As recently as the 1970s I remember the Rag and Bone man who used to trade in the streets around where my grandparents lived. He used a horse and cart, and was mainly collecting metal. This would have pre-dated the council refuse collection covering any recycling, i'm not sure when this was introduced generally in the UK, but i'd say the 90s.
We have a rag and bone man to this day. He doesn't have a horse and cart (for shame :-) but he does go around in his truck once a week ringing a hand bell.
I've given him a few things, like an old copper tank which was probably worth a few bob. He would have given me some money but I let him have it for free just to get it off my property. As in the article we'd have to be careful about fly-tipping, but giving him items with an obvious value that can be sold on seems safe.
Same where I lived as a child in the north of England during the same time period. He would appear with his horse and cart, and shouting "rag bone". It must have seemed normal to me at the time, but now it seems incredibly archaic.
Compost heaps don't include cooked food, so they aren't so attractive to flies, vermin, etc that can spread bacteria and disease.
Seems likely too that the collection of rags and bones (for their various uses) became more systematic, with rags and bones as side-products of industrialised processes, and therefore collecting a few rags and bones from individuals was no longer economically worthwhile. There are also other ways to make money now, that are more profitable to the individual than collecting bones worth a few pence per bag.
I suspect too that the rise of plastics mean that we have fewer day-to-day uses for bones, as handles for things, ornaments, etc. This leaves only the larger scale industrial uses, that get bone from other industrial food production processes.
The article mentions that Rag & Bone men moved to items that were still valuable e.g. scrap metal. They weren't chased out of neighborhoods.
A big part of every compost heap my family has ever kept has been the post meal plate scraps that are assuredly cooked. Probably close to 50% by volume. I am reasonably certain this is usually the case.
Where I am of you're seeing putting cooked food in compost someone will immediately jump up to stop you. We have municipal composting systems that are very explicit about what can and can't be included. I'm also involved in various community gardening initiatives in my city and some friends of mine did research into the different low level compost heaps in the city. In every case like that that I saw they were very careful about the cooked food rule.
I'm sure it varies a lot by geography and culture and I'd be loathe to say there's a general "norm" that would apply to the mileus of most readers here.
Here in the Midwest, municipal composting systems [1] [2] [3] and others are very explicit that you can include cooked foods.
> If it grows, it goes! We can accept all food scraps regardless if they are pre or post consumer, cooked, uncooked, spoiled, rotten, or moldy.
> Accepted items include fruits, vegetables, coffee grounds/ filters and tea bags, bread and grain products, dairy products, meat and bones, chemical-free paper towel and napkins, and certified compostable products.
> Fruit and vegetables, Meat and bones, Bread, Eggshells, All food waste including plate scrapings and uneaten food, Napkins, Paper plates, Compostable cups and cutlery (Greensafe, Ingeo), Coffee grounds with filter
> Food scraps (including meat), coffee grounds and filters, compostable ware (such as takeout containers and utensils), napkins, and paper towels are all compostable on campus.
Most 'modern' venues and food courts (universities, airports, malls, stadiums, etc - not restaurants and houses) will have three adjacent bins: Black Landfill, Blue Recycling, and Green Biodegradeable.
Probably 20% of homes in my neighborhood pay the extra $30/quarter to get an additional 96-gallon (~1.1m x 0.8m x 0.8m) curbside cart for recycling, and maybe 5% have a yard waste and food scraps 'biodegradeable' cart (1% or less have backyard gardens and might do their own composting).
You can also just keep your own compost heap in your back yard. (Municipal composting? Sounds like a scam where I separate my garbage and the city just throws everything into the same landfill anyway.)
The cheapest form of municipal composting typically involves yard waste (grass trimmings, fallen leaves, etc.). That all takes a tremendous amount of landfill space, and it's all somewhat uniform and predictable. It's partly why many suburbs have been doing separate yard waste collection for decades.
The reason they don't always want food waste is that it attracts animals that eat food waste (crows, seagulls, raccoons, possums, cockroaches, flies, etc.) and the composting is often done in open-air windrow heaps. Composting also works most efficiently when the ratio of carbon and nitrogen is in balance, and food waste is somewhat different than yard waste. It makes it harder to manage to get good compost quickly.
