The man who throws away and forgets

Baptiste Monsaingeon offers a curious invitation to travel among the waste produced by our contemporary societies. This book, which “listens to what remains”, is the result of research begun during a thesis in sociology. Opening with a historical overview that traces the relationship between man and waste – mainly household waste -, it focuses on the current challenges related to the uses and reappropriation of waste. He deploys a critique of our waste society, which claims to control it, through an ideal and politically magnified management, recycling. However, this method of waste management aims to make these annoying objects invisible, revealing a society of overconsumption and destruction of non-renewable natural resources.

History of waste

The first half of the essay traces the history of household waste management. The author has conducted an exhaustive literature review since the medieval period, citing the work of Sabine Barles, Catherine de Silguy, Jean-Pierre Leguay, Thomas Leroux, Delphine Corteel and Stéphane Le Lay, as well as the research of Rathje and Murphy. The author rightly defends the idea that waste does not exist during the medieval period because of the absence of a “social construction” of waste management, despite the desire expressed by some kings to legislate on garbage. The street is the receptacle for all the waste thrown away by the inhabitants and, from the III^e century AD, the city lives in the tumult of waste.

We could define this chaos as a “Hobbesian state of nature” where no institution exists to manage waste. The author returns to the activity of ragpickers, these waste collectors who multiplied from the pre-industrial period. With the hygienist movement aimed at cleaning up cities and the efforts of the State seeking to normalize their activity, this rebellious profession, which lives largely on the margins of society, is reduced to a mere shadow of itself, until it disappears with an order of the police prefect of November 30, 1946.

If the period of the two world wars encourages recovery and reuse, Baptiste Monsaingeon specifies the low efficiency of collection during the war. The post-war period is immediately characterized by the development of disposable products, pillars of the society of planned obsolescence. Waste is then increasingly ousted, treated out of sight of the inhabitants, whether by landfill or incineration. The author calls this period “learning to forget”. If it is classic to describe the 1970s as an environmentalist turning point, during which unbridled growth and waste find their first declared adversaries, the consumer society is not seriously challenged. Waste is “environmentalized”, thanks to a political defense of the interest of recycling, a virtuous circle allowing not to revolutionize the established societal order.

The author does not hesitate to denounce the strategic greening (or greenwashing) that benefits certain economic players in the waste sector. It is certain that large waste management groups such as Suez and Veolia are experiencing rapid economic growth that coincides with the changes. With the regulatory framework for waste from 1975, strong requirements are imposed on municipalities to manage waste and delegated waste management, entrusted to private players, is experiencing its golden age. With recycling and its sacralization, theHomo detritus buys a good conscience: throwing away properly becomes a know-how, allowing society to rest on the illusion of ecologically controlled waste. In fact, for a century and a half we have been producing a lot of highly toxic waste (containing heavy metals, radioactive materials and synthetic polymers), which cannot be integrated into any saving natural cycle. The author’s thesis is particularly welcome today, when the circular economy has acquired a popularity that often prevents any critical analysis.

The author focuses on this occasion on a singular fact, which was the subject of his field research, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This term refers to the immense moving mass of plastic, drifting in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, a striking manifestation of the colonization of the biosphere by plastic waste. While it took almost a century for plastic waste to occupy the public arena, its recycling (e.g. plastic bottles) PET) remains an unresolved problem, and we are now seeing initiatives to reduce consumption upstream. The law on energy transition of 1^er The July 2016 ban on the free distribution of plastic bags is an illustration of this, although the cost of plastic bags is now borne by the consumer instead of the large retailers, allowing its players to make significant savings.

A society more aware of the waste it generates?

Faced with the proliferation of waste, Baptiste Monsaingeon focuses on several perspectives for combating it, starting with the management and prevention of organic waste. The fight against food waste has been strongly criticized by a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 2011, before being the subject of several programs in industrialized countries including the US Food Waste Challenge in 2013, aimed at reducing, recovering and recycling food waste. More specific initiatives, such as vermicomposting (digestion of organic waste by worms), which appeared in the 1980s, are also being developed. This is the case of the freeganisma movement initiated by William Oakes, which advocates an ethic of non-consumption, and encourages the wiping out of trash and preparing meals from leftovers.

The gift economy also plays a major role, supported by donation sites such as Freecycle groups (created in the United States in 2003), an Internet platform that currently brings together around 5,000 collaborative exchange groups, allowing Internet users to give away objects they no longer want for free. Many initiatives of this type have developed in North America, Europe, Argentina and around the world. It is regrettable that the author makes little reference to marketing research, which emerged in the 1970s on the behavior of post-consumers giving away unwanted objects, and on the reasons that lead them to give.

This leads us to question this trend: does the relationship between donors and recipients of unwanted objects differ from the ordinary exchange of paid goods? What experience does the recipient of free objects gain? How is this post-consumption society characterized? The cities engaged in the zero-waste movement can give a partial idea. The city of Capannori, in Tuscany, is exemplary, with a sorting rate at source close to 100%, leading to a reduction of residual waste by half in less than ten years. Other municipalities have followed this example.

Homo detritus or Homo destructor?

This book on Homo detritus allows for a popularization of knowledge on the waste society and its contradictions, by highlighting the limits of the circular economy, for which the virtuous circle of recycling is rarely perfect. Some conceptual comparisons could nevertheless have been explored in more depth. The author compares Homo detritus has Homo economicus. Indeed, waste reveals the destructive side of our economy. Waste must be interpreted in the context of the destruction of value. The existence of waste pushes us to redefine the economy. It studies how rare resources are used (or re-used) to satisfy the needs of people living in society (recycling, agricultural recovery, reuse, etc.), but also how rare resources are destroyed (landfill, incineration).

Waste, this object destined for abandonment or having lost value, generates negative externalities whether at the level of recycling of the material (air pollution linked to the transport of glass or collected paper and cardboard), agricultural recycling (metal elements and emerging pollutants, present in the sludge of urban sewage treatment plants spread), or incineration (air pollution). Even though a new recycling ideology seems to promise a persistence of our consumption patterns, the difficulties associated with the treatment of our waste recall the fundamentally destructive potential of the methods of consumption and production of thehomo detritus.