A history of rubbish on BBC4

What we throw away is what our descendants will one day dig through to see how we lived. This programme on BBC 4 is a fascinating, science-based look at our past waste disposal and looks forward to the future of rubbish.

Human rubbish was made up of pretty much the same things for millennia (food, earthenware, pottery, natural fabrics). In a century we have changed what we throw away and the quantity of it so dramatically that it fills our land, our seas and rivers. Plastics, synthetics and chemicals barely decay and are beginning to cause real problems for water and soil. 

However, although the programme does point out some alarming facts about the unregulated dumping of rubbish in the mid to late 20th century and the consequences of that, there is a lot of positive news in this film as well from the tapping of methane gas to power homes to "mining" of old rubbish tips for precious metals. One omission is a focus on the burning of rubbish but I suppose you can't cover everything. One point made by the materials scientist however is that burning is a waste of finite resources like plastics and that finding ways to recycle more effectively would make better sense.

The programme on for another 22 days and I throughly recommend that you find time to watch it. 

The secret history of landfill: a rubbish history