259
summary
The resource recovery regime, 1900–1927
At the turn of the last century, the quantity and type of refuse pro-
duced by Stockholm’s rising population, human and equine, was
compounded by increasing consumption. Stockholm already had
a disposal system that was based on the sale of waste as fertilizer.
This was concentrated in Lövsta, on Lake Mälaren on the outskirts
of the capital, where waste was transported from the centre by train
and from where it could then be shipped to the surrounding coun-
tryside by barge. The city’s refuse managers, however, felt that there
were major problems with waste disposal, partly because there was
a growing amount of it (mostly of night soil and horse manure),
while much of it included greater quantities of non-organic waste,
which made it less appropriate—and less in demand—as fertilizer.
In order to find ways to modernize the capital’s waste disposal, Karl
Tingsten, Lövsta’s manager and later the director of municipal waste
services, was sent on a study tour of European and North American
cities. At the time, there was nothing to suggest that Stockholm
would prioritize one particular method over another. Incineration
had been considered, and the countries Tingsten expected to learn
most from were the UK and the US, both of which had long used
the method. However, Tingsten returned from the trip ready to see
the city invest in resource recovery by introducing source separation
in two categories: ‘fertilizer waste’ and ‘non-organic waste’. The lat-
ter category was screened for any material that could be sold. All
household waste was sorted through from 1907 onwards, but as early
as 1901 Stockholm’s Refuse Department had begun to divide it into
fertilizer waste and non-organic waste. Fertilizer sales were relatively
strong in the first decade of the century. Non-organic waste brought
in some income, but its sale was not an effective disposal method.
In practice, the proportion of non-organic waste that was sold was
marginal; the bulk of it was incinerated in the furnace purchased for
Lövsta in 1900. Incineration as a method, however, barely featured
in the statistics and City Council records; it was resource recovery
that was thought important. The argument for resource recovery
was that it had a utility value which, if the waste was handled pro-
perly, would translate into commercial value. Waste separation and
260
summary
its subsequent handling were also seen as ‘natural’, according to
the idea that all waste had a natural condition to which it should
return: waste suited for use as fertilizer should return to the land,
other materials to industry. At heart it was an eco-cyclical approach.
Moreover, there was a notion that waste had an obvious value that
was driven by its utility value. This vision, shared by Tingsten, can
be traced to the then common emphasis on thrift.
The establishment of Stockholm’s resource recovery regime at the
beginning of the twentieth century can be explained by the fact that
much of its refuse was suitable for fertilizer and that the regime was
reinforced by a strong sense of public spiritedness. Then there was
the inertia of the existing system, with its extensive arrangements
for collecting and disposing of Stockholm’s refuse which, if only
the waste was sorted, could continue. The inertia resulted from the
long-established ideas and practices that governed resource recovery,
reinforced by the existence of railway infrastructure and a complex
organization. A change of system would have involved conside-
rable investment, both in terms of capital outlay and in altering
Stockholm’s waste disposal objectives. Neither was the continued
use of waste as fertilizer and the increased recovery of other mate-
rials thought out-dated—far from it, it was considered a modern
form of management—and all the sorting and reuse became a way
of maintaining the capital’s links to agrarian surroundings. Mean-
while, adapting to modern urban conditions involved dealing with
more heterogeneous waste in ever greater quantities.
At the same time as the introduction of the two-way division of
waste into fertilizer waste and non-organic waste, the collection of
kitchen waste to be used as pigswill was suggested by the Stock-
holm City Council. The idea was not new—many cities had similar
operations, including in the US—and shortly before the turn of the
century Stockholm had seen a less successful attempt of this kind
when pigs were kept on Lövsta’s large rubbish tip. The pig rearing
that was discussed as a serious option from 1906 onwards was to be
run along more organized lines. Kitchen refuse and scraps would
be collected from individual households and then boiled and sold
directly to pig farmers or used in the city’s municipal pig farms.
261
summary
The initiative for this came not from the city’s refuse managers but
from the slaughterhouse industry and the city council department
that ran the municipal slaughterhouse. The refuse managers were
against the proposal, because they felt that pigswill collection would
threaten the key element in the city’s waste management—the sale
of the largest category of waste as fertilizer. They feared a deterio-
ration in the suitability and value of the refuse as fertilizer, regard-
less of whether there was a three-way split between kitchen waste,
fertilizer waste, and non-organic waste or a two-way split between
pigswill and all other refuse. After ten years of inquiries and heated
debate, pigswill collection was gradually introduced across the city in
1916–1918. Once in place, the whole of Stockholm followed a three-
way division into pigswill, fertilizer waste, and non-organic waste.
The process has since been depicted as being a wartime project, but
my study shows that pigswill collection had a far longer history.
The idea of feeding scraps to pigs was one element in the resource
recovery regime, which in society at large reflected a long-standing
emphasis on the utility value of waste. This is shown by the fact
that two city departments’ worth of civil servants ended up fighting
over how the waste’s value might best be realized.
In the 1910s, the demand for fertilizer began to dwindle, which
made it more difficult for the city to get rid of its refuse. The fall in
demand became even more apparent in the 1920s, just as the com-
position of the waste was on the verge of an important change. The
amount of the city’s solid waste had begun to rise after the First
World War. Once the Stockholm City Council permitted lavatories
to be connected to the public sewers in 1909, the number of out-
houses had plummeted, and at much the same time horses began to
vanish from the city, to be replaced by motorized trams and motor
vehicles. These changes brought with new disposal problems. The
city began to use the lakeside at Lövsta as a rubbish tip, and when
poor financial returns and the mass death of pigs in the municipal
piggeries led to the discontinuation of pigswill collections in 1927, the
separation into fertilizer waste and non-organic waste also ceased.
The resource recovery regime, which in practice had been waning
for most of the 1920s, was now definitely over.
Dostları ilə paylaş: |