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Articles

D I S P O SA B I L I T Y A N D
DISPOSSESSION IN THE
T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY

◆ G AV I N L U CA S
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract
This article addresses the issue of disposability in modern Anglo-American
society, through a historical and archaeological perspective of late 19th- and
20th-century practices surrounding waste. Starting from what is identified
as a dilemma in disposability, caught between two moral systems of the
household – thrift and hygiene – this article discusses these systems in terms
of waste and the activities surrounding it. Through examination of various
practices and drawing on several examples and case studies, it is argued that
the issue of disposability is intimately linked to consumption, specifically
through the problem of inalienability and its effect on dispossession or the
shedding off of domestic and personal objects.

Key Words ◆ consumption ◆ disposability ◆ dispossession ◆ inalienability

◆ recycling ◆ rubbish ◆ waste

THE DILEMMA OF DISPOSABILITY

Criticism of the ‘throwaway society’ emerged in the 1960s as a partner
to the outcry against the ‘consumer society’, the two processes in-
extricably linked. The speed with which consumption craved the new,
was matched by the ease with which things were thrown away. The
most popular voice of this critique against the cycle of consumption and
waste was perhaps Vance Packard who in a trilogy of books (The Hidden
Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959) and The Wastemakers (1960))
detailed the various aspects in which corporate business was not only
implicated in, but actively encouraging this heady cycle. Packard in

Journal of Material Culture

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol. 7(1): 5–22 [1359-1835(200203)7:1; 5–22;022303] 5
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particular linked much of modern waste to the problem of over-

production, and how manufacturing companies in a developed economy
such as the United States, responded to this by encouraging disposability
through a number of strategies including the now famous concept of
planned obsolescence (Packard, 1960). Given their close association, it is
strange that, while so much scholarship across the disciplines since the
1980s has been examining the concept of consumption in more positive
terms, no similar impetus has ever been directed to the concept of waste.
Waste has been and continues to be, ‘a problem’ more than a concept
for social or cultural analysis.1
While it might be claimed that the general tone of Packard’s critiques
were not original, they were nevertheless timely. Thorstein Veblen in his
Theory of the Leisure Class (1925), was one of the earliest critics of the
consumer society, but at the time he was writing (and perhaps in
response to them), there were more popular voices advocating exactly
the opposite: that novelty and disposability were good. The American
domestic reformer Christine Frederick was a strong supporter of dis-
posable objects such as paper towels, paper plates and other things in
the name of convenience and hygiene (Strasser, 1999: 179–82). Yet she,
like many others, also attacked waste, but primarily in the abstract terms
of the domestic economy, rather than the concrete process of discard;
for it was precisely the disposability of certain items that made for
greater efficiency and convenience in household management. This is a
recurrent theme in household management manuals; Frederick’s books
The New Housekeeping (1913) and Household Engineering (1919) promoted
industrial-style management in the domestic sphere, guided by similar
principles of economy and efficiency. In the 19th century, before dis-
posability as a concept emerged, all waste was effectively regarded as
inefficient and arising through improper management. Isobel Beeton’s
classic Book of Household Management (1861) cites ‘frugality and
economy’ as domestic virtues and in discussing the economy of the
kitchen, she argues that ‘ . . . great care should be taken that nothing is
thrown away, or suffered to be wasted in the kitchen, which might, by
proper management, be turned to good account’ (Beeton, 1861: 37).
This link between waste and inefficiency or poor economy was
perhaps much more solid in the 19th century, but by the early 20th
century it was being undermined. Christine Frederick’s support of dis-
posability is one indication of this, but to understand why things were
changing one needs to consider another moral system operating in the
home besides thrift or economy: that of hygiene. It is telling that Beeton
nowhere discusses rubbish or the disposal of rubbish in her book, even
though many chapters are devoted to household cleaning and how
important cleanliness is to the house. This contrasts with 20th-century
household management manuals where the problem is more explicitly

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addressed. Ruth Binnie and Julia Boxall’s Housecraft, a book first pub-
lished in 1926 and running through several editions into the 1960s
repeats the usual exhortations to thrift and economy, defining them as
use without waste, or value for money (Binnie and Boxall, 1926: 214).2
But they also include a section on the disposal of household rubbish and
in the very first sentence, its significance is made clear: ‘The suitable dis-
posal of kitchen refuse is most important from the point of view of both
private and personal hygiene . . . ’ (Binnie and Boxall, 1926: 243). In dis-
cussing rubbish, they provide detailed descriptions of its unhygienic
nature and how to dispose of it properly to avoid disease and illness, and
how to take care of the bin. The fifth edition of the book (1965) changes
little on all these points, the major alterations concerning the availability
of types of refuse containers. The basic tension between the moral
systems of hygiene on the one hand and economy or thrift on the other
were explicitly spelt out in S. Maria Elliot’s Household Hygiene (1907)
where she discusses how the ‘puzzling economic problem’ of waste
needs to be offset by concern for health, with examples such as stored
bottles or other objects collecting dust and thus promoting impure air
(Strasser, 1999: 112).
From this brief discussion, it becomes clear that disposability came
to have both negative and positive connotations as it became entangled
in the two moral systems of hygiene and thrift and which articulated the
modern domestic economy in places such as North America and Britain.
Caught between these two moralities, the dilemma of disposability is
played out everyday in the material culture of the home. In the following
sections, I want to explore this process over the historical timescale, from
the late 19th century to the present day, focusing on these same regions,
the United States and Britain.

