Episode 1 The Secret Life of Rubbish

These programmes reveal how the history of household rubbish

has influenced the world we live in today.

Take a look at this...

..the refuse of a couple of days from one home.

In the second half of the 20th century,

the amount Britons threw away grew remorselessly.

Sometimes increasing at seven percent a year.

We actually walked in amongst that and I've had it up to me shoulders,

pulling the rubbish towards me.

This film looks at what was in the bins

during the decades immediately after the Second World War...

..as a land of Make Do And Mend, became a throwaway society.

Suddenly, there were supermarkets and High-Street fashion...

..fancy new toys and interior design...

..and as each fad was thrown out to make room for the next one,

Britain's waste stream swelled to unprecedented levels...

It was a mountain of rubbish, almost to the canopy of those trees.

..this programme reveals the birth of modern Britain -

seen from the back-end.

70 years ago, just as we do today,

Britons sorted their waste on the doorstep.

'Ere, the professor wants to talk to you.

Thanks but I've left school and I'm going home to play.

'Ere, don't you know there's war on?

In the Second World War,

the British government mobilised everything for its war industries -

including the household bin.

The infrastructure for recycling,

or, "salvage," as it was then called,

was provided by the waste management industry...

..but putting the right rubbish in the right bin, was a citizen's job.

How do you do?

Ah, bones!

What is the use of old bones?

Every scrap of bone is useful - glycerine is also got from the bones

and is used for making high explosives.

During the War, nine million tons of household rubbish was salvaged -

equivalent to the weight of 200 battleships.

Here we go, boys!

Yippee!

But, by 1945 Britain was running out of vital necessities.

Fuel, food and clothes, were rationed,

as they had been throughout the conflict.

People simply couldn't afford to throw things away.

Oh, something I forgot to show you.

Eileen Mead grew up in the years just after the War.

Erm...

..redcurrant jelly - I've got a redcurrant bush in the garden,

quince jelly - from my neighbour's quince tree...

this is from my sister-in-law.

We traded her marmalade and rowan jelly for some of my quince.

British cooks of the 1940s, left nothing to waste.

'An appetising mixture of soft roes and baked spuds in their jackets.'

The few leftovers that cooks could find no use for

were fed to farm animals.

On street corners there were pig bins to collect kitchen scraps.

# Yes, that's how you'll all save your bacon! #

Oh, yes, quite interesting in here.

Waste was also reduced with a needle and thread.

This was a double duvet cover that I cut down to single

and made a cover for this pillow

so I can have matching duvet cover and...pillow.

It was a wartime propaganda campaign

that had first taught people like Eileen to produce less rubbish

and instead Make Do And Mend.

'We'll join forces and make John a new sweater.'

'Yo, swish!'

Why not get together with your friends

and form a Make Do And Mend group?

A shoe bag...

some of my own clothes...

..there was a piece of material over so I made a bag.

By the late '40s, war and austerity

had moulded the way Briton's thought about rubbish.

A nice piece of doggy material...

'It's too small to use for anything, is it, or not?'

No, I've got a use for it.

60 years ago,

all that went in the bin was what householders could find no use for.

As 90-year-old Ernie Sharp knows well.

In 1947, when he was de-mobbed from the army,

Ernie got a job as a dustman.

When I would walk into the first house...down the side...

..a bit faster than that, of course!

The bins were kept down the side or at the rear of the house.

Dustmen hauled them to the kerb on their backs.

I used to have a leather belt round my waist...

and when I carried the bin on my back,

the bottom of the bin would rest on the belt.

When full, the steel bins were heavy and cumbersome.

It's getting the knack of swinging the bin round,

you gotta get the bin round to behind you.

All together, you're lifting up over half a hundredweight,

perhaps, going up three-quarter of a hundredweight at a time.

The bins weighed so much

because half of British household rubbish was ash

that had been raked out of the fire grate.

This was where the term "dustbin" came from.

It was...strenuous...

but after a month or two

the camaraderie amongst the refuse collectors was such

that I began to get used to it.

Coal ash had been the main constituent of household rubbish

for over a century.

Since the coal-fired hearth became the centre of British family life.

There you are...one bin up!

