Paul Rand: Every year, people around the world generate billions of tons of trash. And for most of us, we toss our garbage into a bin, and it’s out of sight, out of mind. But the truth is, our trash never really goes away…

Sarah Newman: I think it's hard to deny that we're either at or kind of past even the point of kind of having a crisis of waste. We try to send trash away and it comes back in all sorts of ways in these great garbage patches in the ocean, in microplastics that now we all have in our bodies. 

Paul Rand: That’s Sarah Newman, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She's the author of the book, Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things.

Sarah Newman: We can all kind of try to buy sustainable products and rinse out our yogurt containers. But...The scale of production and the scale of disposal are so far beyond any individual person that I think the questions that we have to ask and the solutions that we had to come up with really have to be much bigger than saying reduce, reuse and recycle, you know, on an individual scale. 

Paul Rand: But it wasn’t always this way. Newman is an archeologist by training who has studied ancient cultures around the world—and how they handled waste throughout history. 

Sarah Newman: What we're really finding are things that are kind of being stored to be reused again, not necessarily things that have been thrown away and are supposed to stay there forever. 

Paul Rand: So what if our modern waste management systems aren't solving the problem…but are instead designed to keep us from seeing the real crisis of our disposable culture?

Sarah Newman: I want to try to sort of break down and unmake the kind of taken for granted idea of waste that I think a lot of people tend to have today. And by that I mean kind of the idea that everything that we make has some kind of inevitable end point, that everything will eventually become waste.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, where we explore the groundbreaking ideas and the discoveries that are changing our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs. On today’s episode, the history of garbage and how we should solve our global problem of waste.

Paul Rand: Well, the title of your book is Unmaking Waste. And I wondered what you mean by that title and what you were trying to get us to think about.

Sarah Newman: I mean it in a conceptual way that I want to try to sort of break down and unmake the kind of taken for granted idea of waste that I think a lot of people tend to have today. And by that I mean kind of the idea that everything that we make has some kind of inevitable endpoint, that everything will eventually become waste. But I also think that I mean it in a practical way too, where if we were somehow able to actually unmake that notion and undo that expectation that things will always become waste, that we would be able to kind of radically change our relationships to the things that we produce and the things that we do with them, including wasting them.

Paul Rand: Okay. Well, part of your central claim in this book is that waste is not natural or it’s not universal, that it’s a modern invention. And that actually really struck me as not something I was expecting.

Sarah Newman: I mean, you actually don’t have to look that far back into the past to see that people have thought about these things very differently. And so some of my examples come from these ancient Maya cities in the jungles of Guatemala from, as I said, a thousand or more years ago. But some of the examples come from the 19th century United States or Western Europe. And even then people have had really different relationships to things than we do kind of right in this moment with the kind of mass production and consumerism that we have today.

Paul Rand: When you say it was invented or it’s invented trash, what are you trying to communicate by that?

Sarah Newman: Yeah. I mean, I think for a long time people have not necessarily thought that the things that we make and use eventually become something that is totally useless or totally valueless. And again, even into sort of the 19th and early 20th centuries, most people would reuse most of the materials that were part of their daily life. I mean, you would eat something and then you would boil down the bones and you would use the the grease for one thing. The bones would get burnt into charcoal and used for a variety of things. Anything made of metal could be sold and resold and reused as scrap metal. And so part of the difference has to do with the fact that now we have very different materials in our lives. I mean, things like plastics and all sorts of other synthetic materials that can’t necessarily be reused in that way.

But yeah, I think that and part of our transition to using those things, we really did kind of have to be taught to throw things away. I mean, when plastics were originally created, part of the selling point of plastics was, well, we’ll never have to throw anything away again because they last forever. I mean, they can be made into any shape. They can do anything you want and yeah, you’ll never need to replace things if they’re made out of plastic. And so people kind of had to learn to take this incredible material that is never going to break down and can take any shape, be very colorful, all sorts of things. And that we’ve had to learn that we should take this kind of amazing material and throw it in the trash. And often many times a day, I mean, every time you open a packaging, you’re kind of taking years of science and technology and this kind of amazing creation and it’s a one second interaction before you throw it away.

Paul Rand: Okay. Well, part of this, which is also interesting is that what counts as garbage in the US may not register in garbage somewhere else in the world, say Japan. What’s the line between trash and treasure between different cultures, even in today’s world?

