Managing waste is one of the great challenges of contemporary Europe. Not only has the volume of waste increased dramatically since the postwar era and the waste itself changed in its character and composition, but increasing sensitivity to the environmental effects of industrial society has also fundamentally altered the politics of waste itself. Despite similar beginnings, West Germany and Britain have diverged dramatically in their approach to waste since the 1960s. Whereas the former has developed extensive recycling schemes and seeks eventually to avoid landfills entirely because of the threats they pose to groundwater, the methane they produce, and their aesthetic effects, the latter has chosen to rely on landfills as the chief method of disposal. This divergence, evident today to visitors to both lands, needs explanation. That explanation, Raymond Stokes, Roman Köster, and Stephen Sambrook argue, is to be found neither in some “in-built cultural factors” (304), i.e. national character, nor in any simple notion of “privatization,” but rather in different paths of institutional development.

Municipalities in both lands developed many different approaches to waste collection and disposal starting in the late nineteenth century. These ranged from Glasgow's focus at the turn of the century on salvaging reusable trash and incinerating the remainder (the latter was used to recharge battery-powered collection vehicles) to Dortmund's “dust-free” collection system of the 1920s, which was destined for local landfills in abandoned quarries. The different systems responded to the challenges of World War II, and afterwards sought to return to the status quo. After 1945, the growing wealth of both countries, the shift from heating households with coal to fuels that did not produce heavy, hot ash, and the development of packaging-intensive, self-service stores meant a different kind of waste that was much larger in volume and contained plastics and other materials that did not break down as easily. Growing labor shortages in Germany, as well as financial challenges in Britain, increased pressure to rationalize waste collection. Through the 1960s, innovations in containers and methods of pickup took place in both countries on the local level, but, by the late 1960s, important divergences between them were starting to emerge.

The environmental movement was strong in both countries, as the authors point out, but differences in political and municipal organization influenced its effects. Germany had a decentralized political system in which the individual states bore the responsibility for setting standards on waste until 1972; Britain, by contrast, had a centralized system that set general rules for all municipalities. Germany's system of proportional representation allowed a small protest party like the Greens to be part of political decision-making at both state and national levels; Britain's winner-take-all system limited the chance of such influences. Germany's municipalities often had long-term officers in charge of waste; British officers were political appointees who might be replaced with each election. These and other factors created different institutional contexts for change.

The narrative of the first part of the book, which takes the story to about 1972, is sometimes difficult to follow, since the authors are weaving together a series of stories about institutions and politics, container sizes and collection vehicles. At times it is not clear why, for example, so much space is dedicated to container design. Halfway through the book, however, the argument begins to come together around several bigger narratives. First, the world of waste becomes more complex with the introduction of new materials that posed new challenges—such as plastics that released dioxins when they burned. Second, a growing awareness of a generalized environmental threat, developed by Rachel Carlson and others, led to new fears of unseen risks that helped to create a new language about waste itself. Third, attention shifted from the immediate challenge to public health of dangerous or rotting waste in cities, to its role as a more complex source of environmental pollutants. With these changes went a change in terminology: “salvage” became “recycling,” “waste disposal” became “waste management.” These terminological changes marked a different way of thinking about waste disposal itself as part of ongoing systems rather than as a finite process.

British and German political systems responded differently to these new challenges. In the 1970s and 1980s, the British government, concerned especially with cost cutting, reorganized the rules for waste collection and disposal. The result was a more intense reliance on landfills and relatively little recycling. The government of Tony Blair (1997–2007) continued to focus on cost and sought to guide development using the blunt and imprecise instrument of tax incentives. Initiatives for dealing with the trash problem tended to remain at the municipal level. In Germany, the interweaving of political and regulatory initiatives on local, state, and national levels created the need to coordinate waste management above the municipal level. Municipalities began to cooperate with states and private firms to solve environmental problems. The authors show, surprisingly, that the “Thatcher revolution” produced less actual privatization of waste disposal systems than was the case in Germany, and that it was privatization of a different kind: in Britain, private firms were smaller than those in Germany, where they were able to cooperate with government to ensure optimal outcomes. When large-scale paper recycling in Germany led to huge swings in the price of paper, for example, the government imposed price floors to ensure that private companies would continue to invest in recycling. Furthermore, the larger German companies were able to hire university-trained scientific experts, something that the smaller firms and municipalities of Britain were not in a position to do. By the first decade of the new millennium, Germany was on the way to eliminating landfills altogether through a robust system of recycling and new methods of incineration that produced energy and removed dioxins from exhaust. Britain, by contrast, remained heavily reliant on traditional landfills.

At times, the complexity of the narrative—or rather the presence of so many narratives—makes this book difficult to read. That said, the work succeeds in putting the history of waste into the center of modern European history, and implicitly calls for a different approach to historical narrative. The authors turn our attention away from the grand history of economic growth to the complex and ambiguous story of how to deal with all the stuff produced. They turn us away as well from the big histories of democratization, rights, and nation-states to the intricate, local problems of how to manage the environments in which people live. They historicize the concept of waste in so doing, and, in this sense, the book is a great success.