But in the mid-50s, the waste management industry

was caught unawares by a sudden change in British rubbish.

It was a side-effect of a government anti-pollution law

called the Clean Air Act.

The smoke produced by Britain's millions of coal fires

had been contributing to a national nuisance.

Smog is simply natural fog,

which is polluted by the discharges from burning fuel.

4,000 people died in the Great Smog of 1952.

So the Clean Air Act created smokeless zones,

in which open fires were restricted.

The impact on air pollution was an immediate improvement.

The refuse collectors' lives got easier too.

We began to see less dust and cinder.

So consequently the bin was that bit lighter.

Ernie Sharp was no longer an actual "dust" man...

..it was an early sign that the coal-fired era,

which dated back to the 19th century's industrial revolution,

was at last passing into history.

The composition of the household bin changed rapidly

in the post-war period.

Within a decade of the Clean Air Act,

the share the British household rubbish that was coal ash halved...

..but the share of paper, cardboard and glass doubled...

..so though the rubbish was getting lighter,

the volume of it was rising.

'Refuse, rubbish, garbage, gash, trash, waste -

'each person throws away four or five hundredweight of it a year.'

The bulky trash was the result of a new kind of shopping habit

that was sweeping through Britain in the 1950s.

Rationing ended in 1954...

and austerity was at last giving way to affluence.

'A transatlantic phenomenon has, at last,

'made its mark in British shops - the self-service store.'

Now, British shoppers were enjoying an innovation

that had recently appeared on the High Street - the self-service shop.

It had been pioneered in '30s America

but was a novelty in post-war Britain.

'Self-service is a new word that has to be learned and explained.

'People just weren't familiar the idea that you might actually'

pick the stuff up off the shelves yourself and put it in your basket.

That wasn't shopping, that was shoplifting,

until you were reassured that it wasn't.

Self-service shops encouraged shoppers to be curious -

not just to look, but touch as well.

So to protect the produce from those feeling fingers,

everything had to be packaged.

Packages basically make possible the kind of display

that you're going to get in the post-war supermarkets,

those who love packaging say packaging is so much more hygienic -

that's a big word at the time -

it keeps away the germs, it keeps away the dust.

It's not this messy old-fashioned muck of the small store.

Of course, once what has been bought is consumed,

its wrapping becomes rubbish.

'So Let's talk rubbish - 370,000 tons of it.'

There was no national strategy

for dealing with the changes in the rubbish

brought about by the Clean Air Act and self-service shops.

Once the War was won, responsibility for waste management

was in the hands of the country's local authorities.

In London, this meant a patchwork of boroughs...

..but in Birmingham, one authority collected the rubbish

for the entire city of over a million people...

..this was the largest such operation in Britain.

'And that's not talking rubbish.'

Languishing in the stores of the city's technology museum

is the forgotten workhorse

of Birmingham's post-war refuse collection system.

-Come on and look.

-Yeah.

Roger Nichols and Les Wainright were Birmingham dustmen.

Oh, I can see one of them.

-It's the old bullnose one.

-Yeah.

Yeah, I remember that.

They haven't seen one of their old dustcarts for 40 years.

How they used to get into these things, Les!

I can get in, but Jesus wept!

How'd I used to get in these?!

Yeah, that's the accelerator, here.

I saw the accelerator, Les.

That was the, the other...

HORN HONKING

These post-war dustcarts had been designed in the 1930s.

'What's top speed?'

-Loaded, I would say five or six.

-Yeah.

'Five or six what?'

Mile an hour.

And swear...

that's how you turned, and you couldn't reverse.

The reason for the sluggish pace and the lack of manoeuvrability

was that these dustcarts were electric powered.

They were more like milk floats than heavy-duty trucks.

-That's the batteries, under there.

-Yeah, that's right.

There's usually a charging point somewhere, you used to plug them in.

In the late 1950s, the volume of rubbish in Birmingham rose so fast,

the dustcarts were running out of juice.

In the morning go out at half past seven -

nine o'clock the bleeding thing was nearly full.

Into the depot, go and have your breakfast,

and out again, and then about 12 o'clock had to get back in again

because the bleeding things are packing up.