Sarah Newman: So I mean, composting is a really easy example that it’s difficult to compost if you live in an apartment building in a dense urban center versus if you live on a farm. So food scraps for one person have to be waste, whereas for another, they can be something that’s in the stage of being transformed into really valuable soil. There’s also cultural differences in terms of the types of things that people see as being reusable or the attachments that people have to even things that are mass produced products that there’s certain things that you or I might think of as a kind of disposable commodity and other people might see as something more valuable.

Paul Rand: Absolutely. Well, one of the other arguments you make, which I think is interesting is that waste isn’t only the stuff that we throw out, it’s also the things that we leave behind.

Sarah Newman: It’s sort of a myth to think that every time we throw something away that we’re doing that in a kind of way that’s totally unthinking or that somehow isn’t meaningful. I mean, if you think about every time you put something in a trash can, you’re sort of making a decision about the kind of person you are, right? You’re not the kind of person who litters or every time you wash out a yogurt container, you’re sort of making a statement like, “I am the kind of person that recycles.” And so I think there’s a sense of waste in which short, there’s kind of this physical thing that we’re putting into landfills or we’re burning in incinerators or something like that. But then there’s also that sense in which there’s a sense of being wasteful of how you decide to leave things behind. And so another good example is you see people who make a big effort with things that are important to them to pass those things down, to donate them. I mean, there’s ways in which we’re always making decisions about how we want to leave things behind and garbage is one of those ways, but it’s just as meaningful as the other ways.

Paul Rand: Okay. Well, the other point you make is that there’s really never been a quote unquote a way for things to go. And most of us discard without a whole lot of thought of where it goes after that discarding.

Sarah Newman: Yeah. I think we’ve kind of always been chasing this dream of not just making waste go away, but somehow turning the act of making waste into something productive, that we’ve always kind of tried to come up with solutions to the problem of waste that somehow are going to make it so that actually it’s not a problem to create the waste in the first place. I mean, today we’re putting a lot of energy into, or I should say a lot of efforts into waste to energy plants

And even those are kind of adaptations of earlier attempts to burn trash or even in the 20th century, there were these attempts to create what were called reduction plants, which were basically to kind of squeeze out organic garbage and use the extracts as fertilizers and even in some instances as the basis for perfumes, which is kind of ironic. But I think we’re sort of always imagining that the relationships that we have with the things that we make can also end on our own terms. And I think increasingly we’re seeing that that’s not the case, that we try to send trash away and it comes back in all sorts of ways in these great garbage patches in the ocean, in microplastics that now we all have in our bodies. I mean, we’re thinking that we’re sending things away and they’re kind of coming back in unexpected ways.

And

Paul Rand: You spent a lot of your time in Guatemala and studying the Mayan culture, but I wonder if you can set the stage and give us an understanding of the Mayan people and how they were thought of at their time and how we look at them historically today to help put this waste question for them into some context.

Sarah Newman: Yeah. So I mean, one thing is that we use the term Maya to cover kind of a really broad area, a really broad swath of time and a lot of people. But the people that I am focused on for the most part in the book are people who are living kind of in Southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize. And like I said, there are cities that have been growing and expanding in that region since the beginning of the first millennium. So one thing that I look at in the book is there are some glyphs where when the Mayer are writing about earth or showing kind of depictions of very fertile soil, they tend to show it with these symbols that they also use sometimes for like really pungent odors, like forest animals like peccaries and deer and stuff like that. And so what I think is happening there is that people are kind of indicating that the really fertile soils are those that have night soil or excrement incorporated into them.

And so that’s one of the things that I kind of look at in the book is the different ways that people take different forms of waste, everything from human excrement to broken up pieces of ceramics and other organic forms of refuse and that they seem to be in a lot of cases using that and incorporating that refuse back into soils for a bunch of different purposes. So sometimes it’s for agricultural fields, you find

That people are taking excrement and ash and broken pottery out of their houses and tilling it into their fields, which improves the quality of the soil, the drainage of the soil. And then in other cases, they’re also collecting that kind of stuff in a sort of dump near their house and then from time to time digging back out that dump where you would have that kind of soil that’s different from the soil around it and using that in architectural constructions and things like that. I mean, I understand that as a kind of sense in which these things that we would call waste, they’re always kind of being transformed into something else. So as they’re breaking down, say you have a ceramic pot that you use to hold water and then the pot breaks. There’s other uses for the little pieces of that pot. People use them as a little scoop to feed animals to protect saplings as they’re growing. There’s all sorts of examples of people doing this. And then when those pieces break down and you can’t use them in that way anymore, they’ll put them up on top of their houses to protect the perishable thatched roofs that they use. And then eventually when they get worn down, as they get rained on and things, they’re getting mixed into soils for architectural fill or for agriculture. And so I think it’s slightly different from the sense of recycling, right?

