The advent of consumer societies in the United Kingdom and West Germany after 1945 led to the mass production of garbage. This book compares the social, cultural, and economic fallout of the growing volume and changing composition of waste in the two countries from 1945 to the present through sustained attention to changes in the business of handling household waste. Though the UK and Germany are similar in population density, degrees of urbanization, and standardization, the two countries took profoundly different paths from low-waste to throwaway societies, and more recently, toward the...