Les drove until his batteries were almost flat.

It was hazardous.

You couldn't stop once the batteries were getting low

cos if you did you'd be stuck in middle of the road or somewhere.

Birmingham City Council persevered with electric dustcarts

because what was at stake was more than a technology -

it was the City Council's entire philosophy of waste management.

The department of Birmingham City Council

that oversaw refuse collection was called the Salvage Department.

The whole culture of Birmingham

was always a culture of trying to use waste in whatever way they can.

Bob Evans was a manager in Birmingham's Salvage Department.

The waste from the jewellery quarter, the gold and the platinum,

they reused that and sold it back to them and used it again.

The whole emphasis was on conservation of materials

and reuse of materials, even from that period of time.

Yes, it was.

So Birmingham dustmen didn't just collect rubbish,

they often earned overtime hand-sorting it for recyclables.

We used sit to sitting on the belt picking bit of rag off

or picking tins up, or whatever went through.

Paper, cloth, metal, glass

was picked-off the conveyor belt of rubbish.

The City Council sold these materials

to Britain's recycling sector.

In the early post-war period there was money in muck.

For instance, in 1959,

a quarter of all Britain's paper was made from recycled sources.

-But you never knew what was coming through on the belt.

-On them belts, no.

-You didn't.

-Cats, dogs, or whatever people used to put in the bin,

-that used to come up.

-Yeah.

Found a stillborn baby once, what was put in a bin.

That come up on the belt once.

I thought it was a doll only it was a stillborn baby.

Had to stop the belt and get in touch with the police

for them to come and take it away,

You've got to have a good stomach to stomach that job, haven't you?

Well into the '50s,

Birmingham's Salvage Department seemed to show that recycling,

which had helped win the war, could also flourish in Modern Britain...

..but at the heart of Birmingham's waste management operation

was a technology from the previous century.

What couldn't be salvaged was incinerated

in huge furnaces called destructors.

These were a Victorian invention

but, in 1950, Birmingham was one of many British cities

still using them.

They'd have to do a quite a lot of lifting and shifting.

Shift this across and then what you'd have, here,

you've have a big huge amount of heat coming out of here

because this would be feeding direct into the grate.

It would be a steaming, hissing, dusty, dirty place.

Joe Wainwright worked for Birmingham City Council

feeding one of these fire-breathing monsters.

With the drag we would pull the rubbish down from the loading deck

and into a small opening, there, where the smoke's coming up,

straight into the fire cell, where it would be incinerated.

That's all you did.

You just manoeuvred it into position and then pushed it down the hole,

and we actually walked in amongst that.

I've had it up to my shoulders, pulling the rubbish towards me.

There was a huge manual effort here from guys,

which would be going on 24 hours a day.

They'd be shovelling hard to shift all this dusty, dirty material in.

If you went forward and then started dragging the stuff towards you,

you gotta be mindful that behind you is that hole,

and it went directly into the fire.

In fact, when I got the job,

the foreman said if you had a problem up there

and you felt yourself falling the main thing to hold onto was the drag

cos that would stop you falling down the hole - it would cut across.

It was a very physical job.

Obviously, as you can appreciate, a dirty job. But I took to it.

And although at first when I saw what I'd got to do,

I wasn't too sure. I grew to like it, and I enjoyed the work in the end.

Destructors reduced rubbish to a sterile ash.

It was often used as a building material in Britain's post-war redevelopment.

Even the heat produced from burning rubbish was exploited.

It generated electricity.

In Birmingham, it was used to charge the batteries on the dustcarts.

It was an ingenious system with almost zero waste.

Today, this would be considered a model of environmental awareness.

But during the late Fifties,

the mood in Britain was becoming less thrifty.

In 1957, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan declared,

Britain had never had it so good.

There was consistent full employment and wages were rising fast.

There's a kind of a euphoria about the idea that once again,

there is going be money. And remember, it's not only the war.

In the Thirties, there's been the Depression,

there's been a sense of not much money around for most people,

and the post-War period,

there's a sense of optimism,

a sense of new kinds of pleasure that can be purchased,

new kinds of shopping. Record shops, fashion shops.

