Nostalgic Garbage

Handwaving Freakoutery has a thoroughly convincing call to arms: Given the currently unresolved vagaries of the recycling supply chain, the environment is better off with you throwing your plastic waste in the trash.

The fact that waste processing is so complex in its global reach nowadays has me feeling wistfully nostalgic about the good old times.

There is something I find very quaint and romantic about how New York City used to handle its waste about a hundred years ago. Through the 1880s, almost all the waste the city produced was just dumped into the ocean. When you consider the trash from the era, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Either way, this changed when sanitation commissioner George Waring created three categories for household waste: ash, food waste, and 'rubbish'. Ash came from the heavy reliance on wood/coal for energy, but it had plenty of use as fertilizer, making lye (and thus soap), and pottery glaze. The fatty portion of food waste could be turned into grease (more soap), while the rest could be composted (more fertilizer, and more food). Even the catch-all term 'rubbish' was easy to deal with, since the organic matter was either biodegradable or could be burned for fuel or turned into paper. Metal has been recycled since the beginning of time, so you're left largely with materials (e.g. glass, rocks, etc.) which is either inert or useful as filler in construction.

Labor shortages from WW1 stopped this, and ocean dumping came back. NYC had to be sued by New Jersey before it stopped ocean dumping in 1931.

Plastic is an undeniably useful material, just go to a hospital and try to remember what they relied on before plastics. Before synthetic plastics, people relied on less-than-perfect alternatives such as ivory, shellac (seriously watch how it's made), and various other animal byproducts. But humanity hasn't quite figured out how to deal with disposing of it yet. I think we'll probably see a similar progression to how modern civilization dealt with industrial chemical byproducts, where the best practices for disposing of highly volatile and dangerous chemicals throughout the 1950s/1960s before relevant legislation was basically either "throw it in the river" or "leave it in a hole somewhere".