ancient cities

962 Waste
account of London Labour and the London Poor.
He suggested this specialization and capacity to
recycle waste was especially common in a large
city with extreme poverty; also, the scale and division
of labor were not to be found in small towns.
The possibilities of finding value in the most
remarkable wastes are clear in his study of one
poor lodging house where he reveals,
at one time there were as many as 9 persons lodging
in this house who subsisted by picking up
dogs’ dung out of the streets, getting about 5s.
for every basketful . . . There are generally lodging
in the house a few bone-grubbers, who pick
up bones, rags, iron, Sic., out of the streets. Their
average earnings are about 1s per day. There are
several mud-larks, or youths who go down to the
water-side when the tide is out, to see whether
any article of value has been left upon the bank
of the river. (p. 315)
The dog excrement was called “pure” and
used in leather tanning yards. Indeed, there was
even, Mayhew recorded, a hierarchy of kinds of
dog excrement with the “dry limy sort” attracting
the highest price—and even a criminal subindustry
that adulterated dog feces with mortar to
increase its weight. The presence of the figure
of the rag collector in social studies illustrates
both the value of waste and the abject status of
workers—in the senses of both wretched life—
and material—that we wish to forget yet are
unable to fully banish.
Issues of reclamation and ragpicking continue
in the contemporary world. In developing countries
especially, open dumps can still be the sites of
labor for the urban poor seeking recoverable materials
and values, and this is often a highly organized
and structured activity with divisions of
responsibility, resellers, and traders. In other circumstances,
towns have made a specialty of processing
wastes imported especially. In developed
countries, the residual value in waste consumer
products has led to the development of urban mining,
extracting metals from former waste dumps; a
ton of ore from a gold mine produces an average
of 5 grams of gold, whereas a ton of discarded
mobile phones can yield 150 grams and also contains
around 100 kilograms of copper and 3 kilograms
of silver, among other metals.
The recoverable values and transformations of
wastes have been highlighted by industrial metabolism
approaches to city economies, which emphasize
how economic activity entails flows and
exchanges of energies and materials in a system.
Here, wastes tend to be seen not just as products at
the end of their lives but also losses between transformations.
The tracing of material transformations
points to waste as more than simply an “end
of pipe” issue, but one endemic to economic production.
The urban system is then seen as a system
of stocks, flows, and transformations. Waste, then,
includes valueless by-products that may be disposed
of or stockpiled. However, such products
may cease to be waste if a use is found for them,
and they can be turned into co-products. An example
might be combined heat and power plants that
use the waste hot water from power generation to
heat neighborhoods. This example is even more
telling if the plant is fueled by burning waste. It
serves both to dispose of waste by incineration and
to turn that waste into a resource for producing
heat and light.
Waste Regimes
If the treatment of waste is thus multifaceted and
variable, so are the structures governing it. Across
nations, there are different sets of priorities reflecting
different and evolving circumstances leading to
different policy environments for cities. Thus,
Denmark has emphasized combined heat and
power plants based on incineration and a pattern
of small-scale power production but also coordinated
planning of residential development and
power infrastructure. In Britain, technologies of
incineration met large-scale popular resistance,
and planning structures inhibited urban authorities
from developing local heating systems, so
landfill has been the predominant strategy.
Historically, demands of hygiene have led to an
emphasis on disposal while periods of wartime
scarcity led to regimes focusing on recycling.
Looking at communist Hungary, Zsuzsa Gilles
talks of different waste regimes as characterizing
phases of economic development. For instance,
one predominating in the early years of state socialism
was organized around lessons learned from
the metal industries about the reuse of by-products,
which became a mode of organizing the economy