Trash 100 Years Ago vs Today

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In the late 1700’s, Benjamin Franklin started the first waste collection service and street-cleaning service in the United States.

However, waste managementhas been around for thousands of years. In Ancient Greece, we see the first recorded landfill around 3000 BC, where large holes were dug deep into the earth to dump refuse. This method of waste management may not be the most sustainable – but it’s still widely used in some developing countries even today.

Another method of disposing of trash is incineration. Incinerators are considered a “modern” way of waste management due to when it was incepted, in 1874 in the United Kingdom, and within just over 10 years, the USA also adopted incineration as a waste management method. Although incineration is widely used across the globe, the major drawbacks include poisonous gases and pollutants that harm local air quality.

The stats in this video are from "Urban Residential Refuse Composition and Generation Rates for the Twentieth Century" by D.C. Walsh. (Evinronmental Science & Technology 36, no. 22 (2022): 4936-42.