"'What has four wheels and flies?' A garbage truck of course" (Melosi xiii).
Centuries ago, long before anyone even thought of trucking garbage far away from homes and businesses, people used to throw their refuse out the windows into the streets ... hopefully when no one was walking by. Trash thus accumulated till it would reach the top of the upper windows and, soon enough, till it would bury the houses. Archaeologists have cleared thick layers of decomposed and intact garbage and sand to discover entire cities and civilizations heretofore lost under their own garbage. As the field researchers dug and dug deeper, they unearthed six or seven cities, each interred in its own refuse, one city on top of the other.
"Refuse is primarily an urban blight. Agrarian societies throughout history have successfully avoided solid-waste pollution ...." (Melosi 3). "In the late nineteenth century urban America discovered the 'garbage problem'" (Melosi 21). In a 1906 issue of Charities and the Commons (later called the Survey), the editor proclaimed the rise of sanitary engineering as "a new social profession" (Melosi 79). Yet, it is only in the 1960s and 1970s that Americans began to "link the resolution of the refuse problem to American affluence and the consumption of goods" (Melosi 20).
Today, we are richer and we have developed ways of packaging food, beverage, and non-perishable objects that make keeping and
transporting these goods over long periods and long distances possible. In fact, we are producing more trash than ever before. And we, Americans, are producing more garbage than any other country. A sign of wealth, of immaturity, of lack of social consciousness? Whatever, the problem arises: If we do not choose to throw our refuse out the window, what do we do with it and what should we do with it?
"Garbage" is everything we do not want. It is "refuse", "trash". Of course, "One man's garbage is another man'...