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When Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery, he studies the strengths, weaknesses, foibles, egos, sensitivities, and other traits of the villains. It is the same with wastes: a detailed understanding of their characteristics is fundamental to being able to manage them properly. To determine the size of a disposal facility, we must know the volumes and rate of generation of waste. A MRF cannot be designed unless it is known what recyclables are contained in the waste stream. A knowledge of the physical and chemical nature of waste allows engineers to select landfill construction materials that will be compatible with the waste. We must understand the toxic and hazardous components in order to design the facility to endure for a period of time commensurate with the hazardous lifetime of the waste. Because of the incredibly large number of existing waste compounds, it is useful to categorize them. Unfortunately, there are no well-established categorization systems in place. We will describe wastes using two main classification systems, and then we will describe their most important characteristics. The first system is a functional one; that is, the wastes are classified by generator. The second is a classification by chemical type. This somewhat arbitrary system combines different kinds of waste primarily by the group or industry that generates the waste. These waste types include: • municipal wastes • industrial wastes • hazardous wastes • radioactive wastes This is a convenient classification because each of these waste classes is generally managed and disposed of as a group. In addition, substantial volumes of waste are generated by the mining and agricultural sectors; these are not discussed in this book. Municipal solid wastes, as the name implies, are produced by the everyday activities in a community. They arise from the following sources: • residential—houses and apartments • commercial—stores, restaurants, office buildings, service stations, etc. • institutional—schools, courthouses, hospitals, etc. • construction and demolition—construction sites, road repair, building demolition, etc. • municipal services—street-cleaning, garden and park landscaping, wastewater treatment, etc. We are a wasteful society. Every person in North America generates approximately 2 kilograms of garbage each day.

This book has been written at a time when late modern societies are experiencing a period of enormous social and economic upheaval. Some commentators have suggested that late modern societies should be seen as defunct, or at best in decline. This forecast of the end of late modern societies looms larger than it has ever done before. But, in what ways will this influence the archaeology of the contemporary past as a discipline, and its agenda as we have charted it in this book? In many ways, the need for an archaeology of the late modern period has become even more urgent in the light of these changes. Any discipline that allows us to look at the nature of late modern societies from a different perspective will help us to understand the critical points at which societies change, and to put this information into practice in the future. But what if we are in a period that heralds the onset of a new form of society? Will the archaeology of the contemporary past simply become another period study, like the archaeology of the Neolithic for example? Although we have focused much of our discussion on the nature of late modern societies, we argue that we need an archaeology of ‘now’ as much as we need one that explores social responses to the very recent past that got us here. The central theme of this book is the need to develop an archaeology that allows us to be more self-aware and critically reflexive by understanding the nature of contemporary society and its engagement with the material world, as well as our recent and deeper past. It is this single point that is at the core of our argument—that we need to use the approaches of archaeology not only to study the roots of our society, but also to understand our present lives. Thus archaeology becomes not only a discipline for recording objects, places, and practices that are extinct or have fallen into ruin, but develops a series of tools alongside its more conventional ones for scrutinizing objects, places, and practices within our own society that are still in use.

In the Wrst part of the book we considered a number of influences on the emergence of an archaeology of the contemporary past, from the interests in contemporary small-scale societies that developed as part of the New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s, to the use of contemporary case studies to address particular archaeological debates about the relationship between material culture and social behaviour posed by post-processual archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s. We have seen how the archaeology of the recent past began with a focus on the First and Second World Wars, and then the Cold War, eventually to encompass a Weld that is concerned with the archaeology of a much wider range of events that have only just passed or are still occurring today (e.g. Penrose 2007). In Chapter 3 we looked in detail at the sorts of Weld methodologies that are being applied by archaeologists of the recent and contemporary past, considering whether their Weld methods might be understood to be distinct from other forms of archaeology. In Chapter 4 we looked at the relationship between archaeology and other disciplines that focus on contemporary materiality, in particular anthropology, material culture studies, art, and documentary photography. And in Chapter 5 we explored some reasons why archaeologists might have developed an interest in the contemporary world, and the period of late modernity in particular, through an exploration of some of the conditions of late modernity that make it distinct from the periods that precede it. In the second part of the book, we look in more detail at how we might approach the archaeology of the contemporary world, with reference to a series of case studies. As you read through this second part, you will notice that one of its distinguishing features is its dual perspective. We consider on the one hand places and material practices that are essentially extinct or have ceased to function, and on the other those places and practices that are still functioning, or, in Tim Cresswell’s (2004: 37) words, are ‘still becoming’.