HYGIENE AND THE CLASSIFICATION OF WASTE

The relationship between hygiene and waste can be fruitfully explored
through Mary Douglas’ elaboration of ‘dirt as disorder’ in Purity and
Danger, particularly with the idea of dirt as something outside or un-
constituted by the system and around which various rules and prohibi-
tions attend, and feelings of disgust and nausea are aroused (Douglas,
1966). At a gross level, the idea of rubbish as disorder does not quite
work, for rubbish can of course be highly ordered or structured as dis-
cussed earlier: rubbish invariably does have ‘a place’, whether this is the
bin or the landfill. Indeed, we even have a particular word for rubbish
that is out of place: litter. But while rubbish may well have its own place,
in bins or landfills, these spaces only serve to separate and demarcate
the rubbish from a constituted material world, much like Douglas’ rules.
What characterizes the contents of a bin above all is the fact that inside,

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matter is commonly unconstituted – or rather de-constituted, and dirty.

Packages lie eviscerated or disembowelled, mixed with the spent or
unused contents of themselves or other packages – things are not in their
place inside the bin or the landfill, but indeed disordered, mixed up
and consequently elicit responses of disgust. Objects that were once
individuated as cereal boxes or tins of beans, become fragmented and
conjoined as in some monstrous creation and are kept out of sight. The
fact therefore, that we do separate and classify rubbish does not detract
from the fact that rubbish can still be disordered; indeed, such classifi-
cation is rather a consequence of the separation of different activities
within the household economy and their associated spaces such as the
bathroom and the kitchen, rather than any desire to classify rubbish
itself. Rubbish is what it is, because of its position in the classificatory
schemes connected to practices of hygiene.
The history and development of these schemes extends back into the
19th century when for example, typical distinctions were made between
night soil (bodily waste), garbage (food remains), rubbish (inorganic
refuse such as bottles or cans) and ashes (Crane, 2000). In Britain
today, 16 different kinds of waste are legally defined after the 1995
Environment Act while in the same year, a more detailed National Waste
Classification System was devised (Williams, 1998: 55–63).3 Moreover,
waste is further classified through recycling programmes, which separ-
ate out different kinds of rubbish (glass, paper, plastics, metals, organic
and so on). It might be arguable however, whether under such regimes,
this material is actually ‘rubbish’ at all. For the very act of such sorting
and classification reconstitutes the objects, removes them from one
system (the household) and places them in another (the recycling
factory); rubbish in contrast de-constitutes objects, removes them from
any system altogether so that in effect, they no longer exist, as matter.
This distinction applies equally to the more marginal types of recycling,
such as with the ‘dumpster divers’ who retrieve objects from bins and
dumps, or the artists using the trash which has been transported to
Mexico from the States and sold back there as art (Cerny et al., 1996).
The key point however is that all these different ‘wastes’ have their own
spaces, their own cycles and such classifications, one might suggest, are
peculiarly modern. My primary concern in this article however, is with
domestic or household rubbish and its articulation.
It is a common occurrence on archaeological sites of the 18th and
19th centuries (and even before) that such different orders of waste are
not obviously demarcated. In particular human waste and domestic
rubbish are often found together, usually in the same space – at the
margins of the domestic domain, at the back edge of the backyard.
Rubbish pits or middens and privies or cess pits sit side by side,
indeed the abandonment of privies is often marked by major dumps of

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household items discarded by the departing residents or incoming

