Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In this general setting, solid waste became the symbol of a consumer society and
of its faults which were, in particular, accounted for by its ubiquitous presence in
urban, peri-urban and rural landscapes. Art and literature seized garbage as an
expression of the futility of a comfortable existence and as one of the contributing
factors in the formation of grotesque landscapes and new environments (examples
include Les M
ores by Michel Tournier, published in 1975, and much more
recently, Tristan Egolf
é
t
é
s Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming
the Aware in the Corn Belt, published in 1998, the Brazilian
'
lm Ilha das Flores,
produced in 1989, and the recent
lm for mass audiences Wall E, released in 2008).
Social Science invented rudology and garbology, the study of waste, to reveal the
societies that produce it.
7.5.2 Garbage Crisis, Garbage Policy
Despite the lull, even decline during the Second World War, there was a signi
cant
increase in the amount of waste generated throughout the 20th century (Fig.
7.4
): in
the United States, municipal waste production went from 1.2 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
in
1960 to 2.1 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
in 1990 where it seemed to reach a ceiling; in France,
it went from less than 1 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
in 1970 to 1.4 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
in
2000.
76
The same year, it reached 1.6 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
in the Europe of the 15 and
later stabilized at roughly 1.5 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
although there was a sharp dis-
parity between countries. In addition to municipal waste, there was waste from
agriculture, industry, construction and public works. The quantity of these wastes,
however, was largely unknown as it was not closely monitored
—
by comparison, in
2004, 16.4 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
of waste was produced by economic activities
(including households) in the Europe of the 27 of which municipal waste made up
1.4 kg inhab
−
1
day
−
1
.
77
As such, as early as the 1970s a waste crisis emerged and the public stakeholders
were often powerless in the face of the piles of materials there were to manage. The
crisis was also due to the increase in the number of accidents stemming from the
toxicity of waste: the abnormally high cancer rate in the 1970s at Love Canal, a
neighborhood in Niagara Falls (United States) where 21,000 tons of toxic waste had
been dumped from 1942 to 1952
78
(see Oates
2004
novel The Falls which recounts
the story of this tragedy); the 1983 discovery in France of 41 barrels of chemical
waste which contained dioxin from Seveso (Italy) following an industrial disaster in
1976; the pathologies developed by inhabitants of houses built on ancient municipal
land
—
lls or the contamination of produce from vegetable gardens by polluted
76
Melosi (
2005
), op. cit., p. 206.
77
According to Eurostat.
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/environment/data
,
accessed 3 January 2014.
78
Levine (
1982
).