Every little town gets a boutique or even two boutiques.

As well as the new shops,

there was a rapidly growing advertising industry.

Packages became hoardings.

Television began carrying commercials in 1955.

Mothers Pride. Baked according to my own original recipe.

Adverts encouraged people to shop for new things.

One way this was done, was to convince shoppers

that what was left over from before the war was now past it.

Battered pans, toys, damaged bikes, tired clothes.

If it was pre-war in late 1950's Britain, it was rubbish.

Take a look at this.

In 1960, the reporter John Morgan made a documentary claiming

there was a crisis in British waste management.

The refuse of a couple of days from one home.

As a nation we produce, we create, 12 million tonnes of refuse

every year, which means that you personally create 5 hundredweights.

and so for that matter, I suppose, do I.

Much of the swelling waste stream of post-war Britain

was just being chucked in holes in the ground.

Throughout history this has been the easiest way to dispose of rubbish.

What has not been burnt, has always been buried.

The actual landfill site is straight ahead of us,

in that depression in the field. The entrance was on the main road

and if the gate was locked you could get round it or over it,

that sort of thing, so you couldn't really stop anyone coming in, no.

Very limited fencing for protection on loose litter, very little.

Fifty years ago, Mike Leeks managed a landfill here in Suffolk.

Such sites were brought into being

by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act

and were called "Controlled Tips".

In reality, back in the early post-war period,

there was very little control.

It was just backed in the gate and they put a match to it and burnt it.

Once it was on fire, it was on fire, basically nearly all the time.

Just burnt, just burnt.

You always had local people here scrounging and looking for stuff, yeah.

Clothes, all sorts of things. Car batteries, copper cylinders.

Even bottles in them days,

you could get a few pence on a beer bottle, about 3p a bottle.

You know, whatever they could get before it burnt.

And then we used to come every ten days or so.

We'd come over and push it all in

and tidy it up ready for the next batch to be disposed of.

A controlled tip was a highly flexible form of waste disposal.

Almost anything could be buried in one.

They also used to put in all the local sewerage from the septic tanks.

It was all disposed of in here as well.

Everything went in?

Everything went in.

Anything that was classed as a waste went in, even car bodies.

All sorts of things like that.

Controlled tips acquired an appalling reputation.

No village wanted one anywhere near it.

You feel it may be rather a disgrace to have a rubbish dump on your doorstep?

Simply disgusting and filthy.

And that's what it is we're down against,

and we're not going to have it at our back doors at all.

Eventually the rats and the flies and the smell

and the smoke will spread all over the village.

But in the Sixties, with the waste stream expanding rapidly,

new tips were being planned and opened all the time.

There were hundreds of them scattered across rural Britain.

A rubbish dump in a beauty spot or a controlled tip in Engine Bottom.

It would take a far more foolish man than myself to try

and give the answer.

If the countryside is going to be used generally to accommodate

the refuse of towns, in about 30 years time,

we shall be picnicking in all the muck we're not swimming in. Goodnight.

By the 1960s, rubbish was becoming a health hazard.

NEWSREEL: The problems arriving from refuse

and the disposal of waste matter are more serious than ever before.

In densely populated areas,

this process can trigger off appalling hazards to health.

Children, of course, don't understand.

They walk innocently into dangers left lurking in their paths

by unthinking adults.

Behind this sanitation scare

was another change in the composition of household rubbish.

Back in the years of austerity,

there had been almost no rotting food in household bins.

Now, because of rising affluence and new consumption patterns,

that was changing, as former dustman Jeremy Shields remembers well.

People started buying from supermarkets once a week,

or once a fortnight, they would buy stuff,

it would go out of date, they would throw it away.

Putrescible content, the food content typically of rubbish,

was going up quite rapidly.

During the Sixties, rotting matter

became the second largest component of household rubbish.

The bins would get dirty, there's no question about that

and stuff would lodge in the bottom of bins and build up

a matt of quite unpleasant material and, boy, did they stink.

The metal dustbin, which dated back to the previous century,

was no longer sanitary.

NEWSREEL: Today, after three quarters of a century of faithful service,

the dustbin is going into honourable retirement.