tenants (Wheeler, 2000). Such practices continued even into the earlier
20th century on rural sites. At a recently excavated farm on the edge of
Cambridge, two disused privy pits were found backfilled with domestic
rubbish from the 1900s to the 1940s, probably during transfer of owner-
ship (Lucas and Whittaker, 2001; this is discussed further later in this
article). Increasing urbanization in the 19th century meant the amount
of domestic waste was also increasing and under the prevailing medical
theory of miasma, close connections were made between this waste
(particularly its smell) and the spread of disease (Wear, 1992; Lupton,
1995: 26–36). In Britain, the health reformer Edwin Chadwick made
clear links between disease and factors such as refuse disposal in his
1842 Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great
Britain, and as a result, the 1848 Public Health Act encouraged local
authorities to provide public waste disposal services, later enforced by
the 1866 Sanitary Act and 1875 Public Health Act. However, it was not
until much later toward the end of the 19th and early 20th century that
such services became standardized and ubiquitous. Most municipally
collected waste was directed into dumps and then landfills and this
remains the dominant destination for 90 per cent of today’s household
rubbish in the UK (DoE, 1994; Williams, 1998: 3). Only 5 per cent is
recycled, with the remaining 5 per cent incinerated (Williams, 1998: 3).
In the United States over the course of the 19th century, similar
processes occurred although a little later (Melosi, 1981). Refuse as a
major problem only started to be discussed and acted upon in the 1880s
and 1890s, but thereafter development was swift and rapidly caught up
with legislation and schemes in Europe, largely due to the dominating
influence of Colonel Warner. Drawing largely on European precedent,
he encouraged the development of an integrated municipal programme
of refuse management as well as experimenting with collection methods
and source separation (Melosi, 1981). As in Europe, landfills were the
major destination of waste, although not as high as 90%; at the turn of
the 20th century landfills accounted for 70% and today it stands at 63%
(Melosi, 1981: 164; Williams, 1998: 16). In the US, incineration was more
common (it is currently 16%), but recycling (as resource recovery rather
than reuse – see later), particularly since the 1970s, also takes in a greater
proportion of waste than in the UK (currently 17%, Williams, 1998: 16).
One of the consequences of the developing legislation and public
concern with rubbish was a growing distinction being made between
different kinds of waste (mentioned earlier). Such distinctions often
generated prohibitions against mixing of these different types of waste
such as the tipping of garbage or rubbish into privies (McCarthy and
Ward, 2000). Such increasingly elaborate distinctions also coincided with
the discovery of microbes and the new science of bacteriology, replacing

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the old miasmic theory. More importantly however, it was an associated

relocation of the primary site of cleanliness or hygiene, from the environ-
ment to the individual that created the modern distinctions we inhabit
today (Armstrong, 1993; Lupton, 1995: 37). This new focus on personal
or bodily hygiene is most sharply represented in the material culture of
the modern household through the segregation of bodily from other
domestic waste (Lupton and Miller, 1992). In this light, it might seem
ironic that at this time, indoor lavatories become more common replac-
ing the outdoor privy, but it allowed for much tighter and co-ordinated
control over the regulation of personal hygiene. The association between
the lavatory and the bathroom is only one of many new reorganizations
of domestic space which occurred in the wake of this new discipline, but
inevitably the separation of kitchen refuse from bodily waste soon
became standard practice and generated new types of material culture
such as the indoor cistern toilet and the kitchen bin (Palmer, 1973;
Wright, 1980: 138–51; Hardyment, 1988: 91–110).
One might see this demarcation expressed in other ways as well as
just physical separation of spaces; for example, many later 19th century
chamber pots and early cistern toilets were colourfully decorated in
transfer prints, but not long into the 20th century, plain white became
the standard colour (Blair, 2000). It is possible to see how such a move
away from decorated lavatory wares might have been impelled by the
growing focus of personal hygiene and its need to distinguish its material
culture from that in the kitchen or on the dinner table where such
decorations continued to flourish. Yet ironically, during the 20th century
there has been a growing co-ordination of domestic furnishings and
fittings according to their space, which while further encouraging this
demarcation, also reinforces the spatial context of the object. Colour co-
ordinated bathrooms and kitchens where toilets match baths and wash
basins, or bins match cupboards, wash bowls and drip trays signify not
so much their specific function as other objects in the same space (cf.
Baudrillard, 1996). A contemporary retail catalogue for example will
typically not place all bins together on the same page/spread but include
them according to kitchen ‘schemes’ – thus chrome bins will fall on
pages with other chrome products (e.g. toasters, kettles), while a range
of coloured plastic swing bins each occur with their matching sets of
buckets, bowls, drip trays and so on (Argos, 2001: 363–72). Early bins all
tended to be plain, in galvanized iron.
The modern organization of rubbish is thus closely tied in to a whole
series of changes affecting the bodily and household economies at the
end of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Lupton and Miller, 1992). Yet
although we now have different kinds of rubbish, there remains some
continuity between them and the responses they evoke. They all can be
characterized as waste, the unneeded and unused effluviae of different

