“It is difficult to say whether we will be able to deal with the radioactive waste issue”

What insights from the history of human-made waste can be useful in tackling the issue of radioactive waste?
The learning process must be taken into account – much of what we used to do is done differently today. But if we really did that consistently, we wouldn’t be allowed to make any more decisions at all. If that were the case, we would have to wait at least another 100, 1,000 or 100,000 years before we can handle radioactive waste properly, but of course that is not possible. So you have to communicate honestly that today’s solutions will someday no longer be state of the art. It thus makes sense to find solutions that can be adapted and customised. This is comparatively difficult with a deep geological repository, where the waste is buried at great depth.

In your book, you mention the term “technological solution optimism” in a different context. What exactly does that mean?
Technological solution optimism can mean different things. For example, waste management practitioners in the 1960s believed that building a good landfill or incineration plant would solve their problem. They were in the fortunate position to control the entire process. Citizens had no say until the 1970s, when the practitioners were forced to enter into dialogue with them after the citizens started founding initiatives and protesting against new incineration plants. Through their campaigns, citizens acquired considerable expertise over time, but they still focused strongly on the information that was withheld from them. The technological solution optimists in the city’s sanitation authorities and the interior ministries said: we are going to build this plant, and it is not dangerous.

In the sense of: what more do you want?
Yes, exactly. And the citizen initiatives never said that these plants were dangerous. What they said was: we don’t know how dangerous they are. In a waste incineration plant, for example, an estimated 500,000 chemical compounds are released from the chimney. We know only 10,000 of them – the other 490,000 compounds are unknown! This argument of incomplete information strongly influenced these debates. For the authorities, it means that they can no longer simply pretend that there are no citizens. The authorities must involve the citizens and organise the decision-making processes democratically, precisely because no definitive statement can be made about safety.

Where does the desire to get rid of waste once and for all come from? You say it always comes back to us. Would that also be the case with radioactive waste?
The fact that the waste returns to us is a modern experience. In the 19th century, waste came back as potting soil at best. That is what is new about the very complex waste we have been generating since the Second World War. It does not simply disappear but finds many ways to return to our everyday lives. We can export plastic waste to Asia, but it will just end up in the sea. Then suddenly it reappears in our food chain in the form of microplastics. In a way, it is a Freudian interpretation of consumer society: you can push the waste away, but like the unconscious, it will resurface.

Are you saying that waste management was easier and “better” in the past. For example, wood was burned or allowed to decompose in a meadow. Today, wood is treated with varnish or similar products.
Wood is treated with lacquer, but there is a reason for this as it fulfils other functions. Our society has become much more complex in material terms over the last hundred years. More and more elements that were once considered curiosities in the periodic table are now being processed at ever higher temperatures in ever more complex constellations. Cheese packaging, for example, does not simply consist of a simple film of plastic, but of five films of different plastics that have been welded together. This makes it incredibly difficult to return plastic to product lifecycles, so the waste takes much longer to decompose and also becomes increasingly uncontrollable. In the case of radioactive waste, this issue is taken to an extreme.

What advice do you have for us to better understand waste?
First, we should realise that waste is inextricably linked to the way we organise our everyday lives. Any kind of mass production relies on packaging. At the same time, far too much is produced so that the supermarkets can always be fully stocked. If we wanted to change the system and produce less waste, we would have to do without mass production as we know it based on the current state of technology.

I would like to delve briefly into the history of waste management, or into “a dirty history of humanity,” as you titled your book. You wrote that waste only became an issue once people began to settle down.
We have always produced waste, even the Neanderthals littered their caves. For me, the history of waste management begins when people stopped leaving their huts. From then on, they had to deal with the waste. Even in societies that produce little waste, it will eventually pile up and become visible, smelly, tangible. The organic waste of the past, which always included faeces, had the unfortunate effect of attracting vermin and rats. It can be shown for settlements dating back as early as 10,000 BC that humans took the waste out of the house and piled it up in a heap.

As I understood you, the prevailing opinion at the time was that vapours and gases make us ill. What can you say about the so-called miasma theory?
The miasma theory goes back to Greek medicine and states that diseases are also caused by vapours emanating from the soil. This includes cholera, for example, which is a disease that kills very quickly and very painfully. Even if the miasma theory is not scientifically correct, it created a discourse, which in turn led to many improvements. Roads were paved and sewerage systems built. These are all infrastructures that were built on the basis of a false theory, but nevertheless helped to combat cholera.