Just as collection by horse and cart gave way to motorized collection,

so the dustbin is making way for the plastic bag.

Polythene was one of the many plastics that were invented

in the mid-20th century.

Its first popular use was for hula-hoops.

Being lightweight and resilient, it was also an ideal bin bag.

And as the rubbish of post-war Britain got smellier and dirtier,

local authorities began to use polythene bags

to collect household waste.

People never, ever, came back and said,

"I appreciate the fact that I don't get a smelly dirty bin bag once a week."

But they stopped complaining about smelly dirty bins!

Bin bags were also a symptom of the changing culture of waste management.

They not only made it easier to throw things away,

it was now much harder to recycle the rubbish.

Once it's in closed, plastic sacks, that becomes much less practicable,

because the first thing you've got to do is open all the sacks

and get the contents out.

So in a way, closing the rubbish in is a kind of one time activity

and you will deal with the rubbish as one thing.

As bin bags spread across Britain,

out of almost 1,300 local authorities,

all but 50 shut down their salvage systems.

The recycling infrastructure,

which had been built-up during the war, was now being dismantled.

Waste management now had one overriding priority -

move the rubbish as far from the doorstep, as fast as possible.

Pleased to see us, a lot of people were, like.

Because the people loved it,

getting the rubbish out the way, "Thank God, it's gone." You know.

People don't want rubbish hanging around their place, you know.

Mel Clarke is Wolverhampton's longest-serving refuse collector.

He's been collecting bins for over 40 years.

There was loads of rubbish in those days.

There was cans and bottles and all sorts that you can describe.

Anything that you can name that they didn't want, we'd take it.

We just came in our jeans.

And then when the weather got hot, you could wear shorts, trainers.

You know. No tops, some of the lads, whatever they felt comfortable in.

There was no health and safety issues at all.

But as the bin bag replaced the metal bin,

collecting rubbish without protective clothing

became dangerous.

There was a few accidents as well, there was glass in bags and stuff.

People didn't care what they put they put in the bin.

They just put everything they could get in the thing, you know?

In the bags at the side.

There was one occasion when I was dragging the bags,

and the glass from a broken bottle stabbed me in my leg.

So that was a nasty thing that happened to me,, like, you know.

Binmen were limping off to A&E.

But, crucially, the doorsteps were wiped clean.

And the growing unease that there was a flood of waste

was averted for another week.

These days, when the rubbish starts to pile up at home,

it's time for a trip to the local dump.

It's brilliant for everything we can bring in, yes.

And it keeps your place tidy, doesn't it?

Here, do you want one of these?

Michael Jackson!

In a sense, it's become like, not just a local service,

I suppose, for some.

You can bump into people like you would if you were going

to any other local facility,

like a shop or something, so it's quite nice.

"Do you know, I bumped into my good friend while I was at the tip?"!

Do you want Michael Jackson?! Going, going, gone!

It's a bit too big, isn't it, as well?

-Do you want Michael Jackson?

-No thanks!

Few who come to the dumps know about their origins.

In fact, they date back to 1960s.

This was when the waste management industry first found old furniture

clogging up the waste stream.

# Oh what a lovely surprise!

# My turn to dream about, talk about,

# Scheme about furniture for you... #

In 1964, the first Habitat store opened in London.

It was part of another new trend in post-war consumption.

In the late Fifties, teenagers had differentiated themselves

from their parents by new clothes.

Now, ten years later, they were growing up and settling down.

Their approach to homemaking was also a break from the past.

It's the idea that everything needs to be new

when you start your life, or your married life,

it would have been at that time.

When you get your own place, you have your own things.

and those things, like with clothes,

you won't be taking what you can from relatives,

as sort of things that are handed down

or things that have been in the family for generations.

I can actually remember as a small kid seeing,

I don't know if it was a cover or an inside page of woman's magazine,

that had a mock demonstration with a housewife holding a placard,

saying, "Old furniture must go".

But in the mid-Sixties, the waste management industry

was still entirely reliant on doorstep collection.

This traditional approach simply couldn't cope with sofas and chairs.

It is sometimes very difficult to get rid of awkward items.

