For most of American history, there was no garbage truck, no sanitation system, and no plan. Americans simply lived with their trash, tossing it into streets, alleys, and rivers, and the consequences were deadly. When the first European colonists arrived in the 1600s, they brought with them the waste practices of their homelands, which meant discarding food scraps, chamber pot contents, and animal carcasses wherever convenient. In Jamestown, Plymouth, and New Amsterdam, refuse piled up in gutters, outhouses sat dangerously close to wells, and nobody connected the filth with the diseases that killed so many.
Dysentery, typhoid, and cholera were blamed on bad air or the will of God, never on the rotting waste in the streets. Early laws attempted to curb the worst abuses. In 1634, Boston banned the disposal of fish and garbage near the common landing. In 1657, Dutch authorities in New Amsterdam forbade throwing waste into city streets.
But enforcement was practically nonexistent, and the ordinances did little more than respond to complaints from wealthy residents tired of wading through refuse. Nature absorbed the waste for a time, but as towns grew, the mess became impossible to ignore. In New York, an unusual solution emerged. Starting in the late 1600s and continuing into the 1800s, thousands of free-roaming pigs wandered Manhattan, devouring food scraps, spoiled produce, and animal offal.
For poor families, many of them recent immigrants, the pigs were a lifeline, a source of food and income that also happened to clean the streets. By the 1820s, hogs roamed lower Manhattan in staggering numbers. Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and wrote with a mixture of amusement and horror at the sight of pigs wallowing in filth alongside well-dressed New Yorkers on Broadway. As the city grew, wealthy residents came to see the pigs as a symbol of everything wrong with the city, and a class war erupted over them.
Reformers wanted them gone. Working-class communities, many of them Irish and German immigrants, resisted, sometimes violently. City officials attempting to confiscate hogs were chased off by angry crowds. It took the cholera outbreak of 1849, which killed thousands, to shift public opinion decisively.
Afterward, the connection between filth and disease could no longer be dismissed. New York finally removed the pigs from lower Manhattan, and in 1869, banned them from roaming the streets entirely. The pig era was over, leaving the city to face a difficult question: who was going to clean up the garbage now? For a long time, the answer was nobody.
The second half of the 1800s brought explosive growth to American cities. Industrialization pulled people into factories, immigrants arrived by the hundreds of thousands, and the volume of waste reached unprecedented levels. Factory byproducts, chemical waste, and packaging added entirely new categories of garbage. On top of this sat a problem so enormous it deserves its own chapter: horses.
In the late 1800s, the horse was the engine of the American city, powering streetcars, delivery wagons, fire engines, and ambulances. By 1870, New York City had an estimated 150,000 horses, each producing around 22 pounds of manure and several gallons of urine daily. That came to over three million pounds of manure deposited on the streets every single day, plus roughly 40,000 gallons of urine. When it rained, the manure mixed with water into a foul slurry.
When it dried, it crumbled into dust that people breathed and that settled on street vendors’ food. It bred flies by the billions, and those flies carried typhoid, dysentery, and infant diarrhea, a leading killer of children. Horses also died, often in the middle of busy streets. A dead horse weighed over a thousand pounds and was frequently left to decompose until it could be hacked apart and hauled away.
In 1880, New York removed an estimated 15,000 dead horse carcasses from its streets. Vacant lots became unofficial dumping grounds, and some piles of manure grew 40, 50, even 60 feet tall. Farmers had once hauled the manure away for fertilizer, but the volume overwhelmed demand, and it simply sat rotting and breeding disease. Among the poor, scavengers, rag pickers, and bone collectors sifted through the garbage for anything that could be sold.
Rags went to paper mills, bones to fertilizer or buttons, grease to soap makers. These original recyclers performed a service the city refused to provide, but their lives were miserable. They worked in unimaginably filthy conditions, exposed to disease, sharp objects, and toxic chemicals, and they were looked down on by everyone else in society. The garbage that had no value had to go somewhere.
New York dumped refuse into the East River, the Hudson River, and the Atlantic Ocean for decades. Garbage scows carried municipal waste out to sea, where it was dumped into open water, and beaches along the New Jersey shore and Long Island were regularly littered with what washed back. Open burning was another common method. Cities piled garbage on the outskirts of town, usually near immigrant neighborhoods, black communities, and the poorest areas, and set it alight.
The toxic smoke drifted over residential areas, causing respiratory disease and contaminating soil and groundwater. It was one of the earliest and most persistent examples of environmental injustice in American history. In 1885, the first American garbage incinerator was built on Governor’s Island in New York, a technology borrowed from England. It reduced waste volume and eliminated open-air burning, but it was expensive, produced toxic ash and emissions, and required dry waste that was often hard to come by.
