We Did Talk Rubbish

Peter Daniel of the Somerset Industrial Archaeological Society gave a most interesting talk to us las night on the management of domestic rubbish from the 19th century through to today.  From the early days of heaps of rubbish piling up in courtyards, through the beginnings of organised scavenging and area rubbish pits, on to the introduction of refuse destructors – large industrial sites where waste was collected, sorted and burned, often generating electricity, long before the new era where we think we have invented a more sustainable solution, and ending with the large recycling plants of today.  Peter used photographs to help us identify previous refuse dumps, both old and new, and talked of the benefits of rubbish in both traditional archaeological investigations and in industrial archaeology.  The talk was a comprehensive coverage of the subject, and an important subject that most of us ignore save for putting out the bins once a week.