Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment.

Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment

Melosi, Martin V. 2005. (Revised Edition). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press. ISBN: 0-8229-5857-0 (paper), $32.00 (US$27.95), 320 pp.

While the publisher's web site advertises that Garbage in the Cities is "absolutely essential reading for historians", Melosi's expanded and updated version of his original 1981 text is also essential reading for environmental planners, geographers, and engineers who have been examining the wicked problem of municipal solid waste management. His work sheds new perspectives on this most controversial of planning issues. One of the most important contributions to the literature Melosi gives us is pointing out that there is nothing new about our present crisis. Politicians and the media are often fixated on the idea that there exists a waste crisis, but Melosi downplays that notion: "... the idea of a [garbage] crisis was a convenient, albeit a relatively simplified way, to label a complex set of issues ... however, crisis ignores its persistence over time" (p. 195). Melosi carefully deconstructs this so-called crisis using meticulously researched archival materials. In particular I have found his historical waste composition and management data very useful for both teaching and research purposes over the years, and the new version provides even more data.

Geographically the text is primarily a western-paradigmed account of the history of waste management in the United States, although Great Britain and Europe are cross-referenced often. The problems of developing nations, with their informal waste picking culture, are only casually reviewed in the last chapter. Canada is almost absent in the text. Notwithstanding, Richard Anderson's (York University Geography) research on the historical geography of Toronto's solid waste infrastructure mirrors Melosi's account of the USA. Despite the American focus, one of Melosi's themes integrated throughout the book highlights the struggle between individual, government and, later in the text, extended producer responsibility for sustainable waste management. This struggle transcends political boundaries in our globalized economy. For example, he speaks to "... the idea that personal action could make a difference. In a complex world where global warming and ozone depletion seemed beyond the control of the individual, recycling offered a way to participate in environmental reform" (p. 235).

While Melosi reviews the history of waste management from early civilization through to the 21st century, the emphasis of the text is his detailed account of the Progressive Era at the turn of the 19th century. While we know the black plague killed millions in European cities in the middle-ages due to non-existent waste disposal, Melosi points out that it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that "experiments in England and the United States demonstrated that there was some relationship between communicable diseases and putrefying waste" (p. 21). I found his portrayal of the tug of war between those who exposed the "filth theory" and those who favored the "germ theory" to be particularly fascinating. The author points out through this account that waste was a public health crisis long before it became an environmental crisis. However, he accurately portrays how it has always been an economic and political crisis. Even in the 1890's short-term waste management contracts were handed out for "political reasons" even though they lacked proper "long range planning for the city" (p. 82). Juxtapose the City of Toronto's decision to truck its waste to Michigan over a hundred years later. Has anything changed?

Reviewed by Chuck Hostovsky, Department of Geography, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN, USA