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systems, whether this is the body, the house or the factory. Lupton and
Miller for example have discussed how an aesthetics of waste implicitly
connected bodily and household economies and design in the early to
the mid-20th century (Lupton and Miller, 1992). They use the term
‘process of elimination’ to signify a conceptual intertwining of the bio-
logical, economic and aesthetic, where streamlining formed a key re-
current theme. Movement and design are both streamlined, movement
for example through the ergonomic kitchen,4 design through the flowing
curves of everyday domestic objects from steam irons to refrigerators. In
particular, it is the domestic landscapes of the kitchen and bathroom,
they argue, that form the key nexus for the articulation of this process.
All of these spaces can be envisaged as systems or economies through
which objects flow, waste being that which is ejected from the system
as unused and inessential.
Despite the growing discourse on household economies and hygiene,
the concept of a specifically disposable material culture as opposed to de
facto rubbish, was slow in emerging. The case of glass bottles illustrates
this. A bottle from one of the early 20th-century assemblages from the
Cambridge farm mentioned earlier had this text embossed on its side:
THIS BOTTLE IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF J. N. BALDRY AND ONLY
LOANED. ANY OTHER PERSON USING THE BOTTLE WILL BE
PROSECUTED. Such warnings were common in order to prevent other
people refilling the bottle and passing it on as the original contents.5
Manufacturers’ fears of this kind of fraud were common, indeed many
even sent agents out to retrieve bottles from other companies or private
households, sometimes prosecuting for illegal reuse (Busch, 1987: 71).
The practicality of this kind of system largely depended on the fact that
the companies and their products were also largely local – many of
the glass bottles in the Cambridge farm assemblage are embossed with
Cambridge makers’ marks (e.g. Wadsworths, Star Works, Woods & Sons,
Bailey & Tebbutt, all of which were local breweries or mineral-water
works). For larger corporations with wider coverage, such a retrieval
system would have been more difficult, and this may have encouraged
the decline in bottle reuse, along with the development of the automatic
bottle machine in the early 20th century which could produce bottles as
fast or faster than they could be consumed. Disposability slowly became
a more viable option than reusability, although since the later 20th
century, recycling has somewhat altered this formula.
Moreover these changes affecting the reuse of glass bottles were not
isolated but part of a wider shift in packaging which should be explained
not so much by technological innovation or baseline economics, but
changes in consumption practice (Strasser, 1999: 168–73). During the
19th century and even into the early decades of the 20th, most packaging
consisted of glass or ceramic containers, paper or card boxes and metal

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cans and boxes.6 Most of this packaging was intended for reuse,
especially the ceramic and glass containers, but from the late 19th
century goods began to be sold in packages that were intended for dis-
posal and not reuse, and over the course of the early 20th century, this
principal spread to cover almost all commodities. The main medium of
this disposability was paper/card and since the later 20th century, plas-
tics and other synthetics. The force behind this move to disposability is
precisely the same that caused the demarcation of wastes and their
associated spaces discussed earlier in this article: the new discourse of
personal hygiene.
The development of paper and card packaging for products such as
biscuits was closely connected to this discourse – Uneeda’s famous turn-
of-the-century In-Er-Seal carton was explicitly promoted under the
banner of cleanliness (Hine, 1995: 81–3). More importantly in this
context however, is that the associated disposability of the package
undoubtedly created an aesthetic that made a link between cleanliness
and single-use. Every time such a product was purchased off the shelf,
the consumer was assured that the package was new and therefore clean,
and this assurance was strengthened precisely because they threw away
the package after using the product. In other words, a reinforcing loop
was established between disposability and consumption through the
mediation of the package. Associated with this disposability is also the
need to contradict the apparent effort that went into its creation, thus
sustaining the belief that one is paying for the contents and not the pack-
aging.7 Thus throwing away the package only reinforces its valueless-
ness. Such an aesthetic has continued today, especially through the use
of plastics as packaging; cellophane for example is widely used on rela-
tively unprocessed foodstuffs (fruit, vegetables, meat) in supermarkets
because of it double ability to be both transparent (‘invisible’) and yet
enhance or even transfer a visual ‘freshness’ onto the product through
its glossy surface (Hine, 1995: 124–8; Bowlby, 2000: 103).8 Moreover, this
loop or chain between disposal and consumption has almost become
hyper-signified today as packages typically have use-by dates which tell
the consumer the lifespan of their object, exactly when to consume it or
dispose of it, not leaving the temporality of the object open to any
chance.9

VALUE AND RECYCLING

If disposability has become a key aspect to much of modern material
culture, especially in terms of the domestic economy of goods, it has
been offset by an equally dominant and contradictory morality which
promulgates thrift and associated anti-waste values. This is most -
apparent in the practice of recycling and reuse; the two terms are similar

