One of my favorite Dickens characters is Noddy Boffin, the Golden Dustman, from Our Mutual Friend. Mr. Boffin makes his fortune as a rubbish carter and scavenger. He very much wants to be accepted in society. He pretends to be a miser, although he's not. He hires an illiterate scoundrel to teach him to read. He is based on a real person, Henry Dodd, who set up a thriving garbage business in London in 1836, worked his way into society and died worth 5 million.
What is wonderful to me about Mr. Boffin is his desire to demonstrate his worth, not by flaunting his wealth but by somehow convincing people to see him as a good man. His business is a necessary one in a growing city with no organized way to rid itself of refuse. He provides a service that others generally do not want to even think about and turns a nice profit. He knows that people throw away, lose and are otherwise parted from many objects of great value. What he does with what he finds drives this great novel and provides us with an intimate view of London in the early nineteenth century.
What any society does with rubbish tells worlds. We Americans mostly entomb our trash. Giant garbage mountains dot the landscape. Approaching St. Louis from the east on the Interstate a garbage mountain blocks the view of the iconic Arch. Only lately has our society begun to try to find the gold in the trash. We recycle a bit more of our trash every year, but it's still not a lot. We burn some of our trash and convert it to energy. Some dedicated gardeners turn yard and food waste into compost. Even with all these efforts, we still bury a lot of garbage.
Throughout the cities and towns of the developed world the descendants of Noddy Boffin still circulate. Out on the fringes, often at night, they drive their rusting trucks through the streets and alleys looking for discarded gold. They want metal. They want working appliances or furniture that can be resold. We usually do not see them at work. They call themselves “junkers” or “metal men.” We need them, not only to reduce the bulk of landfills, but to teach us about capitalism.
Advanced capitalist societies need to produce garbage. The more garbage there is, the more new stuff that can be manufactured and sold. If we didn't throw away perfectly usable stuff the economy would slow down. People would be put out of work.
Imagine a society without rubbish.
Back in the early 1980's I knew a graduate student at SUNY Stony Brook named Suki. She had the good fortune one year to be selected to go to Africa to study the social lives of the Bonobo, Pan paniscus, sometimes called pigmy chimps. They are an endangered species of great ape that live only in the jungles of the Congo. To reach her research station Suki had to travel for days by boat up the mighty Congo River, then travel a few days into the jungle by Land Rover and by foot. For much of the time she lived alone in a camp. One local man worked for her, doing all her cooking, cleaning and general work. She set out each day into the bush with her equipment then returned in the evening to write up her observations.
Being alone and largely out of contact with the outside world made her somewhat homesick after a while. She wrote her boyfriend and beseeched him to come join her. She told stories of home to the man who worked for her. When Thanksgiving day came she set out as usual. She was particularly homesick that day since back home she knew families would be gathering for the traditional fall feast.
When she arrived back at camp that evening she stopped dead in her tracks. All across the open space of her camp her employee had strung home-made twisted fiber cords. Fluttering from these cords were many little white paper flags. On closer inspection every paper flag was made from notes she had crumpled up and discarded over the past months. He had saved every scrap, carefully ironed them flat, cut them and made his festive banners. He also found a skinny chicken somewhere that he baked for her Thanksgiving supper.
She cried when she told this story, nearly a year later. His gesture was touching, but perhaps the greatest wonder was his assumption that nothing should be discarded while it still has a possible use.
We couldn't live like that, could we?
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