Our Long History Nibbling the Edges of the Waste Problem
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| South Street, Philadelphia, August 1984. |
The Defenestration of Prague
In the spring of 1618 the people of Prague were busy arguing over religion. Emperor Ferdinand II, a Catholic, had been doing things that the predominantly Protestant aristocracy didn't like, such as ordering the destruction of Protestant churches. So one fine day a delegation of these aristocrats, who were collectively known as the Bohemian Estates, ambled over to the Prague castle, seat of local government, laid their hands on two of the emperor's advisors, named Vilem Slavata and Vaclav Borita (I've left out the diacriticals - forgive me), dragged them into the main hall of the castle, and threw them out a window.
It was three stories to the ground, and things didn't look good for Vilem and Vaclav, but something interesting happened. Catholic propagandists put out the word that angels swooped down to save them - and perhaps they did - but most people thought the two men landed on the spongy mass of a large manure pile. (Horse manure, for those of you who take an interest in these things.) Finding themselves not dead, Vilem and Vaclav immediately scuttled off to Vienna, where they complained to Emperor Ferdinand about their working conditions and those mean Bohemian Estates people.
The Defenestration of Prague, as it is called (to defenestrate is to throw somebody out a window - over the years there have been three events that came to receive the appellation Defenestration of Prague) was an opening salvo of the Thirty Years War, which devastated much of central Europe between 1618 and 1648 and, much later, led Bertolt Brecht to write
Mother Courage. (As is often the case with history, there are numerous versions of the defenestration tale, with variations particularly in the details. Here's a good
story from a reputable source.)
So, a manure pile in seventeenth-century Prague. Are we shocked? We shouldn't be. That's what life was like back then, in the city as well as the country. We may presume that the manure was eventually carted away and spread on farmers' fields. It helps, by the way, if you wait until the manure is well rotted. That way you're not spreading around a lot of fecal bacteria.
Cities have always generated a good amount of waste, and getting rid of it has, I think, almost always been a problem that people prefer not to think about. As a consequence, problems remain unsolved, often for extraordinarily long periods of time, and solutions, when they become available, are often delayed in their implementation, partly because they're usually expensive, and partly because politicians, as a group, seem to prefer cutting ribbons on things like bridges. Ribbon cutting at a sewage treatment plant? Maybe the lieutenant governor should take this one.
Still, over the years there have been those who have studied the problems, developed solutions, and even (after the inevitable delay) implemented them. As with most topics in civil engineering, a good place to start is the Romans.
Cloaca Maxima
The Romans made an early start in the waste management business with something called the Cloaca Maxima, built sometime around 600 BC. The term Cloaca Maxima simply means Great Big Sewer, and it seems to have gotten its start as a flood-control system, channeling several streams that ran through the city. Very soon, however, the attractiveness of this system for the expeditious removal of waste must have become apparent, and in due course the city had a whole network of these channels.
On the issue of whether the primary goal was flood control or filth removal, see Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow,
The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy (2015) pp. 63-70. Her conclusion, on p. 70: "From the evidence, it seems clear that Rome's glorious
cloacae were constructed primarily as culverts (for ground-water runoff), or what we usually call storm drains."
Rome's famous aqueducts, which brought fresh water from afar, were new arrivals compared to the Cloaca Maxima. The first one didn't show up until 312 BC. (The eleventh, and last, dates from 226 AD.)
It seems that, early on, the sewers were open trenches in the middle of the street. There were a number of downsides to this design. First was the stench. Second, there was the temptation to throw any and all trash into the sewer. Think about it. Would you rather load up all your household trash and haul it to a dump at some distance, or maybe drag it down to the Tiber? Or would you rather dump it into a trench in the middle of the street in front of your house? Talk about a labor-saving device. Unfortunately, this meant that sewers were often clogged by more solid waste than the available water could flush away.
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| South Street, May 1992. |
Then some bright young Roman engineer got the idea to cover over the sewers. I can just hear the Roman people, at a cacophonous public meeting, asking again and again, "So where are we supposed to throw our trash now?" And we're still trying to come up with a good answer to that question.
