Michelle Mulder - Trash Talk: Moving Toward a Zero-Waste World

Who says boots are only for feet? Creative container gardening turns broken boots into fancy flowerpots. POOPIX/ISTOCK.COM

What is garbage anyway?

Picture an empty yogurt container. It could be trash. But it could also become a pencil holder or a flower vase or a container for picking blackberries. An item only becomes trash when we decide that its no longer useful for anything else. People have always tossed trash, but a few human inventions have really made it pile up.

If you were living hundreds of thousands of years ago, you might have woken up each morning in a cave. Breakfast would be the roasted leg of a wild bird you had hunted the day before. When your belly is full, you look down at the bone in your hand. What could you use it for? Should you tie your hair around it to keep loose strands out of your face? Or should you dip the bone in ash and use it to draw pictures on the wall? Then again, maybe it could be a piece for a new game to play with the other kids.

Just as youre imagining the rules of your new game, your mother grunts at you. Its time to feed the fire, pick the bugs out of your little brothers hair and find some berries for lunch. You toss the bone into the bush until later. If you forget about it, nature will turn it into soil again (more about that in Chapter Two). But chances are youll remember. Stores havent been invented yet, and if you want a hair clip or a pencil or a toy, youve got to make it yourself.

Back in the days of living in caves, people traveled around a lot, following their food with the changes of the seasons. Then, about 12,000 years ago, people in the Near East (western Asia) started farming. For the first time ever, people began living in one place all year round. Cities formed, and city dwellers did what theyd done in the countryside: they threw what they didnt want out the window. But this time, their chicken bones and carrot tops didnt land in the bush. They landed in the street.

Ancient Minoans buried trash in pits like this one. YVAN POINTURIER

Each civilization had its own ideas about what to do with garbage. The Minoan people (who lived on the island of Crete about 5,000 years ago) tossed their trash in a pit outside their settlement and covered it over with dirt to keep down the smell. Two thousand years ago, the Chinese composted food scraps and recycled metals like bronze into new tools. Around the same time, on the other side of the planet, the Mayans of Central America were recycling some of their garbage and burying or burning the rest. Mostly, though, for thousands of years, trash landed in the street.

For hundreds of years, garbage filled the streets of London. Evening strolls were more enjoyable if you held your nose! LEBRECHT MUSIC & ARTS

In 1280, the citizens of London, England, were told to stop tossing waste out the window. No one suggested anywhere else to put the trash, though, so most people ignored the new rule. Cats, dogs, pigs, rats, mice, bugs and bacteria feasted on the stuff in the streets. Not long afterward, in Paris, France, the citys defenders complained that big piles of trash at the city gates blocked their view of invaders. Worried about the safety of their city, people cleared the gates but left rubbish in the rest of the streets. The rubbish attracted rats, which had fleas, which carried a disease called the bubonic plague. Between 1347 and 1352, one-third to one-half of Europes population died of this disease.