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A Brief History of Waste Management 27
as children’s playgrounds (Vesilind et al., 2002). In 1741, Lord Tyrconnel described the streets of
London as “abounding with such heaps of filth as a savage would look on in amazement.” In 1832,
citizens complained that the streets near Westminster Abbey were “the receptacle of all sorts of
rubbish which lay rotting and corrupting, contaminating the air and affording a repast to a herd of
swine.” (Tammemagi, 1999) (Figure 2.2).
In 1842, Sir Edwin Chadwick drafted the Report from the Poor Law Commissioners on an
Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. The report
described the sanitary conditions as follows:

Many dwellings of the poor are arranged round narrow courts having no other opening to the main street
than a narrow covered passage. In these courts there are several occupants, each of whom accumulated
a heap. In some cases, each of these heaps is piled up separately in the court, with a general receptacle
in the middle for drainage. In others a pit is dug in the middle of the court for the general use of all the
occupants. In some the whole courts up to the very doors of the houses were covered with filth.
… defective town cleansing fosters habits of the most abject degradation and tends to the demoraliza-
tion of large numbers of human beings, who subsist by means of what they find amidst the noxious filth
accumulated in neglected streets and bye-places.

The report included a recommendation that “public authorities undertake the removal of all refuse
from habitations, streets and roads, and the improvement of the supplies of water.”
In the middle to late 19th century, the research of physicians and scientists such as Frenchman
Louis Pasteur, German Robert Koch, and German-Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis revealed the

FIGURE 2.2 London slum, 19th century.