The Archaeology of Rubbish — Reading

Passage

A Archaeology has always depended on rubbish. Almost everything recovered from the ancient world was thrown away, lost or buried, and middens — accumulated domestic waste — are among the richest sources available, precisely because nobody curated them. What people discard is a more honest record than what they choose to preserve, and applying that principle to the present produced a discipline of its own. B The Garbage Project, begun by William Rathje at the University of Arizona in 1973, applied standard excavation method to contemporary household waste. Students sorted, weighed and catalogued material from Tucson, and compared it with what the same households said they consumed. The discrepancies were systematic rather than random. Respondents underreported alcohol by a substantial margin and overreported fruit and vegetables. They were not lying so much as reporting the diet they believed themselves to have. C This mattered beyond dietary surveys, because a great deal of public policy rests on self-reported behaviour. If people misdescribe what they eat, drink and throw away in consistent directions, surveys built on those reports are wrong in predictable ways. The project's contribution was less any individual finding than the demonstration that physical evidence and self-report diverge reliably enough to be measured. D The excavation of landfills overturned a widely held assumption. Buried waste was thought to decompose steadily; Rathje's teams found the opposite. Landfills are dry and oxygen-poor, and organic material does not readily break down in them. Newspapers were recovered legible after decades, with the dates still readable, and food waste was identifiable rather than reduced to soil. Biodegradability, it turned out, describes what a material can do in the right conditions rather than what happens in a landfill. E The composition findings were equally counterintuitive. Fast-food packaging and disposable nappies, then the focus of public concern, together occupied a small fraction of landfill volume. Construction debris and paper dominated. Public perception of what fills landfills tracked what was visible as litter on streets rather than what was actually buried, and policy followed perception. F Food waste has proved the most durable finding. The project consistently measured households discarding food they had reported eating, at rates far above what anyone admitted, and the pattern has been replicated in every country where the method has been applied since. Waste rises with the variety of food bought rather than the quantity, because unfamiliar items are bought hopefully and then not used before they spoil. G The method's limits are worth stating. It is laborious, it is expensive, and it raises real questions about consent, since nobody sorting refuse asked permission from the household that produced it. Rathje's response — that discarded material is legally abandoned and analysed only in aggregate — is defensible and not universally accepted. The wider point survives regardless: a society's account of itself and the physical record it leaves are different documents, and where they disagree, the rubbish is usually right. H Garbology, as the discipline is sometimes informally known, has extended beyond historical archaeology into direct study of present-day waste, most notably through the Garbage Project founded at the University of Arizona in the 1970s, which sorted and catalogued fresh household waste from volunteer communities to compare actual consumption against what the same households reported in surveys about their own habits. The gap between the two was frequently substantial and consistent in one direction: respondents reliably under-reported consumption of items associated with social disapproval, including alcohol, and over-reported consumption of items associated with virtue, including certain health foods purchased but rarely eaten and later discarded. This asymmetry between self-reported behaviour and physical evidence of actual behaviour has become a standing caution across social science generally, not just waste studies specifically, and it explains why researchers in several other fields have since adopted similar behavioural-trace methods — reviewing pharmacy records, utility consumption or, more recently, anonymised digital transaction data — wherever what people say they do is suspected to diverge systematically from what they actually do. Rubbish, unlike a survey response, has no reason to flatter the person who produced it. Whether a comparable method could be applied usefully to digital consumption records raises the same methodological question in a newer form, with considerably higher privacy stakes attached.

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