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but not always interchangeable, the difference most clear in the case
of glass bottles, which will be discussed later. Nevertheless, no sharp
distinction will be made here, the context providing the main basis for
preference of one term over the other. Susan Strasser discusses the
history of these practices in Waste and Want and argues that the trans-
formations in rubbish disposal since the late 19th century are directly
linked to changes in what she calls our stewardship of objects (Strasser,
1999). As Strasser relates, during the 19th century a great proportion of
domestic material culture was recycled, or more accurately, reused, both
within and without the household. Things like worn out clothes, animal
bone and fat were all used as the raw material for other objects – paper,
quilts, rugs, buttons, candles, soaps and other items. This was not just
on a domestic scale either, but major industries were based on this waste,
with classes of people earning their livelihood as collectors for the fac-
tories.10 Moreover, most of the early packaged goods in the 19th century,
such as the various bottled products were sold with the intention that
the containers (i.e. empty bottles) would be returned and reused (Busch,
1987). This practice has to be distinguished from the contemporary one
of recycling; today, the bottles are largely broken up and used as a raw
material in the production of new bottles. In the 19th and earlier part of
the 20th century, the bottle was kept intact and merely cleaned and
refilled, a practice which only exists today in a small fraction of cases
(e.g. milk bottles).
The practices of reuse which Strasser describes for the 19th century
may or may not have reduced over the course of the 20th century;
certainly care must be taken not to mythicize an eco-friendly past against
a rapacious, consumerist, throwaway present. A great deal of reuse con-
tinues in contemporary society as manifested in the whole ‘sub-culture’
of hand-me-downs, household reuse and second-hand or thrift shops. One
of the best ways to actually explore the longer term dynamic of these
practices is through an analysis of what gets thrown away. Historic
research suggests that in the late 19th century in Britain, around 80 per
cent of domestic waste consisted of the ashes/cinder from household fires,
with glass, metals, paper, textiles and food remains and so on making up
the remainder (Open University, 1993: 16). By the end of the 20th century
ashes/cinder had fallen to less than 5 per cent, while conversely glass,
metals, plastic and especially paper saw an increase, much of this related
to packaging (Open University, 1993). The high amount of ash/cinder in
the 19th century must also be seen in relation to the use of waste as fuel,
with much of the household rubbish being thrown in the stove or on the
fire. The noted changes are clearly linked to the widespread use of gas or
electric fires and stoves after the 1950s/1960s, which not only meant
reduced ash/cinder wastes, but also a corresponding increase in the things
that were thrown away (Williams, 1998: 78–80). However, the rise

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specifically in packaging waste is clearly not the product of this change

– much of the old packaging waste (glass, metal) is not what would have
been used as fuel anyway. Rather it seems to reflect a real rise in dispos-
able packaging. Food remains, paper and textile, being more combustible,
would have made up most of the waste incinerated, and indeed the
amount of food remains making up household waste rose from less than
a tenth to around one-quarter from the late 19th to the late 20th century
(Open University, 1993).11 However, textiles have remained more or less
constant while paper/card has increased from around one-twentieth to
one-third of domestic rubbish, an increase greater than simply attribu-
table to a change in disposal method but one related to the rise in pack-
aging and magazines/newspapers. Currently, packaging waste accounts
for typically about one-quarter of domestic rubbish (Open University,
1993).12 The contemporary figures are fairly similar in the United States,
with packaging, and paper in particular, forming a slightly higher pro-
portion (Open University, 1993: 130; also see Rathje and Murphy, 2001:
104, 218).
It must be remembered however that it is only with an ‘archaeo-
logical’ approach that we can really begin to understand discard pro-
cesses in operation at the domestic scale and in reliable detail, as the
Garbage Project so lucidly demonstrates (Rathje, 2001). Often, data on
waste composition and ratios, derive from an approach called materials-
flows, which estimates waste generation by a proxy analysis of produc-
tion and consumption rates – but this is dependent on several untested
assumptions and its resultant figures have been shown to be misleading
(Rathje and Murphy, 2001: 48–9).13 Instead, direct waste analysis of
either household refuse and landfills, as conducted by the Garbage
Project, offers the most rigorous approach to studying rubbish. Such an
archaeological approach offers the means to examine these dynamics.
Nevertheless, what these general figures still suggest are two things: first,
the greater changes in the composition of domestic/municipal waste
seem primarily related to the changing nature of domestic foodways,
specifically the change from solid fuels to ‘cleaner’ gas/electric and a rise
in disposable packaging. Second, one of the few constants concerns tex-
tiles (i.e. clothing), this suggests that the reuse of many items or materi-
als has remained fairly stable. In other words, while disposability may
have increased in some arenas of the domestic economy (particularly the
kitchen), in many others, reuse has continued as a viable alternative.
This is supported by a study of contemporary reuse in Tuscon, Arizona
which found that of major domestic appliances and furnishings, only a
fraction were actually thrown away; rather, about a third were kept in
storage, another third sold/given away to stores and the final third
given/sold to friends or relatives (Schiffer et al., 1981).14
Granted therefore, that reuse continues to form an important part