At least where I've lived (except Arizona where I had no lawn) I've never been able to mulch or leave clippings on the lawn the whole season. Once the grass is actually in growing season, it grows too fast. If the grass is wet, you can't mulch. If you cut twice as often, the thatch doesn't decompose quickly enough. For me it was just more work now so that I could do more work later.
I separate my garbage and then the municipality uses the organic waste to create compost. I've visited the site myself and seen it (my ex worked for recycling company). The compost is then used to feed our shared green spaces, parks and flowerbeds, within the city. I do also have a separate compost heap for my building which we use to feed our community garden.
This practice of municipal organic waste connection actually dates back centuries. Anthony van
Leeuwenhoek, the father of the microscope, worked his day job in gathering organic waste in the locality, and some of his early experiments were based on inspecting this waste via magnification.
I understand that the trustworthiness of public governance varies from place to place but I can't imagine why a city would spend time and money on a project like this just to throw everything in a landfill.
A lot of “recycling” ends up in landfills, especially since China stopped accepting it. Some people like separating their garbage because they enjoy the illusion that they’re doing something virtuous, and it’s easier to indulge that fantasy than to actually have multiple waste management streams.
I'm aware of that, and my municipality also sends some dry recycling abroad. But the green waste we use locally. I've visited the sites and read their annual reports.
It makes sense to be critical but there's a certain level of distrust that I wouldn't be personally able to tolerate and still feel happy living here.
According to the Bank of England's inflation calculator page [1] 50 GBP in 1875 would be worth around 4,766 in today's Sterling. Not sure how to calculate the true "worth" of the exchange from GBP to USD, though. 50 GBP in 1875 would be around 320 USD (according to the Wikipedia article), does this mean that the 4,766 Sterling should be represented as 21,663 USD (according to the 1875 exchange rate) OR as 6,015 USD (according to today's exchange rate)? Not sure.
Just don't? Needing to add "which at the time was a substantial sum of money" means the value is so out people's experience that a foreign currency isn't any more confusing.
The best way, IMO, would be by comparing it to the wages of the rag and bone man, or the median income at the time, and potentially by comparing that to modern incomes in the UK and US.
In 1875, per [1], [2], and [3], a common laborer's average annual income was on the order of £30-£50. (DDG found no data on the income of Victorian rag-and-bone men specifically.) So when the article says:
> To do so was punishable with a fine of £50 (approximately US$65), which at the time was a substantial sum of money.
The "approximately US$65" is only meaningful at the December 2023 exchange rate, and "substantial" is carrying all the information and doing a poor job of it. But the important, comparable thing is that it was on the order of his annual income.
It might be more accurate to say that it would be comparable to fining a British person the median household income of £32,300 [4] or an American $74,580 * 0.75 = $55,935 (after taxes) [5]. Quality of living, cost of services, and various baskets of goods were more or less expensive at different times, so there are certainly additional comparisons or modifications you could do.
I'm not much of a historian, but when I want to understand how much of a disincentive the fine was to a rag-and-bone man, that is a start to the kind of context I need. I don't have the context for the savings or borrowing power available to a Victorian laborer - did most people have savings accounts, an estate, retirement account, or other assets they could draw on? Did the government run installment agreements, or did a convict have to borrow from a bank and repay the loan over time? Were they just thrown in a debtor's prison until their family and friends paid the fine? I don't know.
Regardless, it wasn't equivalent to me imagining a loss of $65.
This provided some great context for one of my favorite poetry books, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology (1992). I never understood that the title referred to an actual profession. When I tried to look it up several years ago, all I got was an explanation that it's meaning was figurative. That's one mystery solved.
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweeping of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, and that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
- William Butler Yeats
from The Circus Animals' Desertion
When I was in Buenos Aires a year ago this was still very much a thing, and a daily thing. There were multiple people going around with carts, some carried by horses, others by humans, and some had a truck.
