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William L. Rathje's Influence on the Field of Discard Studies

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William L. Rathje's Influence on the Field of Discard Studies ethnoarchaeology, Vol. 7 No. 2, October, 2015, 173–178 The Happiest of Finds: William L. Rathje’s Influence on the Field of Discard Studies Carl A. Zimring Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute. The study of waste has many roots. For more than half a century, anthropologists, historians, and policy analysts have attempted to understand what, how, and why societies dispose of materials deemed worthless or hazardous. Historical approaches to discard studies include analyses of the creation of industrial wastes, the develop- ment of infrastructures such as landfills and wastewater treatment facilities, and the emergence of formal and informal recycling systems (Melosi 2005; Tarr 1996). Anthropologists, including Mary Douglas (1966), have considered cultural con- structions of waste. Sociologists and economists have assessed consumption and dis- posal patterns (Bullard 2000; Strasser 1999; Thompson 1979). William L. Rathje, who died in 2012, made a unique and enduring contribution to the interdisciplinary study of waste by focusing on the materiality of discards. Rathje applied his archaeological training in unearthing the material culture of prehistoric societies to provide new perspectives on industrial societies, perspectives that have proved influential on the broad field of discard studies. Rathje completed his doctorate in anthropology from Harvard University in 1971, submitting a dissertation on Lowland Classic Maya socio-political organiz- ation (Rathje 1971). He subsequently continued to study Mesoamerican societies. In 1973, he was a co-director of the Cozumel Archaeological Project, sponsored by the National Geographic Society (Sabloff and Rathje 1975). As Rathje completed his degree, interest in contemporary garbage was on the rise. Environmental concern about waste in the 1960s had led to the passage of a series of federal and state laws intended to curb garbage and pollution. A few aficionados began attempting to use discarded materials to interpret contemporary life. By the end of 1970, A. J. Weberman had begun calling his attempts to decipher Bob Dylan’s lyrics through the songwriter’s Greenwich Village trash “garbology.” Any value Weberman gained from analyzing Dylan’s old coffee grounds and his young son’s dirty diapers was limited to fantasies; however Weberman’s scrounging brought to light the possibility that studying garbage might illuminate our lives. Not long after Weberman began snooping through Dylan’s garbage, Rathje applied his more rigorous methods to modern garbage, but with the goal of © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1944289015Z.00000000033 174 CARL A. ZIMRING understanding more about society at large rather than the behavior of a famous indi- vidual. The year he graduated from Harvard, Rathje taught an anthropology class at the University of Arizona designed to teach principles of archaeological method- ology. He guided students to complete independent projects to show the relation- ships between material objects and behavior, which included a comparison of garbage samples from different households. Within two years, this research had evolved into a “Garbage Project” that would continue for thirty years. Landfills, in the words of Tarr (1996), are sinks for wastes. Tarr argued that every human attempt to find a sink without consequence has been unsuccessful, but the search for the best possible sinks has informed the complex ways in which we have managed wastes throughout history. The value of the Garbage Project was to focus on the material composition of these often-chaotic, often-neglected landfill sinks for the wastes of industrial society. Rathje’s team analyzed randomly selected household pickups from desig- nated census tracts in Tucson. Each sample was analyzed with attention to the date it was collected, the census tract from which it came, any information available from packaging (such as branding or volume), and weight. “We developed the meth- odology to study contemporary garbage using archaeological methodology,” said Wilson Hughes, who served as field director for the Garbage Project. “There were no ‘how to’ books, so we developed what is now called garbology” (Harrison 2012). Rathje spent most of his professional life in Tucson as a professor at the University of Arizona. The Garbage Project expanded in 1987 to excavate landfills, and five years later Rathje coauthored with Atlantic reporter Cullen Murphy an influential book Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage (Rathje and Murphy 1992) that drew greater attention to contemporary discard studies. Rathje’s methods revealed broad patterns of what and how people consume. The core samples of Tucson’s