Garbage In....

Roger and out

By Ian Shoales

Did we always have garbage? When the ancients threw things away, those things gained value instead of losing it. These days a shard from a pot thrown by the Greek equivalent of Aunt Minnie can find a place on a shelf in some museum somewhere to be pored over by scholars. These garbage items are better known as "antiquities."

Even the mundane junk of times gone by holds an anthropological interest. Stone spoons and arrowheads tell us how we used to eat, for instance, and the brutal means by which we obtained our food in the olden days before mad cow disease and shopping.

Chicken Bone Treasures

Nowadays, who cares about chicken bones? We try to keep the dog from getting into them, but other than that, they're like coffee grounds and eggshells, just another thing to stuff in a Hefty bag.

Yet we approach dinosaur bones with trembling fingers and intellectual curiosity. Every day, new, depleted critters are found in Africa or South America. These bones would have barely caused a T. Rex to belch - yet for us bipeds, their discovery is front-page news. Eons ago, dinosaurs may have been thick as chickens, but today they're more like pheasant under glass - a special treat for connoisseurs of the distant past.

And what killed the dinosaurs? A meteor, scientists think. Space garbage, really. Yet meteors are also examined and preserved.

From Tidy to Anal

Unlike the universe, my parents never threw anything away. And they were organized. (Nowadays we call people with organizational skills "anal." When I was a kid, they were called "tidy.") People used to cut out the pictures in catalogs and newspapers for scrapbooks or repurpose them as papier-mache. Empty jars were used to can preserves. Boxes and paper bags were saved along with envelopes (for scrap paper). Buttons were sorted. Pencils were used until they were millimeter-thin nubs. Socks were darned.

Do people darn socks any more? Do people own sewing machines any more? Even a needle and thread?

Look at the telephone. Early telephones were sturdy things, made of brittle black Bakelite so they would last forever. They weren't stylish, just functional. They weren't marketed; they were just bought and used. We gave no more thought to their appearance than we did to a light bulb or underwear.

Then came the Princess phone, pink phones, yellow phones, phones shaped like ducks that quack instead of ring, Elvis phones, phones with LEDs, phones with liquid crystal displays, neon phones, car phones, cordless phones, cell phones - all of which bear as much resemblance to their Bakelite predecessor as a meteor to a dinosaur.

New Trash

Well, Wireless Reporter informed me of a new wrinkle in the history of telecommunication and garbage: the disposable cell phone. "Investor Randi Altschul," it seems, is "making the media rounds to show off a working model of her gadget-to-be. Four years in development, the disposable phone is about the size of a credit card - and not much thicker. Altschul plans to offer the phones with prepaid talk time ... and retail them in outlets where they'll attract casual users.... Altschul expected the phones to sell for between $9.99 and $29.99" ("Inventor Debuts Disposable Cell Phones," February 20, 2001).

The telephone has joined the ranks of shavers, pens, diapers, and troubled teenaged boys. Use it! Throw it away!

Will these skinny little disposables show up on a university shelf ten thousand years from now, tagged and cataloged, so graduate students can look at them, and ponder: "Hmm. I wonder how they ate with this?"

Ian Shoales, lives in San Francisco, where he only throws away items he'll desperately need three months later.