Because when we’re recycling, we’re always thinking, “We made this thing, it doesn’t work this way anymore, but we’ll reuse it in different ways.” And here there’s sort of an understanding that these things, they just kind of go and cycle- 

Paul Rand: They have a life cycle

Sarah Newman: Yeah. And eventually you’ll dig out that soil and make a new pot with it. So it’s kind of a continuous cycle of transformation rather than something like

Paul Rand: That. So one of the words that I did learn by reading was this concept of middens. And in other words, this is kind of a trash sheep that archeologists dig through.

Sarah Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, middens are kind of basically any place that people have kind of concentrated leaving things behind and archeologists love to find middens because they’re usually these dense concentrations of artifacts and so you can kind of dig a small area and usually you can find a ton of different types of information and they’re often, because they’re often pits that are dug out or sometimes this happens in wells and things like that because they’re kind of a circumscribed area and people use them over time until they fill up the well or they fill up the well or the pit, you can get a really good sense of how the things that people are using change over time. Kind of the oldest things at the bottom and the newer things at the top. And so yeah, archeologists, I mean, it’s sort of not exactly a standard practice but not uncommon say if you’re in almost any part of the world, if you’re working in what was a kind of domestic or residential setting to sort of try to figure out where people were depositing the stuff that was no longer in use. I think the thing that’s really interesting about this idea of middens is that all of these examples were then at least in the Maya area where people are returning to those middens and excavating them to reuse the soil, to me that kind of suggests that sure, archeologists are finding middens all over the place, but what we’re really finding are things that are kind of being stored to be reused again, not necessarily things that have been thrown away and are supposed to stay there forever.

Paul Rand:

At some point they just stayed though.

Sarah Newman:

Yeah. I mean, at some point people abandon their houses, there’s all sorts of things that happen. And so I like to think of them a little bit like in classical archeology there are all sorts of examples of people finding hoards where roping soldiers will be carrying coins and then something happens and they think they’re going to come back and get their little pot of silver and then they never come back. And I think there’s something similar happening with the middens and the Maya area that people are kind of disposing of things, but in a way that that’s always potentially useful for something and sometimes they never get around to using it.

Paul Rand:  Tell me about El Zots and why it didn’t fit the categories that you as archeologists normally rely on.

Sarah Newman: Yeah. So El Zots, it’s not one of the biggest Maya centers from the time period, but especially kind of early on, like around 300 to 400 AD. My very first year of graduate school, I was digging with my advisor in El Zots and one of the things that we found there was a very early royal tomb. So there were broken and burnt pieces of pottery, there were some broken animal bones, but there were some human bones in there, there were pieces of jade. There were also really kind of beautiful tools and different types of ornaments made out of animal bone. And so initially it was kind of hard to understand what I was looking at with this kind of mix of things that some looked like trash and some looked to me valuable. And actually it’s not that uncommon to find that kind of deposit in the Maya area and even kind of more broadly in some of the related cultures in North and Central America. And so the Guatemalan excavators that I was working with, the archeologist said, “Oh, this is a termination ritual.” And I had not really heard that term before and I was kind of struck both by the idea that there’s a specific category for this kind of mix of things and also that the category is kind of described as the thing that you would do to make it, that you would say, “Ah, what we’re looking at is a ritual.” When initially I kind of thought, well, the ritual would be the thing that happens before and what we’re looking at are kind of the remains of the ritual. I found that the category just kind of interesting.

And then when I was looking into the use of this term, it’s actually kind of a, I mean, it has an interesting history in Maya archeology. And I think for people who don’t work at Mayan sites, they find the fact that we use this category, which has a bunch of different names. Sometimes they’re called termination rituals, sometimes they’re called termination deposits, sometimes they’re just called problematical deposits. So I think to other archeologists, this is kind of unusual to have a category that you would find in the ground and say, “Ah, a problematical ... Oh, I found a problematical Deposit.” And that’s kind of like you’re interpreting what you found.

Paul Rand:

And what does that reveal about the Maya to come across problematical deposits?