landfilled waste revealed changing patterns over time. Not surprisingly, the amount of waste in Tucson’s landfills rose substantially between the 1950s and the 1970s, as population increased. Simultaneously, the composition of the landfill changed, as plastic packaging became a much larger share of the waste by the end of the period. Analysis of rubbish samples revealed discrepancies between professed behavior and actual consumption. A common way to study consumer behavior has been via questionnaires and surveys. These are prone to inaccuracies, either intentional or unintentional, as respondents tend to underreport undesirable forms or levels of consumption. Analyzing sorted garbage revealed these discrepancies, especially when rubbish collected from known tracts was compared to questionnaires adminis- tered to the same population. Consumption of alcohol and processed foods tends to go underreported. Samples of garbage indicate people consistently underreport the consumption of processed foods and over-report healthier foods (Rathje and Murphy 1992). The Garbage Project also revealed consumer reactions to alarming information. In the wake of the autumn 1982 publication of the National Academy of Science’s report and subsequent media reports identifying fat as an unhealthy influence in the diet of Americans, the Garbage Project observed a sudden widespread increase in the percentage of fat trimmed off and discarded. RATHJE’S INFLUENCE ON THE FIELD OF DISCARD STUDIES 175 Rathje’s landfill excavations allowed scholars and waste management pro- fessionals to better understand the long-term dynamics of materials in municipal landfills. The excavations began in 1987, as the Mobro 4000 fiasco (in which a garbage barge left New York State and fruitlessly traversed the Atlantic Ocean for seven months seeking a port to dump its load, to the ridicule of New York City’s tabloid newspapers) focused attention on landfill capacity and policy experts spoke of a “garbage crisis” (Melosi 2008:240–258). Rathje’s work informed and critiqued these concerns. As summarized in Rubbish!, Rathje redefined archaeology through the lens of discarded material (Rathje and Murphy 1992:10): To an archaeologist, ancient garbage pits or garbage mounds, which can usually be located within a short distance from any ruin, are always among the happiest of finds, for they contain in concentrated form the artifacts and comestibles and remnants of be- havior of the people who used them. While every archaeologist dreams of discovering spectacular objects, the bread-and-butter work of archaeology involves the most common and routine kinds of discards. It is not entirely fanciful to define archaeology as the discipline that tries to understand old garbage. Among the Garbage Project’s findings was a discovery that the rate of natural bio- degradation in landfills was much slower than experts had assumed. This was the case not only with plastic wastes, but also paperstock and food wastes. The Garbage Project sampled landfills from varying climates, levels of rainfall, varying soils and geo-morphology, and varying regional lifestyles across the United States. Despite different environmental contexts, the contents of the landfills examined appeared relatively uniform. Variation in terms of weight percentage of different cat- egories of the refuse samples seemed negligible. Since landfills close when they are full, consideration of volume, rather than weight of the contents, becomes more important. Since most garbage tends to expand once it is extracted from deep inside a landfill, the sampled garbage was subjected to compaction of 0.9 pounds per square inch in order to reflect the volume of the garbage when squashed and under pressure inside a landfill. Slow breakdown of older discards shortened the estimated lifetimes of landfills (Rathje and Murphy 1992). These findings attracted wide attention. Rubbish! was reviewed or profiled in aca- demic and popular media, including The Quarterly (1992), Contemporary Soci- ology (Plummer 1993), Christian Science Monitor (Germani 1992), Los Angeles Times (Corwin 1993), and Chicago Sun-Times (Underwood 1993). In a 1992 New York Times feature, writer Grimes (1992) conveyed one of the book’s insights to a broad audience: After 20 years of sorting through garbage cans and landfills, the archaeologist William L. Rathje has accumulated precious memories. There are the 40-year-old hot dogs, per- fectly preserved beneath dozens of strata of waste, and the head of lettuce still in pristine condition after 25 years. But the hands-down winner, the one that still makes him shake his head in disbelief, is an order of guacamole he recently unearthed. Almost as good as new, it sat next to a newspaper apparently thrown out the same day. The date was 1967. 176 CARL A. ZIMRING Later, as he and coauthor Robert M. Lilienfeld previewed their
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