Americans who, having survived years of Depression grayness and wartime scarcity, resumed their search for a healthier environment and a "greater ease of living" through goods and amenities that offered more cleanliness, convenience, and comfort.

The disposer has certainly made life easier, but it turns out not to have made all that much difference as far as garbage-generation rates are concerned.

I checked up on Jasper not so long ago, and spoke with the city's street commissioner, Robert Main.

How was the future going? Well, he said, Jasper still didn't have anyone picking up wet garbage, and it still gave out tickets to people whose trash cans were found to harbor such garbage. But the town had never been able to dispense with the pickup of non-wet garbage.

Now Jasper's landfill is nearly full, Main said, and the town had to ask the state to allow it to pile refuse higher and higher. Insofar as garbage is concerned, Jasper is now scarcely distinguishable from anyplace else in the United States. And your job—as always—is as safe as houses.

The Garbage Project, as well, continues to survive the onslaught of disposers. Over the years we have found that all households, whether in neighborhoods where every household has a disposal or where only a small portion are so equipped, discard some sort of foodwaste and food preparation debris. Through interview-surveys of householders and through detailed analyses of discards, we have discovered a variety of reasons for the omnipresence of food remains in residential refuse.

First, disposers usually advise operators not to grind down certain items, such as bones or meat fat. Second, at any given time a significant number of disposers are inoperable. Third, many people don't use their disposals as often as they might because they are afraid that they will become inoperable. And, fourth, many folks use their disposers in a highly selective manner; for example, most people wisely discard unwanted hard candy rather than grind it up. The overall result is that households in neighborhoods where all households contain garbage disposers throw food remains out at only half the rate of households in neighborhoods where only a few households have such a luxury—but that is still a lot of food-preparation debris and foodwaste! 

While an unknown amount of wet garbage is, in fact, ground down disposals, this does not invalidate the Garbage Project's findings based on hands-on sorting and weighing actual discards. The presence of legions of kitchen garbage disposers simply means that our estimates that US households waste between 10% and 15% of the solid food they buy are highly conservative.

By and large, Americans have never been content to do things the old-fashioned way, and where garbage has been concerned they have always been receptive to any new state-of-the-art means of disposal—to each new technological fix—especially if it promised a savings in money (Fire the garbage collector!) or, better yet, a tidy profit.

In the mythology of the American Dream, the relationship between advancing technology and a state of personal well-being that ratchets ever upwards was long assumed to be linear and direct. And, until recently, this assumption seems to have been stunningly unaffected by the repeated failure of technological fixes to perform precisely as advertised. Today, of course, technological backfires and misfires, real and alleged, have become so common that the old mythology is at best non-PC, at worst an object of hostility.

That the pendulum has swung in this direction is perhaps not a bad thing. One lesson of the Jasper story may be that ambivalence is the most sensible stance to take toward many technological innovations, including those that involve garbage. Such a stance may allow us to employ realistically the technological tools that we possess or may develop.

Archeologist and contributing editor W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - November/December 2004