By 1914, nearly 300 incinerators operated across the United States and Canada, but none of them were a complete solution. Through all of this, American cities refused to answer a fundamental question: whose job was it to deal with the garbage? Private contractors were inconsistent and corrupt. Municipal governments avoided the responsibility because it was expensive and politically thankless.
In New York, Tammany Hall treated the sanitation department as a source of patronage, handing jobs to political allies who had no interest in working. Streets went uncleaned for weeks, garbage piled up in enormous mounds, and citizens complained to no effect. By the early 1890s, New York was one of the filthiest cities in the Western world. Garbage sat shin-deep in the streets, horse manure coated everything, and visitors said the smell could be detected from miles away.
Tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, and diphtheria were the baseline conditions of life for millions. The emerging science of germ theory made the connection between filth and disease impossible to ignore. In 1894, New Yorkers elected a reform-minded mayor, William Lafayette Strong, who had run on cleaning up the city. One of his first acts was to appoint Colonel George E.
Waring Jr. as street cleaning commissioner. Waring was a Civil War veteran, an engineer, and a man obsessed with cleanliness. He had designed the drainage system for Central Park and built sewers in several cities.
When he took charge in January 1895, he found a department that was broken beyond recognition, a patronage army with outdated equipment and no plan. He accepted the job on one condition: he would do it his way. Waring immediately fired the political appointees and hired workers on merit. He established strict schedules and routes, separated waste into ashes, organic garbage, and rubbish, creating one of the earliest recycling programs in America.
He built transfer stations and organized waste removal with military precision. But his most visible innovation was the uniform. He ordered every member of his street cleaning force to wear an all-white uniform with a white cap. The effect was dramatic.
The men who cleaned New York’s streets were suddenly visible, a uniformed symbol of civic pride. New Yorkers called them the White Wings, and they became some of the city’s most beloved public servants. The transformation was almost unbelievable. Streets that had been buried under mounds of filth suddenly revealed pavement beneath.
The journalist Jacob Riis wrote that it was Waring’s broom that first let light into the slum. In 1896, the White Wings organized a parade, thousands of garbage collectors marching through the streets of New York to public cheers. Death rates from infectious diseases dropped significantly in the years following the reforms, and cities across the country adopted Waring’s methods. By 1902, dozens of American cities had established organized garbage collection services.
Waring did not live to see the full impact of his work. In 1898, he was sent to Cuba to study sanitary conditions in Havana after the Spanish-American War. There he contracted yellow fever, returned to New York gravely ill, and died at 65. The man who cleaned the streets of one of the dirtiest cities in the world was killed by a disease that thrived in filth.
His legacy endured. Before Waring, sanitation was a personal responsibility or a corrupt private enterprise. After Waring, it became a public service funded by taxpayers, managed by government, and staffed by professional workers. The idea that municipal government had a duty to collect and dispose of its citizens’ waste, obvious today, was revolutionary in the 1890s.
Women’s civic organizations also played a crucial role. Groups like the Ladies Health Protective Association in New York, and similar organizations in Chicago and Boston, documented sanitation failures, lobbied politicians, and demanded accountability. Acknowledging that filth was not just an aesthetic problem but a killer of children, these largely middle and upper-class women organized cleanup campaigns, pressured newspapers to cover the crisis, and shamed city officials into action. Their contributions have been largely written out of the mainstream narrative, but without them, the reforms of the 1890s might never have happened.
The story did not end there. Even after cities organized collection, the question of what to do with the waste remained contentious. Ocean dumping continued until 1934, when the Supreme Court ruled it illegal, and even then the ban was not fully enforced. New York City did not stop dumping sewage into the ocean until 1992.
Landfills became the primary disposal method. The most infamous example was Freshkills on Staten Island, opened in 1948 as a supposed three-year stopgap. It remained open for 53 years, swallowing over 150 million tons of garbage and growing into the largest landfill in the world, covering 2,200 acres. At its peak, 20 barges carrying 650 tons each arrived daily.
By 1996, the mounds of trash were taller than the Statue of Liberty. Residents of Staten Island lived with the stench, the rats, and the contaminated air for half a century. The history of garbage in America is not a story of steady progress. It is a story of crisis and response, of neglect and reform, of problems ignored until they became unbearable and then addressed with solutions that were often just new ways of hiding the same old mess.
The sanitation infrastructure was not built out of enlightenment. It was built out of desperation, because the diseases were killing too many people, because the streets smelled too bad, because the filth had become impossible to ignore. George Waring understood something his contemporaries did not: sanitation was about dignity. When he put his workers in white uniforms, he made a statement that the people who clean our streets deserve to be seen, respected, and treated as professionals.
When New Yorkers lined the streets to cheer the White Wings in 1896, they acknowledged what had always been true. A city that cannot manage its waste is not a city. It is a disaster waiting to happen.