Personally, I think if you can't throw your solid waste into a trench in the street, the next best thing is to throw it into the middle of the street. And that's what the Romans did. In fact, they developed the bad habit of throwing their waste - both solid and liquid - out the window, saving themselves the rather unpleasant task of carrying a chamber pot down several flights of stairs (Romans who weren't rich generally lived in multistory apartment buildings). They were particularly fond of doing this at night - Rome didn't have any street lights, so if you dropped your bucket of used Kentucky Fried Chicken on somebody's head, chances were the person wouldn't know which apartment it came from. (See Lionel Casson,
Everyday Life in Ancient Rome, 1998, p. 40.)
Oddly, the residents of the Five Points neighborhood in New York City were handling their trash pretty much the same way, 2,000 years later. Here's historian Tyler Anbinder on conditions before the Civil War:
"New York streets were reputed to be the dirtiest in antebellum America. For decades citizens had thrown their garbage into the gutters, hoping that scavenging pigs would eat the mess or that rain would wash it away. Homeowners were supposed to sweep garbage into piles for the city to cart away, but the carts never came. As a result, street traffic mashed this household refuse together with the droppings of horses and other animals to create an inches-thick sheet of putrefying muck, which when it rained or snowed became particularly vile. Only when city fathers feared an outbreak of cholera in 1832 did the city properly clean its streets for the first time. When the workers chopped and scraped the sludge off, revealing the paved streets below, an old woman who had lived in New York all her life purportedly asked: 'Where in the world did all those [paving] stones come from? ... I never knew that the streets were covered with stones before.'" (Tyler Anbinder,
Five Points, 2001, p. 82.)
Old habits die hard.
So what, exactly, were the old Romans throwing into the street? Well, certainly their trash stream would have looked different from the trash stream in a modern American city like Philadelphia. No plastic, for starters. No paper - it was unknown in the West - so no cardboard boxes or newspapers. All the glass and plastic bottles, tin and aluminum cans, and Styrofoam and Tupperware containers would have been absent. In their place would be broken clay pots.
As for food waste, there was likely less than we have today. Like many pre-modern societies, the Romans seem to have had a tendency to eat everything in sight - the poor because they were hungry, and the rich because they could.
I think the vast majority of what lay on Roman streets was human and animal waste, and ashes from the charcoal braziers that Romans used to keep warm (well, warmish) in the winter, with a few table scraps thrown in, and a sprinkling of broken clay pots, along with other worn-out household items.
And so how did all this muck get off the street? Well, sometimes it rained, and some of it would be washed into the sewers and off to the Tiber. And then sometimes a guy would come along with a cart and shovel the muck into the cart and carry it away.
This was clearly a disruptive activity. Rome's streets were narrow, twisty, and, on the hills, steep. They were also "forever jammed," as Professor Casson puts it. "Julius Caesar faced up to the situation and passed a law banning all wheeled vehicles from dawn to dusk," thereby making Rome a pedestrian priority city on every street, at least during the day; "the only exceptions were the carts that carried in materials for the erection of public buildings and carried out debris from demolitions connected with these, and the carts that hauled away the refuse of the street cleaners." (Pp. 44-45.)
So the trash trucks could run 24/7.
Casson adds, "The law was enforced for centuries and applied in all the other cities of Italy, not merely Rome." (Pp. 45.) (For an English translation of Julius Caesar's Law on Municipalities of 44 BC, click
here. For an online story that covers waste and pollution in the Roman empire, click
here.)
So who did the garbage men work for? An interesting question. Although Rome had crews of city workers to clear clogged sewers, no such organization existed to clean the streets and cart the refuse away. City officials known as aediles were responsible for overseeing the repair and cleaning of the streets, but actually carrying out the work was the responsibility of the owners of the properties next to the street, the "abutters," as they are commonly called in American law. (See Koloski-Ostrow, pp. 80-81.)
