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Overview
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Waste events/facts
1500 •
1550• When Henry II of France proposed to turn some of the sewers of
Paris into the river Seine, the municipal authorities vetoed the suggestion on the ground of danger to the public health, since
half the population of the city were dependent upon the river for water for cooking and drinking purposes.
1554• In Paris (by this time a city of around 200, 000 inhabitants) 800
carts are employed to remove filth twice daily.
1580• In the northern English town of Prescot, the authorities passed a leet order
in 1580 allowing residents to pile solid waste products in the street near their doors for up to a week prior to removal. Dunghills
against residents' houses were supposed to be neat, not 'disordered' or 'inconvenient' and not allowed to 'lie down' and spread
themselves into the street.
1696• Gregory King, an English statistician, estimated (in his Natural
and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, 1696) that the waste lands
of England and Wales occupied 10 million acres out of 39 million acres, or more than a quarter of the country. By 1800, because
of the success of efforts to reclaim waste lands, official estimates
would reduce this to approximately one-fifth of the total area of England and Wales.
1724• In early modern Japan human excrement was so valuable as a fertilizer
(it would be stored for at least a month before being spread on the land) that in 1724 two groups from the Yamazaki and Taketsuki
areas of the city of Osaka fought over rights to collect night soil from the city. By the middle of the century the price for the human waste
was so high that poorer farmers had difficulty in obtaining sufficient fertilizer, and incidents of its theft - depsite the threat of prison
- are recorded in official records.
1794• In Britain, the Board of Agriculture was created in this year. Its County
Reports provided estimates of waste land, which are variously described as waste, common, fen, bog, salt-marsh, marsh,
moor, forest, heath or warren.
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Also ...
A proclamation on filth
(issued by British colonial authorities, Philadelphia, 1778)
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