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of the domestic economy, how do we understand its articulation? One

of the more popular impressions would align such practices with re-
cycling and a concern to reduce wastefulness. The emergence of recy-
cling schemes since the 1960s and 1970s has certainly been a more vocal
and public issue than informal reuse, and perhaps because of this and
the necessity for governmental and/or institutional support, it has
tended to colour our perception of reuse and waste. Thus recycling can
be seen to have taken on a reconciling role, resolving the dilemma of
disposability: recycling permits a disposable material culture yet at the
same time counteracts the apparent wastefulness in such a practice. But
the ideology of recycling may be out of all proportion to its efficacy and
experience in practice; surveys of attitudes to recycling show how
people want to recycle more, but at the same time, do not do so – the
reasons given tending to be laziness, business, forgetfulness or in-
convenience (Waste Watch, 1998: 26). The statistics on recycling cited
earlier in this article testify to this inefficacy. The question one should
perhaps ask is: is it enough to simply see recycling and particularly
reuse as a counter-ideology to wastefulness, or does it have a more
active sense of direction?
A key aspect to reuse practices is the notion of the bargain, often the
more important motivation than a concern for waste; this certainly
motivates much of the consumption of second-hand goods rather
than a wider altruistic concern to minimize waste (Miller, 2001: 119).
This empirical observation has some theoretical support in Thompson’s
Rubbish Theory, which defines rubbish as objects with zero value that
mediate between objects whose value decreases over time (transient
objects) and those which increase (durable objects). In the classic
example of the stevengraph (a woven silk picture), he argues that low
value ephemera can be converted to high value durables such as
antiques through the mediation of this rubbish category (Thompson,
1979). Thompson’s work does develop some very interesting ideas,
particularly the idea that rubbish is a border category rather than simply
disorder. Thompson’s whole discussion of rubbish is predicated on the
concept of value, with rubbish being of zero value, acting as a catalyst
able to create or transform objects with low or negative values into
highly valued objects. In its role as a kind of zero (or universal) signifier
it transcends fixed assumptions and mediates different value systems,
highlighting points of difference yet at the same time, enabling com-
munication. Thompson’s theory takes into account different people’s
relative perceptions of what rubbish is, but at the same time preserving
a definition which is universal. Thus while one person’s junk thrown on
a skip is another person’s antique, it is precisely this difference which
makes the object a border object, whose value is not fixed but negotiable
by action. There are criticisms to be made of Thompson’s theory, not

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least the manner in which he polarizes terms such as transient and

durable, or value and valueless objects; more particularly, the adoption
of rubbish as a universal, zero signifier places a strain on the meaning
of the word and its usefulness. For example, I do think there is a real,
qualitative difference between a stevengraph in a junk shop and the
contents of a bin – or even for that matter, a stevengraph in a junk shop
and one on a tip.
As long as objects still participate in the system, as in recycling, they
remain constituted. Thus a stevengraph does not have to become
rubbish before it can become an antique – in fact most things which
are recycled (whether glass bottles or junk-to-antique) bypass the
rubbish category altogether, in the vernacular sense of the term. They
are always constituted as something (empty bottle, junk), they just
become reconstituted as something else (cullet, antique) – there is no
need for an intermediary in this process. These contrast with those
objects that do come via rubbish tips such as the Mexican garbage art
or an antique pulled from a skip; certainly a similar process is in the
operation of reconstitution, and it may not matter whether the antique
was pulled from a skip or bought at a junk shop from this perspective.
But this context does matter from the point of view of how the object
arrived there in the first place. A very different attitude is displayed
toward an object thrown away than to one given or sold to a junk shop.
In the context of this article, Thompson’s main failing lies in the way
he emphasizes the reconstitutive force of rubbish (i.e. in transforming
values or mediating between elements of a system), rather than its
deconstituted nature. This is why he does not distinguish rubbish from
recycling, and even goes so far as to claim that the closed contents of a
bin are not even rubbish (Thompson, 1979: 92). Yet it is precisely this
aspect that requires further analysis – how do objects come to be dis-
carded and what role does this act of de-constitution play in the
economy of the household?

DISPOSSESSION AND INALIENABILITY

The idea of rubbish as un- or de-constituted material culture remains a
powerful one. This is not to deny rubbish a social or cultural meaning,
let alone as a subject of discourse. But it is to affirm that rubbish, in itself
only exists culturally because it lies at the borders or interstices of social
existence – it lives in an ambiguous plane, both part of and yet outside
the domestic economy, an existence that is only maintained and medi-
ated by objects such as bins which are able to take part more inclusively
in this economy (as desirable objects). More significantly though, rubbish
needs to be linked to a temporality of desire which is never present to
its object but always future or past. That which we desire/no longer. This