Sarah Newman: So I think that that’s kind of what prompted the questions that I wanted to ask was that why do we have these deposits that don’t fit into the categories that make sense to us? It’s been probably 70 years longer, almost a hundred years since people started using these categories like Termination, deposit, problematical deposit. But what I try to say in the book is that part of the problem is that we don’t have a category between kind of ritual and trash where you could have these two things mixed together. Whereas for the Maya, like I said, there’s kind of this understanding that you can take the broken bits and pieces of things that you’ve been using, bury them for a while, re-excavate them and use them to create something new, whether that’s a new cycle of crops or a new building. And so I think that what’s happening in that example in the palace is that was part of a renovation of that palace and that people are kind of doing the same thing that they would do in an agricultural field to take all those things that are really kind of make soil fertile and are the things left behind from previous cycles of life and to take those and kind of reseed the palace for the next cycle of life that’s going to happen there, which is a very different way of thinking about the middens than the archeologists think about.

Paul Rand: Okay. Well, let’s transition with that setup going into our modern world and waste. It feels as if we are producing so much of it that it is overwhelming our oceans, our landfills and other things. Is that an accurate assessment?

Sarah Newman: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s hard to deny that we’re either at or kind of past even the point of having a crisis of waste. I mean, as you say, we have these enormous collections of plastic that are floating in the oceans, the size of some countries. One of the things that has also happened over time, I mean, I think this is where kind of taking a long-term view is helpful is that at this point, a lot of waste making to a certain extent is kind of beyond the scope of individual people. I mean, I think we can all kind of try to buy sustainable products and rinse out our yogurt containers, but the scale of production and the scale of disposal are just so far beyond any individual person that I think the questions that we have to ask and the solutions that we have to come up with really have to be much bigger than saying reduce, reuse, and recycle on an individual scale.

And I think that that’s absolutely possible maybe to, instead of focusing on what to do with the garbage once we’ve produced it, to think about what kinds of things could we produce so that there would never be this problem of what to do with the waste. And of course, I mean, people have been arguing this for some time. There’s a push to move towards a circular economy and things like that.

Paul Rand: Yes.

Sarah Newman: I think that that’s the direction that we need to be moving in. It’s just even the idea of a circular economy kind of imagines that what you want to do is produce a product, that it has kind of this one use life and then when it becomes waste, it’s not a problem. What would that look like?

Paul Rand: And this is kind of how you wrap up the book, isn’t it? I mean, you talk about disposing of the very notion of waste and becoming almost a zero waste society. Is that, for lack of a better word, a dream that you think is actually achievable?

Sarah Newman: I think that the possibilities are there. I think a lot of times the problems have to do with the fact that consumers don’t always like the texture or the color of products that are actually kind of disposable or compostable as compared to the ones that are not, that of course it can be more expensive for producers to produce things that are environmentally friendly versus things that are not. I mean, this is part of the problem is that it really would take, I think, really ambitious kind of collective agreement from what we’re doing in our everyday lives in our homes to legislation, that can be difficult to achieve, but I think the problem is a social problem, not necessarily a technological or kind of environmental problem. Well,

Paul Rand: One of the descriptions you had in the book was talking about yourself as a past loving creature living on a ruined planet. Gosh, that’s a heavy thought. Tell me what you mean by that.

Sarah Newman: I mean, ruined planet, it’s true. It is kind of a dark picture, but I don’t know how else to describe things like the Pacific Garbage Patch, the size of sanitary landfills. I mean, it’s difficult to paint some of those things in a positive light. I mean, this is kind of the mark we’re leaving on the planet, the things we’re leaving behind.

Paul Rand: Say we come back and society comes back and another Sarah Newman, 200, 300 years in the future comes back. What are they going to think about the civilization that we’re in right now and maybe even in relation to recycling and waste and so forth?

Sarah Newman: One of the things that I think about sometimes is imagine if you had an archeologist just looking at Airbnbs around the world. It’s like every culture would be the same. It’s a kind of a mid-century modern aesthetic and so I think that that’s one of the things that I find kind of interesting and maybe surprising to think about is that in a certain way it would be difficult to read kind of the differences among people-

Paul Rand:

Oh, interesting. ... in ecause we’ve gotten more similar in how we’re living and what we’re discarding.