I mean, one puts them out with the dustbin

and the dustmen won't take them away,

and some councils charge, and sometimes quite a lot,

for taking stuff away.

Well, I think that is part of the cause of the problem.

The authority that will not collect or makes a charge for it.

Meanwhile, car ownership was rising.

By 1967, over 20 percent of the population had access to a car.

If you can't get someone to collect your ugly sofa,

and you've got a vehicle, then there were problems around fly-tipping

in local areas, countryside, in the vicinity of towns,

which were often expensive to clean up and, of course, quite an eyesore,

particularly as once fly-tipping starts in an area,

it tends to attract more fly-tipping.

Some of this is obviously from the householder.

The slipper shoes. The metal stuff is probably from diddycoys,

a sort of gypsy who are itinerants, usually deal in metal.

So, in 1967, the government passed the Civic Amenity Act.

It introduced fines for fly-tipping.

And all local authorities were ordered provide a site

where the public to could safely dispose of unwanted furniture.

A dump.

This is the back end.

This wall here now is the old original wall of the council yard.

The entrance is just up there.

Nigel Harrison and Dave Doidge

ran one of Britain's original council dumps.

That's what's left of the old yard.

As you can see, some lovely old buildings there. Bit overgrown now.

For over a century, it had been standard practice to collect rubbish

from the doorstep.

But now the public brought their rubbish to this yard themselves.

The dump was nothing less than a revolution in waste management.

And it was just four little skips, dumped in the yard

where people could come in and just dump their rubbish. That's right.

In the winter, we used to have a big brazier going,

we used to take wood out the skip, burn that, pour a bit of oil on it,

set fire to that. Because there was no heating, like here now.

There was no facilities as such.

You just stood outside, people would come in and you were just,

"Yeah, what have you got? Household? Dump it in there."

Within a few years of the Civic Amenity Act,

the fly-tipping scandal of the late 1960s had faded.

The dumps also exposed a shocking truth about the values of modern Britain.

You could be standing here one day

and you'd get somebody smash their Grandfather clock up.

Somebody may have smashed up a grand piano.

And they'd dump... Grandma had died, they'd dump the pictures, everything.

Everything just came out the cupboards

and went straight down the tip.

It would have been the time, if you had foresight,

to be able to find some really nice antiques!

Antiques were out of fashion in the late Sixties.

People wanted spaces that were well-proportioned and open-plan.

It was ironic that achieving this uncluttered modernity

involved creating ever more waste.

The wastefulness of modern life was starkly revealed in Birmingham.

The centrepiece of its post-war redevelopment was a new city centre,

the Bull Ring, which opened in 1964.

NEWSREEL: Oil-fired central heating and air conditioning

maintains a pleasant, late-spring atmosphere all year round.

The Bullring had clean lines and wipe-down surfaces.

But in fact,

it was a machine for generating thousands of tons of rubbish.

NEWSREEL: A boat show in the centre court

marks the opening of the new precinct,

which includes over 100 individual shops in its 35,00 square feet.

Birmingham proudly claims that no other city can match

the Bullring anywhere in the world.

Birmingham's waste management system was creaking under the strain.

For a hundred years, the city's destructors had burnt rubbish

to generate electricity.

They'd been the heart of a collection and disposal system

that minimised waste.

But that meant little to the new head of waste management

in the city, a local GP and influential councillor.

Dr Katie Rogers. She was newly appointed

as the Chairman of the West Midlands waste disposal committee

and she wanted to see all the waste disposal plants.

and as she was walking alongside the furnaces,

which were being raked out manually, an aerosol can flew out.

The whole point of the destructor was to reduce rubbish to ash.

But an aerosol can didn't burn in the furnace. It became a bomb.

It just flew out of the incinerator. It came out at quite a rapid rate,

and nearly hit her. She just sat calmly and said,

"I'm not happy with my workers working in those conditions,

"I want something done about it quickly."

Birmingham promptly closed all destructors.

Never again would Joe Wainwright stand beside an open furnace.

I can see the reason why the council at that time wanted to improve

the conditions for the workers.

So I can understand the reasoning to go forward and hopefully build

a better way of incinerating rubbish for the benefit of everyone.