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doubling of desire forms a key part of consumption viewed in the

reworked Marxist notions of appropriation and alienation, whereby
rubbish is created through the interplay of these processes. It is this
doubling that I want to explore through an analysis of the relation
between rubbish and consumption in the economy of the household.
The issue of de-constitution, of throwing away, clearly needs to be
related to theories of consumption (e.g. Miller, 1995); the ‘no longer’ of
desire, when desire for an object falls away might be likened to the
process of alienation – or rather, re-alienation.15 But the dynamic of
this drawing away or re-alienation has not really been addressed in
consumption studies, and it is directly linked to the problem of rubbish.
Consumption, it might be said, is not simply about making the alienable
inalienable, but equally the reverse. In the general economy of the
household or the person, shedding off possessions can be as complex a
process as acquiring them, and acts such as giving away, recycling and
discard, need to be examined as different responses to this process. In
many cases, there is a variously strong reluctance to discard; hoarding
unused, unneeded objects is a common practice, and somehow the
stronger the investment in the original appropriation, the harder it
can be to dispossess ourselves of an object. Three examples will help
illustrate this, one archaeological, one ‘archaeo-ethnographic’ and one
ethnographic.
Recent excavations on the outskirts of Cambridge, recovered several
dumps of household waste into disused privy pits dating from the 1900s
to the 1940s (Lucas and Whittaker, 2001). Broken crockery, glass bottles
and jars, tin saucepans and kettles were all thrown away, some com-
plete but most broken up. The contents of these assemblages probably
did not accumulate all at once – many of the objects are usually associ-
ated with longer use lives (e.g. kitchen and table wares) as well as
greater reusability (e.g. the glass bottles) and this would suggest that the
assemblages had built up over a period of time, years probably. The
reasons for their dumping may well be due to a household/yard clear-
ance of a departing or incoming household during property transfer at
least in terms of the complete items such as the jars and bottles. But
even for the broken objects which may have lain on a rubbish tip behind
the house, this rubbish might be read as ‘hoarding’ of some kind, with
the objects accessible and still retrievable, until the final act of dumping
into the privy pit. The second example comes from a study of an aban-
doned council house also in the Cambridge area. Most of the rooms had
been cleared, unwanted objects strewn around, but in one room there
were boxes with various items which had been packed ready to take –
but for whatever reason, were left. The house was encountered in mid-
flight as a single mother with two children fled after a relationship
breakdown (Buchli and Lucas, 2001). A clear distinction emerged

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between the items packed away ready to take and those deliberately
left, revealing a sense of valuation of inalienable objects – for example,
basic household furnishing such as curtains and ornaments were
packed away for removal, while Christmas decorations were not.
Similarly, of the mother’s clothing, jackets and suits were gathered up
while T-shirts and underwear were left strewn about (Buchli and Lucas,
2001: 162). A final example of this process is giving away property in
extreme circumstances when an elderly person leaves their home to go
into care and has to dispose of the greater part of their belongings. The
importance of giving things to relatives, and even specific items to
specific relatives is often a complex process in which such relationships
are confirmed or endangered and has been explored in the French
Canadian context in terms of the ritual of breaking up the home, or
casser maison (Marcoux, 2001).
This last example in particular reveals an irony in that the more care
we take to dispose of something, the more we are contradicting the act
of disposal. Nevertheless, it perhaps also only serves to underline the
difficulty we have in discard, in dispossession and the power of ‘inalien-
able possessions’, which is evident in all the examples. Returning to the
study already cited of reuse in Tuscon, Arizona, it is quite clear that the
same themes which are being played out in these examples, can be read
in general household cycles. The study found that of the old objects that
had been replaced by new items, around one-third were variously
retained in the house (hoarded or reused in some manner), one-third
were given away or sold to relatives or friends, and one-third given away
or sold to strangers or stores. Only 6 per cent were actually thrown away
(Schiffer et al., 1981: 74–5). This reinforces the notion that discard is
difficult – we hold on to things, or if not, pass them on to kin and
friends,16 or at least, to stores or other people where their alienation is
not complete. Discard, it seems, is often a last resort.
This reluctance to throw away things, thus making them alienable
again by de-constitution, might seem to contrast with the casual discard
of quotidian rubbish, such as packaging or magazines. But even though
we are, in putting something in the bin, making a statement about an
object’s (re-)alienable status, as long as it remains in our bin or on our
property, there remains a residue of ownership and inalienability as
expressed through the privacy we feel towards our rubbish. Nobody
likes someone else rummaging through their bin and much of the field-
work conducted by groups such as the Garbage project have to mediate
issues of privacy and anonymity (Rathje and Murphy, 2001: 23–4).
Nevertheless, once the contents are in the landfill or even the garbage
truck, few would feel any personal sense of violation (unless a specific
search was being made for someone’s rubbish). Rubbish then, often goes
through a graduated process of (re-)alienation, and a sense of attachment

