How cities turned compost into garbage — chemical fertiliser and the century of the landfill

On 9 September 1913, at Oppau near Ludwigshafen, the world's first ammonia synthesis plant went into operation. BASF's own records put its initial capacity at about thirty tonnes a day; within a year it was producing forty, and by 1918 Germany as a whole was making over 200,000 tonnes of synthetic ammonia a year. It was the industrial conclusion of Fritz Haber's patent on the synthesis of ammonia from its elements, filed on 13 October 1908, and of Carl Bosch's translation of that chemistry into high-pressure plant. It is worth restating what the plant did from the city's side of the ledger rather than the farm's. Until then, the nitrogen in a field had to be carried in from somewhere: compost, farmyard manure, night soil, oil cake, fish meal, Chilean saltpetre. The moment nitrogen could be taken out of the air, the top of that list became unnecessary.

Saying it became unnecessary is economically imprecise. What actually happened is that it stopped having a price. Edo's night soil and the manure of European cities were not loops sustained by goodwill; they were commodities that farmers paid to take away. Carting them cost labour, boats and wagons, and it was worth paying because nitrogen was scarce. Synthetic nitrogen abolished the scarcity itself. Once a product existed that was easy to move and store, consistent in composition and an order of magnitude denser in nitrogen per unit weight, the heavy, smelly, variable organic matter of cities quietly left the market. A material with no buyer becomes surplus, and surplus in time becomes something that must be disposed of. What this article follows is the disappearance of that price tag.

The argument here comes in two stages. First, the primary cause of urban organic matter's demotion to waste was neither hygiene nor urbanisation but the collapse of its price under a substitute good. Second, a lost price alone does not produce garbage. You also need a technology able to dispose of stranded material cheaply, at volume, and in a way that looks harmless enough. That technology was the sanitary landfill, implemented in 1937 in Fresno, California. The engineer Jean Vincenz's method was to cut a trench, tip the waste in, compact it and cover it with earth every day — a design that made the three standing complaints against open dumping, rats and smell and scatter, disappear at once. By the 1950s it was the most widely used disposal method in the United States. Only with both pieces in place — no price, and a hole engineered to receive it — did urban organic matter settle into the category of garbage.

Read this way, the composting mandates now spreading across the world look different too. Before they are an expression of environmental awareness, they are an attempt to manufacture, by regulation, the buyer that vanished a century ago. Mandating separation, banning organics from landfill, pricing disposal differentially, setting up certification schemes — every one of these is an operation that re-attaches a price, for some other reason, to a material the market stopped pricing. What follows checks first what chemical fertiliser actually replaced, then when Japan's night-soil cycle was cut, then the provenance of burial as a technology, then the line of refusal running through Howard and Rodale. It ends by asking how the loop now being rebuilt differs from the one that was lost.