In Philadelphia, we still have this arrangement for the repair and cleaning of sidewalks. It doesn't work very well, and I expect the system in Rome worked about the same.
Okay. Enough about ancient Rome. Let's jump ahead to Paris, just before the French Revolution.
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| South Street, May 1985, |
Paris
The Fontaine des Innocents, the oldest monumental
fountain in Paris, stands in the Les Halles district not far from the Centre Pompidou. It marks the place of a very old burying ground, the Cimitiere des Innocents.
This old graveyard was a terrible place. We think of cemeteries as tranquil places where each of the deceased has a spacious plot with a marker. The Cemetery of the Innocents was a different kind of place. In use since at least 1186, it was horribly overcrowded, with many mass graves and also many shallow graves. Think of it as a mosh pit for dead people.
These conditions were well known, and complained about, but very little beyond lip service was done until one day in 1780, when the proprietor of a restaurant adjacent to the cemetery went to his basement to retrieve a few bottles of wine. He was overwhelmed by an awful stench. He soon discovered that his basement had acquired some new tenants: An overcrowded mass grave just beyond his basement wall had applied so much pressure that the wall failed, and the grave spilled a pile of corpses in various stages of decomposition into the wine cellar. (I first ran across this story on page 159 of Shelley Rice's
Parisian Views, a simply wonderful book that was published in 1997 and is mainly about photography. For an online story, click
here.)
Zut alors! Time to do something. And indeed, the corpses were evicted and the Paris
Catacombs were born, repurposing an old quarry as the final, final resting place for the many bones retrieved from the Cemetery of the Innocents and a number of other cemeteries. (You can tour the Catacombs. The entrance is not terribly far from the Jardin du Luxembourg.)
Paris was quite an old city when this happened. It had a lot of old buildings, and a lot of old infrastructure. Paris started building its sewer system in the middle ages, initially with open trenches in the middle of the street (just like the Romans). The
first underground sewer was completed in 1370, under the rue Montmartre.
And of course Paris was about to enter the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution, its factories, its railroads, and a huge expansion of the city's
population as people poured in from the countryside seeking a better life - from half a million in 1801 to 2.7 million in 1901.
As the nineteenth century progressed, it rapidly became apparent that the old Paris required some renovation.
The heavy lifting came under the Second Empire (1852-1870). It was then that the emperor, Napoleon III, appointed Georges-Eugene Haussmann as prefect of the Seine; Haussmann served in that role from 1853 to 1870 and during that time effectively transformed the city of Paris.
Mr. H is best known for his work above ground - the boulevards and parks and squares, the apartment buildings, the iron-and-glass version of Les Halles, the Opera Garnier. He also rebuilt the sewers and the water supply, ably assisted by Eugene Belgrand. They reportedly doubled the supply of water and expanded the Paris sewer system fourfold. (Here's a well-footnoted
article on Haussmann's work in Paris.)
Haussmann and Co. certainly did the heavy lifting, but they didn't finish the job. In particular, they left behind them a highly dysfunctional waterway, called the Bievre (Beaver River). It's something of a cognate to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn - a small waterway that noxious industries glommed onto early. As Luc Sante describes it in
The Other Paris (2015):
"It was for a long time a sewer, collecting the outflow of abattoirs and hospitals as well as households, and its water was used by the tapestry manufacturers of the Gobelins along with tanners, dyers, and curriers of leather. Those uses destroyed the Bievre, turning it into a festering source of epidemics, creating immense mires of brackish mud on its edges, and polluting it irredeemably. 'Colored in every hue, yellow, green, red, ferrying noisome offal right alongside us, slimy, virtually immobile, nauseating, with a texture like clotted blood, with no reflections on its surface on a cloudy day, with heavy clumps of greenish foam slowly sliding by,' observed
Georges Cain in 1908." (Pp. 106-107.)
The Bievre had been canalized by 1844, and the next logical step was to cover it over - bury the body, as it were. This task began around 1874, proceeded in a leisurely way, and was not complete until well into the twentieth century.