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often lingers which can be expressed between the extremes of hoard-

ing junk to feeling possessive over the contents of one’s bin. Again, the
temporal rhythms may be different and drawn out for longer or shorter
durations, but the process of rejection or alienation of an object is as
complex as its acquisition or appropriation.
Seen from this perspective, the modern process of consumption
therefore is as much about dispossession as possession. How we remove
objects from the domestic and personal economy is as important to
understanding consumption as how they enter it. Moreover, throwing
something away would seem to entail quite different responses to giving
something away or recycling it. Throwing something away, putting it in
the bin, would seem to have a finality which is not present in other forms
of disposal; the finality of de-constitution, de-mattering an object, both
structurally and symbolically. The question is, therefore, do we in fact
not need a place that can accommodate the destruction or de-constitution
of material culture? Is it conceivable that, even if it were possible to
recycle all our waste for example, would we still not need to throw some
things away, or at least know that we could do so? The bin therefore
plays a central role in this process, the absoluteness of the bin as a de-
constituting place articulates the recognition that we no longer
need/desire/want this object and it places a certainty on this ‘no-longer’,
that is irrevocable. The bin acts as the siphon for more than our
unwanted objects, but for the very need to no longer want objects: to
make the object alienable again.
I have only really touched the surface of most of the issues raised
here, but I believe it demonstrates the potential for a larger project
exploring the dynamics of rubbish and consumption. Moreover, while
my focus has chiefly been on the recent historical and contemporary
regimes of disposal practised in the Anglo-American context, there is
the question of the wider applicability of its conclusions. While the
domestic systems of hygiene and thrift discussed here may be culturally
specific, the general issue of re-alienation and its link to rubbish could
be explored in other cultural contexts where it has very different social
and symbolic meanings. This article is therefore only really offered as a
starting point rather than a definitive statement or detailed case study,
its main aim is to stimulate more attention on the concept of waste in
the field of material culture studies.

Acknowledgements
An earlier draft of this article was kindly read over in great detail by Bill Rathje
who gave an almost endless supply of incisive and critical comments that helped
to substantially improve the structure and content of the article. Thanks must
also go to an anonymous reader for their encouraging and critical comments.

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Notes
1. One should be careful to distinguish disposability from waste – there is
actually a small but substantial research on waste/rubbish (e.g. Melosi, 1981;
Hodder, 1987; Staski and Wilk, 1991; Strasser, 1999; Martin and Russell,
2000; Rathje and Murphy, 2001) but very little on disposability, at least that
I have been able to find.
2. Significantly, they defend thrift against any association with meanness,
explicitly denying this connotation, as Beeton had also done.
3. The 1995 Environment Act incorporated a National Waste Strategy in
conformity with all members of the European Union, after an EC Directive.
4. This streamlining of the domestic kitchen was a concept transplanted from
factory and work places, promoted by reformists such as Catherine Beecher
and Christine Frederick. The same transposition can also be seen in the new
designs of the self-service supermarkets which emerged at the same time,
employing the same language of streamlining (Bowlby, 2000: 143–6).
5. Some bottles still have such a caption on their labels, especially mineral-
water bottles, with attendant warnings to check the seal.
6. See Davis (1967) for a light history of early packaging.
7. For a more general discussion of the link between disposability and graphic
design, see Jacobs (1990).
8. Such a quality might also be compared with the use of the shop window
whereby transparency and framing act as a self-advertisement (see Bowlby,
2000: 59–63).
9. Some authors might even wish to see deep psychological symbolism in such
a process, asserting a kind of immortality in the face of the ephemerality of
the object (see Baudrillard, 1996).
10. In many parts of the world, such groups of people still subsist off this kind
of livelihood – the pepenadores of Mexico City or zabaline of Cairo (Rathje
and Murphy, 2001: 192–3).
11. This rise however may equally relate to any number of other changes such
as the decrease in using left-overs or residuals (e.g. peel) or simply an
increase in foodstuffs.
12. These figures are based on weight; however, it may be that waste by volume
is an equally valid measure, especially in terms of landfill capacity, and some
types of waste such as paper rate much higher by volume than weight (e.g.
see Rathje and Murphy, 2001: 96).
13. Even more unreliable are questionnaires or interviews with subjects about
their discard practices (Rathje and Murphy, 2001).
14. In relation to this, much of a household’s acquisition of the same kind of
possessions is composed of ‘second-hand’ goods – about a third (Schiffer et
al., 1981).
15. In effect, rubbish is comparable to the unopened package or commodity –
it is alienable and interchangeable (cf. Thompson’s point about rubbish as
a zero signifier, discussed in the article).
16. In the same manner, the Tuscon project also found that the mechanisms for
acquiring reused items were heavily dominated by kin and community ties.
The important corollary of this of course, is that much of the reuse and
recycling that goes on with many household items falls outside the official
economy and often outside of money exchange.

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◆ G AV I N L U C A S gained his PhD in Archaeology from Cambridge and is

currently working for the University Field Unit. He is also directing a project on
colonialism and diaspora in South Africa. His research interests include the
archaeology and material culture of British Imperialism. Address: Cambridge
Archaeological Unit, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK. [email: gml15@cam.ac.uk]

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