The city turned to a new generation of furnaces

called mass-burn incinerators.

They were vast and completely automated.

To improve cleanliness and productivity, rubbish was no longer

hand-sorted for recyclables. There wasn't even electricity generation.

Everything just went up in smoke.

Personally I quite enjoyed the new environment I went into,

compared to the one I had spent three and a half years doing.

We used to joke that, in comparison, it was like going to work

in a collar and tie compared to what we did before.

By the end of the 1960s, the age of the destructor was over.

Meanwhile the waste stream continued to change and expand.

Because it wasn't just the waste management industry that was gripped

by enthusiasm for whatever was the latest thing.

In everyday life, what would once have been considered still new,

rapidly felt too old.

And the people with their foot on the gas,

were often the producers of goods.

They'd learned that they could increase sales

by speeding up the rate at which their products appeared outdated.

This was called planned obsolescence -

a phrase coined by the industrial designer, Brooks Stevens.

You became linked with a very controversial phrase,

"planned obsolescence".

I wondered when we would get to that.

Remember, planned obsolescence...

You came up with the phrase?

I came up with the phrase one night in the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis.

I had to speak the next day before combined advertising agencies

and the Rotary Club up there.

So I was trying to think of a catchy title.

So I said, "planned obsolescence", then defined it -

the desire to own something a little newer, a little better.

Remember better. A little sooner than is necessary.

Today, planned obsolescence is a derogatory phrase.

It's seen as a trick

played by producers on their unwitting customers.

But back in the '60s, it was presented as progress.

This was something that would benefit society.

It was perceived as good way of maintaining prosperity.

You've got to keep people buying a new car every two years,

or a new fridge,

so I don't think there was anything hidden in it

or conspiratorial, necessarily,

I think it was a means of ensuring the economy was healthy

because production meant people were in work.

But planned obsolescence contributed to yet another unprecedented problem

for the waste management industry.

Now, dustmen were being asked

to collect and dispose of old TVs and fridges.

From the back end, modernity just looked messier and messier.

This machine just keeps packing and packing.

This was the best refuse vehicle ever built.

The Revopak dustcart was introduced in 1971.

Revopak is a dustman's best friend.

Its enormously powerful teeth

will crush and digest anything on the menu.

Former dustman Steve Jones worked with a Revopak,

and has now restored one of his old dustcarts.

This is how we done it when I was on the dust.

The hydraulic powered steel rake

compacted bulky rubbish to one-fifth of its size,

so the Revopak carried five times as much waste

as conventional dustcarts.

The sheer simplicity in it.

You just threw it in, it done the job for you.

As you can see, this is bulky waste

and it's just tearing it to pieces, it's unrecognisable now.

And that's made of steel.

The design of the Revopak

reveals how recycling, once integral to waste management,

was now almost irrelevant.

In those days, we had no sorting of waste whatsoever.

Everything was co-mingled, crushed in the back.

That as the way it was, that was the way of the world.

By the '70s, the recycling rate had fallen to less than 3%.

I've put hundreds of these through one of these in my time on the bins!

Didn't I tell you that this would crush anything?

In one promotional film, the Revopak was shown compacting a fridge.

We put a piano through one once. Took three of us to lift it.

A boiler, beds, three-pieces,

kitchen appliances, televisions - anything they wanted to get rid of.

During the '70s, the volume of waste grew by as much as 5% a year.

Nearly every local authority switched to Revopaks.

Almost all the nation's waste stream

flowed through these steel jaws.

You could actually put a house through one of these,

including the roof trusses.

That's a Dennis Olympus...

..for wheeled bins and recycling.

They all know me. He does my house.

By the mid-'70s,

every week in Britain, almost half a million tonnes of rubbish

was carted off in a compacted slurry

and poured out onto the local tip.

The waste management industry

had once helped Britons contain the waste stream.

Now it was opening the floodgates.

SEAGULLS CAW

This is a film about the spreading wastelands of the western world,

the wastelands of abundance.

The reporter Trevor Philpott made a documentary

criticising the wastefulness of the consumer society.

Consumption has become holy.

The big consumer has become the true brother, the faithful, the patriot

and year by year,

more of the nation's effort is made to be thrown away.