Today there are actually hopes that sections of the Bievre in Paris can be
daylighted (that is, have the cover removed), creating a pleasant water feature and undoubtedly boosting local real estate values.
Sante also describes the ragpickers of Paris, who actually put a dent in the city's solid waste stream. Ragpickers (or rag-and-bone men, or scavengers) "collected not only rags and paper but also dead animals. The rags and paper were used for making paper and cardboard; bones went toward the manufacture of charcoal and blacking; broken glass was remelted; animal hides were tanned and the hair bought by wig makers." (Sante, p. 59.)
Ragpickers had been around in Paris since time immemorial, but during the nineteenth century their life became progressively tougher as the city worked on raising its game. A turning point came in 1884, when Eugene Poubelle, the prefect of the Seine, decided that city workers would collect the trash, and homeowners would get trash cans with lids and keep their trash in the cans until it was picked up. "Poubelle" to this day continues to be the French word for trash can. (Sante, p. 59.)
Scavenging is of course a worldwide phenomenon that probably dates back to the beginnings of trash. I found a very interesting article on the subject (to see it, click
here) and I'm grateful to it for giving me my title - New York City used scows, a specialized kind of barge, to transport waste to dumping sites. Scow trimmers were allowed to scavenge the waste on the barge. (See page 14 of the article.)
I think of scavenging as proto-recycling.
There are new things in the world of waste - plastic, for instance - but it amazes me just how far we can trace back a lot of the components of our current system of waste management.
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| 40th & Walnut, October 1984. |
The End
"Send it to the Schuylkill!" It's a Philly tradition. A boy's mama hands him a small bag of trash - table scraps, maybe a tin can or two - and the boy dutifully walks to the corner and pops it down into the storm drain, where its contents are promptly eaten by rats. Sometimes, I suppose, the bag and the tin cans actually make it to the Schuylkill.
Similar activities were taking place in the Subura neighborhood in Rome 2,000 years ago.
I'd like to think that education can help here. It's true that we're fighting against some very old habits passed down through many, many generations. And we still must contend with the continued disinterest of our leadership. But, yes, I think that education can help.
Philadelphia's
Fairmount Water Works is located on the Schuylkill River not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Water Works dates from 1812, and it's no longer operational. Instead, it teaches school groups about the Philadelphia watershed. I visited a couple of years ago, and I learned a lot.
You might think you can't do education in an operating plant, but there's a waste treatment facility on
Newtown Creek in New York City that has a visitor center, again mainly for school groups, that covers the trip that water takes, from how it gets to your home to how it gets cleaned and given back to Mother Nature.
There's a whole movement toward engaging people with facilities and operations that we have, in the past, generally sought to hide. For an article on this, click
here.
But education can't do it all. We need to rethink the basic design of our processes. And I know precisely where to start: the sidewalk. The Romans, 2,000 years ago, threw their trash into the street. Then, if a rainstorm happened along, some of it would get washed down into the sewers and off to the Tiber. And the rest of it might get swept up and carted away. Or maybe not.
How far have we progressed from that model? Well, the trash cart is motorized, as are the street sweeping trucks. And garbage now goes into plastic bags instead of sitting naked on the street.
(Most of the time. And yes, before plastic bags there were garbage cans. And, yes, we do classify our trash and recycle. The Romans clearly saw their trash stream as an undifferentiated mass; but then almost all of it was biodegradable, so separating it made less sense than it does now.)
We need some new ideas. Here's one candidate: New York City recently
proposed commandeering a few parking spots and placing large, secure trash receptacles there, replacing the plastic bags on the sidewalk. I think this idea, which is not entirely new, may have legs.
An older new
idea is located on Roosevelt Island in New York. It essentially involves moving trash through underground pipes attached to a gigantic vacuum cleaner. The system on Roosevelt Island has been there for nearly half a century, and the manufacturer reports that it has about 800 of these installed at various locations around the world. So, a proven concept. But probably a long-term fix.
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| South Street, December 1985. |
See also Did Carpet Bombing Inspire Urban Renewal? Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?