Sarah Newman: I mean, the one thing that would be really interesting is I think about this a lot, that I imagine there must be now in landfills, a kind of strata of the COVID pandemic- Masks and test kits. Masks and tests and gloves and thermometers. Excellent point. Yeah. So that’s one that I think about too, that that’s a really ... Yeah, and that of course there’ll be all sorts of traces of that historical moment, but say there were something to happen where there was only the archeological traces and no kind of text or memory about this, I think you could still get a pretty good idea of what happened there.

Paul Rand: One question that I want to make sure we touch on is this concept of recycling.

Sarah Newman: Yeah. I mean, so in the same class where the talking trash class where it wanted people to not make any waste, there was also a woman who was a choreographer who had worked with the sanitation department in Austin, Texas to choreograph a dance that she called trash dance in the landfill. And it was amazing. It was people kind of dancing with their bulldozers. It was amazing. And she came to speak to the class and one of the students asked her, “What did you learn kind of spending a year following along with the sanitation workers?” And she said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. I stopped recycling.”

Paul Rand: Okay?

Sarah Newman: Not exactly what I hoped she would say to these kind of hopeful first year students, but what she explained to the class was just that when you actually go to see a landfill, you kind of realize that again, kind of like that individual people are not really the major problem there, that it’s construction debris makes up a huge amount of landfills. But there’s also, I think in the same way that we don’t necessarily know where our waste is going after we kind of take it out of the house and bring it to the curb. We also don’t really understand in general how recycling works.

Sarah Newman: And one of the ways that you see this is what people call aspirational recycling and people do this all the time. I mean, I find myself doing this where we all have that complicated chart to say these are the kinds of plastics you can recycle and then you have an object that has many different types of plastics, maybe some metal, maybe some wood and you think, “I hope it’s recyclable. I’ll put it in the recycling and someone will figure this out. “ And really what that does most of the time is to kind of ruin the entire batch of plastics that’s supposed to be recycled.

And so there’s a certain way in which recycling is I think one of these things that people really like to feel like that’s a viable solution, right? That if we can just recycle things, then I mean, if you’re the kind of person who’s recycling, you’re a good person, you’re not really contributing to the waste problems as much as maybe other people. But one of the examples that I give in the book is that a lot of the way that recycling works in the US and Canada and some other countries is that for a long time, most of that was just shipped to China and some other countries that would process, especially plastics, paper, that kind of thing. And in 2018, China put in some new regulations and they decided they didn’t want to be kind of the world’s garbage dump and so they increased basically the levels of purity in terms of the plastic. So all that aspirational recycling really becomes a problem because then you can’t ... I mean, you ruin, like I said, entire batches of plastic that might be recycled. And when that was happening in a lot of cities in the US, what happened was that recycling companies could no longer export the recycling. And so they were just picking up recycling bins and taking those materials to-

Paul Rand: Performative recycling.

Sarah Newman: Exactly. And so the idea was, well, one, we want people to still be able to feel good about recycling and two, when we figure out where the recycling can go, we don’t want to break the pattern. We want people to continue this practice of recycling. And so in some ways, I just think that’s such a good example of kind of these myths around both waste and the kind of solutions to it that we kind of tell ourselves the problem isn’t that bad or that we have these solutions without really understanding either the problem or the solution.

Paul Rand: You said that you kind of hope that archeology will stop taking garbage for granted and how do you think about that even as you think about society as a whole?

Sarah Newman: I think that one of the things that comes out of this kind of idea of archeology as the science of rubbish or the fact that a lot of archeologists without necessarily doing this consciously tend to assume that we can recognize middens when we see them, that we kind of know what trash looks like no matter who’s producing it. I think one of the things that that does, and again, this is kind of inadvertent, but it does kind of make it so that trash becomes something that seems kind of natural and inevitable, right? That we can say, well, people have always been producing trash, whether they were flaking little bits of stone off of rocks to produce stone tools or grinding up pottery shards to put back into other types of ceramics. But again, that’s not really the same as what we’re doing today. And I think in some ways it kind of creates this narrative that really we’ve just kind of been on this track of continual progress of both making new kinds of waste, but also having new and better ways to deal with it.

And so I think that one of the things that, like I was saying, archeology actually has the possibility to do is to show that that hasn’t always been the case and to show that there are other ways of being a human in the world that don’t require you to produce something that we consider valueless that needs to be thrown away. And so that’s what I mean about undoing this idea that garbage is an inevitable fact of human life, that archeologists are really the ones who should be showing that that’s not necessarily the case rather than saying, let’s look at the garbage people have.