War on Waste (Island Press, 1989), efficient waste removal meant that garbage simply disappeared, making the mad levels of buying, using, and throwing away seem normal.

After the war, most municipalities began contracting waste management to private firms whose work was based on volume: The more waste they handled, the higher the profits. To deal with scavengers, municipalities invented a new offense: dump trespassing. What had happened was a classic "enclosure" straight out of Marx's Capital. Once a form of commons where the little guy could forage, garbage had become a profitable commodity.

Pretty soon, however, people began to question this logic. In the early 1950s, "ban the can" movements emerged in response to the marketing of single-use containers. Vermont led the way. In 1953, as the beverage container industry started promoting disposable bottles and cans, the Vermont legislature outlawed them, fearing that litter would blemish the landscape and hurt tourism.

Within months, the beverage container industry struck back, creating a lavishly funded nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful-the first great example of corporate greenwashing. Its mawkish TV commercial featured the buckskin-clad Native American Iron Eyes Cody riding horseback through a wrapper- and can-strewn landscape as he shed a single tear. The strategy was to shift the emerging environmental consciousness away from industry's massive despoiling of the environment onto the rather irrelevant issue of litter. After heavy lobbying by the container makers, the Vermont legislature let the no-deposit container ban expire four years later, and 15 more years passed before Oregon adopted laws limiting disposable containers. Vermont followed suit in 1973. Today, there are still only 10 states that mandate deposits on bottles and cans.

Recycling Now

By the late 1960s, environmental consciousness was on the rise, propelled in part by Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, which revealed the toxic effects of DDT on birds and their habitats. In 1970, grassroots activists organized the first Earth Day and began chanting a new mantra: "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." Today, there are curbside recycling programs in an estimated 9,300 U.S. communities, and more Americans recycle than vote. Yet more garbage is produced per capita than ever before.

What are the ways forward? The mainstream and liberal defense of recycling is that it's better than sending soda bottles and tin cans to the landfill. This is true, but actually cutting back on consumption and reusing materials-in contrast to recycling-would lead to a much more significant reduction in waste. Salvaging can also help. Urban Ore, a business in Berkeley, California, sells only items that come from the dump, thanks to an unusual contract with the city that lets it extract these "resources" from the waste stream. While cases like this are visionary and necessary, they are, in the end, Lilliputian. Materially, garbage might be the end product of consumerism, but politically and economically, it is the lifeblood of capitalism. Ever more consumption is what keeps our economic system moving forward.

Capitalist growth and profitability depend as much on the destruction of wealth as on the production of it. While salvaging the value contained in a discarded but perfectly usable desk is rational from an environmental and social point of view, it is irrational and not useful for the furniture industry, which must produce and sell more and more desks in order to thrive. Ultimately, the environmental crisis, of which garbage is just a subset, is inseparable from the logic of our whole economic system.

Heather Rogers and Christian Parenti live in Brooklyn, New York. This essay is based on Rogers' documentary film Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, available from AK Press at www.akpress.org. Reprinted from The Brooklyn Rail (Early Summer 2002). Subscriptions: $20/yr. (6 issues) from 43 Withers St. #3, Brooklyn, NY 11211.