Post-war prosperity had led to a spending boom,

which had created more jobs and higher wages,

and so more spending, and so on.

Planned obsolescence had then suggested

how this consumption-led economic growth could go on for ever.

No matter how much stuff people bought, they would keep on shopping

as long as they regarded what they already owned as old rubbish.

It was claimed this would lead to endlessly rising prosperity.

But some saw this economic model as piling up mountains of waste.

We can now make more of practically everything

than we can ever possibly hope to use.

And to prosper, we must become a race of massive consumers,

wasting to live.

Only 20 years before, Britons had been encouraged to make do and mend.

People had really thought about what they put in the bin.

At the heart of the consumer society was a completely different mindset.

It's a shift at a psychological level, for sure,

because you're involved in this process

where the bin outside your door just becomes...

It's a bit like the toilet that you flush.

You flush something, it disappears

so you can't smell it, you can't see it.

I think it functions in that kind of way.

It's outside your house

and it's there to take your excess.

Then, in the late 1970s,

the wastefulness of modernity became suddenly apparent to all.

Because the dustmen went on strike.

In the first few weeks of 1979,

Britain's streets became overrun with rotting rubbish.

Yeah, I was involved in it.

It was getting quite worrying in some areas, you know.

They were getting piles of stuff and it was coming out onto the road.

We did actually come in on some occasions

and just clear the worst areas,

even though we were supposed to be taking industrial action.

They didn't really like being out on strike.

It wasn't good.

And wouldn't want to go there again.

Mick Wright was a shop steward during the strike.

Like many dustman, he felt they had no choice.

Inflation was running at 8%,

and their wages weren't rising in line with it.

We were faced with a pay freeze

when everybody else was getting pay rises.

We knew that Ford workers, for instance,

were getting quite large pay increases,

yet the government was saying to us we couldn't have any.

That's what caused the strike, really.

This dispute was initially seen

as a further symptom of a wider economic crisis.

But in a consumer society, a refuse collection strike

exposes the shocking truth about the way people are living.

It takes an event like the dustmen's strike,

for example, of the late '70s, to bring it all back into view

and that fact that if you stop working on removing this stuff,

even for a couple of days,

you pretty soon get a sense that you could be overrun by it.

The amount of waste, it just showed

how much was being thrown away and discarded by people.

Bob Seear was at the heart of the biggest controversy of the dustmen strike.

He ran an emergency dump.

People were invited to bring their rubbish to him

rather than leave it on the doorstep.

His dump was right in the heart of London, in Leicester Square.

It was the whole square. I mean, we started at this end,

cos the theatre booth wasn't there in those days,

and it was just brought in, walked in

and just gradually built up as the weeks went by.

People just came along by hand, in barrows, in vans

and just brought their rubbish here and dumped it.

Bob's dump in one of the nation's most iconic spaces

became a major news story.

Its vile growth was reported with glee.

It started small,

but rather like the story of Jack and the Beanstalk,

it grew, and it grew, and it grew.

It was a mountain of rubbish, almost to the canopy of those trees.

It was an incredible sight.

Maggots, rotting food, rotting waste.

it's got a smell of its own.

It smelt horrendously. It was a totally uncontrolled waste dump.

The dustmen's strike lasted five weeks, and after it,

the waste management industry would never be the same again.

Critics of the consumer society

had accused it of building a mountain of waste.

What happened in Leicester Square seemed to prove them right.

Undoubtedly, people realised

that there was a problem in the country as a whole

and they wanted to relook at everything they were doing.

But by the late '70s,

the throwaway mindset had been ruling Britain for a generation

and wastefulness is a habit that's easy to learn, but hard to forget.

LAUGHTER AND CHEERING

Next week, this series concludes

with the story of the rubbish revolution

sparked by the dustmen's strike.

We took a fairly pessimistic view about human nature in those days.

They used to call me, in the first few years,

the King of the Wheelie Bins.

This is what you get

when you throw bins on your shoulders year, in year out.

Everyone's got a muscle there

but I suppose when you're lifting,

it just gets bigger.

We were shifting 20-30 tonnes a day, and that's a lot of waste.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd