Health needs soon become a need for economic support

Waste collection has a distant genesis, in fact, it was already mentioned in the Middle Ages as a problem that plagued the first urban centers in the most advanced countries.

But it was from the early nineteenth century that, as the city agglomerations grew, they organized themselves, especially in England , the first independent manual sorting centers for municipal waste. Unhealthy places, where mountains of garbage of all kinds were divided, almost exclusively by women, trying to recover what could be reused and resold.

An extremely difficult and hygienically dangerous working condition, those of garbage women, which exposed workers to frequent accidents or illnesses, as described for the first time in 1900 the researcher Emily Hobhouse , writing an article for the Economic Journal, in which she talked about the job insecurity of women in these construction sites along the banks of the Thames:

“A man shovels the waste just brought into his sieve , she sifts through and then quickly orders the rest before a new supply is launched. Grouped on each sieve half a dozen baskets are ready to receive the sorting. Rags, bones, string, cork, boots and paper, coal, glass and hard core these receptacles. The dust flies dense on the woman's face and permeates her clothes and hair; but the open air is healthy and she continues to work .. "

Emily's remarks followed widespread public protest against these stinking places, so much so that during 1883 it was not unusual to read, even in the Times, letters from prominent citizens asking for a solution to this problem.

Thus, around 1890, the industrial revolution brought with it the invention of the first waste incinerators which had a dual purpose, to physically destroy unusable waste and to bring about a sort of sanitization through fire.

Starting from the twentieth century , in England, almost all the major cities were equipped with an incinerator and the municipalities began the waste collection in an organized way, leading to the closure of most independent collection sites.

The action of waste pre-selection, with the aim of recovering reusable materials, became less and less evident, as the convenience of destroying incoming waste at a incineration plant, created a sort of alibi to avoid the costly work of separating and storing recoverable materials, also pushed by the industry that produced more and more new products at progressively lower costs.

Close to the beginning of the First World War the concept of rejection was expressed in an element that had to be disposed of in a efficient, as worthless, but when hostilities broke out, the immense war effort needed all usable or reusable materials.

It was thus that large quantities of paper, fabrics, rags, bones, metals were requested by the industries that worked for the ministry of war , but the inefficiency of collection at the municipal level was wasting most of these resources.

At the end of the First World War we realized the importance of creating an organized collection, aimed at the recovery of all recyclable materials, as a sign of help to economy of the country, setting up an office in England for this purpose.

At the outbreak of the Second World War , England was not taken by surprise, as it could count on a national collection network whose sorting centers could provide many materials for war needs.

Under the guidance of H.G. Judd, in 1939 , his office imposed the obligation of separate collection with the aim of recovering from the waste as much as possible of materials to be reinserted into the production cycle, this also due to the strict embargo placed by the Germans by sea and by air.

Through a study of Public Cleansing , from November 1947, we can see the materials collected through recovery and recycling programs of local authorities, in the period between October 1939 and July 1947:

Materials in Tons

• Waste paper: 2.141.779

• Scrap metals: 1.585.921

• Textiles: 136.193

• Bones: 68.695

• Household kitchen waste: 2.368.485

• Various (fuel, ash, glass, etc.): 2.546.005

Total Ton.: 8.896.012

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Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.