Foreshadowing our more recent experience with recycling, the war-era scrap drives, Strasser says, did help to bring the conflict home and "offered Americans a way to contribute...without sacrificing too much." But she also points out that by asking people to turn their worn clothes, dented pans, and broken tools over to the government, the scrap drives paradoxically reinforced "newer habits of throwing things away" rather than older habits of mending, saving and reusing.
City Limits Magazine
In the end, Waste and Want leaves us back at asking how we can become less wasteful, but with a richer understanding of how we got this way. By expanding the history of trash beyond the policies and technologies to which other accounts of the subject have been limited, Strasser has collected the raw material out of which we might fashion better answers to that question and, perhaps, more sophisticated solutions to our waste woes.
John McCrory is executive director of Big Apple Garbage Sentinel, a New York City waste policy research organization.
