And another thing

Rubbish, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Paul Johnson

16 June 2007

By mysterious law each place
Where nature looks most gentle and glad
Attracts the rubbish dumping race

But in fact the entire human race has this propensity, and always has had, as archaeologists know to their delight.

One way of looking at it is to use physics, or more particularly the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This lays down that the entropy of a closed system can never decrease. In practice this means the energy is conserved but degraded into less ordered and convenient forms. Rubbish-creation is a form of entropy. Consumption goods are produced, marketed, bought and even used in an orderly fashion. Then the products of use and what remains unusable become disorderly — rubbish. It is a fact of nature that it is much easier to find ways to convert order into disorder than vice versa. The point is powerfully made in the neat Australian use of the verb ‘rubbish’: to tip a surfer off a high wave.

A huge and to some extent successful effort is now being made by authority to reverse the entropy of rubbish disposal. We are being made by law and the threat of fines of up to £1,000 to sort our rubbish and put it in the right places whence it can be reordered into useful matter. It is said that in a decade New Labour has created over 100 new crimes and over 1,000 new misdemeanours. Many of these deal with physical issues, such as smoking and rubbish, never before tackled radically by law, as well as metaphysical ones, such as opinion, now in many cases identified as ‘hate crime’. It is notable that throwing down a cigarette butt may now be punished more severely than theft, and expressing hate, as defined by law, can be a more serious crime than physical assault (or may aggravate the assault exponentially).