ABSRACT. This article argues that the experiences of war played an important role in reshaping the social practices of waste disposal between and 1950 . Before 1914 recycling was declining in the face of the challenge presented by the 'refuse revolution', the emerging culture of hygiene, and the rise of incinerator technology. This decline was partially reversed between 1914 and 1945 by the wartime imperative to efficiently utilise resources. The need to preserve both valuable shipping space and foreign currency reserves compelled wartime governments to seek stricter recycling measures from local authorities. One consequence of this was that waste management professionals, whose duties had previously been confined to the maintenance of the public health, suddenly reconstituted themselves as experts in resource management. In turn they transformed their attitude to waste, developing new salvage technologies that promised to increase levels of reuse and recycling. During this period there emerged a brief challenge to the nascent throwaway society. However, wartime salvage efforts did not prosper with the removal of the campaign for national survival. Even the economic problems of the late1940s proved insufficient to maintain the level of recycling without the drive provided by patriotism and Britain quickly slipped back into a throwaway culture. 1 IRecycling has become a pillar of the contemporary search for that utopia we call the 'sustainable society'. In the age of environmentalism recycling is presented as a 3 means of forging a new relationship between the consumer society and the waste it inevitably generates, a relationship that holds at bay the ecological implications of uncontrolled, unbounded consumption. Recycling is thus perceived to act as a brake upon the entropic results of runaway capitalism: a modern-day alchemy that can transmute increasing mounds of useless stuff into things of value. But, as so often, the claims of the good ship novelty come to grief on the rock of history. The current fad for recycling is not new. The municipal reclamation of domestic waste was pioneered in the early twentieth century, which saw efforts to encourage the 'salvage' or 'utilisation' of refuse as a means of coping with the problems of growing urban waste and of providing raw materials during wartime crises. This 'rediscovery' of recycling was partially an attempt to revive an older sense of the value of waste, which had been undermined by a IIFor the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century the recycling of waste products was a fairly common activity. In many urban areas domestic refuse was collected by scavengers and dustmen, and taken to dust-yards of the kind that inspired Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend. These dust-yards were staffed mainly by women who were paid to rummage through the filth of cities and towns in search of reusable items such as brass, rags and

This article investigates the emergence of 'controlled tipping' as the preferred means of municipal waste disposal in Britain between 1920 and 1960

This article investigates the category of waste and its ideological function within Victorian political ecology. It seeks to draw out the connections between conceptions of nature, understandings of technology, and political economy in mid-Victorian capitalist ideology. It does so through a detailed reading of the corpus of one Victorian writer and commentator on technological subjects, Peter Lund Simmonds. Simmonds is interesting both as an everyday producer of knowledge about science and technology, and because he explicitly draws on the category of waste as a condition of possibility for technological progress and civilization. Ultimately he is indicative of the continuing str! ength of cornucopian ideas of nature among ideologues of capit! alist improvement in the mid-Victorian period, which suggests the limited metropolitan influence of any emerging conservationism or "green imperialism."

This article responds to current critiques of Ulrich Beck's ‘risk society’ thesis by historians of science and medicine. Those who have engaged with the concept of risk society have been content to accept the fundamental categories of Beck's analysis. In contrast, we argue that Beck's risk society thesis underplays two key themes. First, the role of capitalist social relations as the driver of technological change and the transformation of everyday life; and second, the ways in which hegemonic discourses of risk can be appropriated and transformed by counter-hegemonic forces. In place of ‘risk society’, we propose an approach based upon a ‘political ecology of risk’, which emphasises the social relations that are fundamental to the everyday politics of environmental health.

In this article, I discuss some of the questions that arise for environmental historians from recent historical and theoretical studies of waste. This article is not an attempt to methodically review the entire corpus of work on waste within the social sciences and humanities. Rather I seek to draw attention to the ways in which waste constitutes an important problem for environmental history in particular. The article is in four sections. The first two deal with conceptual approaches to waste that are presently popular and draws an analytical distinction between waste and dirt, terms that are often collapsed into one another but which, when kept distinct, can do more useful work. The third and fourth sections discuss present historical treatments of waste, their capacities and limitations, before I mark out possible ways in which historians can take seriously the analytical distinctiveness of ‘waste’.

(London, The New Press, 2005

This article challenges the predominant narrative of the rise of modern environmentalism that supports much of the historiography on environmental ideas and movements. Through a study of the effects of the Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967, we show that everyday life is a vital mediator of environmental catastrophes, and has played a crucial role in rendering ambiguous popular attitudes towards the impact of disasters on the natural world. Using oral interview evidence, neglected by much environmental history, we trace the connections between the experience of the disaster and the contradictory ways in which this experience was or, more commonly, was not translated into environmentalist sensibility. We study the ways in which everyday concerns about economic insecurity created antagonistic understandings of the disaster that both magnified its unfortunate impact and complicated its subsequent meaning. We argue that attitudes towards the spill and its effects on nature were often contradictory. On the one hand there was a powerful association with the suffering of wildlife affected by the spill. Yet simultaneously many of those interviewed rejected explicit environmental activism, or drew only weak lines of connection between green ideas and their own experience of environmental disaster. We suggest that everyday environmental discourse should be seen as more geographically specific, ambiguous, and self-aware than that which is traditionally associated with the conservation movement, and that oral history can be a vital tool in developing a more sophisticated understanding of the complex social nature of modern environmentalism.

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