1At the turn of the 19th century, Prague was among the cities experiencing rapid demographic growth. In 1888, official statistics recorded 284,586 inhabitants; by the turn of the century, the figure had risen to over 368,000, and by 1920 to almost half a million. In 1930, Prague’s population was estimated at 830,982. This growth reflected both rising population density and the city’s geographical expansion, as it gradually absorbed the neighbouring areas on both banks of the River Vltava. A sharp increase occurred in 1922, when so-called Greater Prague was formed by merging all Prague municipalities and the originally independent suburbs into a single administrative unit (see graph 1).

2As the city expanded, the volume of waste – household waste, ash and street sweepings – rose steadily. An understanding of the amount of waste generated in Prague can be gained from a public tender for the years 1886–1888 for the collection of waste from the largest landfill at the time in Libeň, on the right bank of the Vltava. According to existing historical literature, as much as four-fifths of Prague’s solid waste was sent there.¹³ The tender estimated the annual waste volume at 13,809 m³ of household waste (including ash) and 382 cartloads of horse manure.¹⁴ This figure corresponds to the actual quantities of waste collected from this landfill during those years.¹⁵ The administrative report of the City of Prague states that in 1898, 25,627 cartloads of rubbish and ash were collected, which, when converted at a rate of 1 cart = 1.6 m^3, amounted to 41,003 m³.¹⁶ Ludvík Čížek, a member of the City Building Council and professor of Czech Technical University in Prague, who conducted a survey on waste management in Czech towns, reported that Prague was already generating 70,000 m³ of solid waste annually in 1909.¹⁷ Following the establishment of Greater Prague in 1922, the figures rose sharply – for example, in 1925 it was 189,156,¹⁸ and in 1930 it was already 319,467 m³ of solid waste from households, ash and street sweepings.¹⁹ This represented 23 times more than the estimate from 1888 (see graph 2). The press in the 1920s repeatedly reported that Prague generated an average of almost 50 railway wagons (1 wagon = 10,000 kg) of waste per day.²⁰

1Note: Up to 1901, the figures include Prague I–VII, Karlín, Smíchov, Královské Vinohrady and Žižkov; from 1902, they also include Libeň; from 1905, they include Vršovice; and from 1921, they include the whole of Greater Prague.

2Source: Statistická zpráva hlavního města Prahy za rok 1930–1933, Vol. 50–53 (Praha: Statistický úřad hlavního města Prahy 1937), 76–77.

1Note: Pre-WWI statistics report waste quantities in carts and wagons. For this chart, the data have been converted to m³ (one wagon is equivalent to six horse-drawn carts, and one cart is equivalent to 1.6 m³).

2Source: compiled based on the official statistics of the City of Prague: Administrační zpráva královského hlavního města Prahy (for years 1898, 1905–1907) and Statistická zpráva hlavního města Prahy (for years 1922, 1926–1929 a 1930–1933).

3Throughout the period under review, the cleaning of the city and the collection and disposal of Prague’s solid waste were the responsibility of the municipal administration. Costs as a percentage of the city’s total expenditures were rising. In 1888, they amounted to just under 200,000 gulden (approx. 1.57% of city expenditures), and by the mid-1920s they had reached almost 22 million Czechoslovak crowns (3.64% of city expenditures).²¹ The task was overseen by the city administration, which operated through a network of so-called municipal yards.²² Until 1919, the city’s cleaning was carried out manually, using primitive equipment and relying solely on horsepower.²³ The number of people involved in city cleaning (e.g. street sweepers with brooms, cart drivers, supervisors of street sweepers and landfills, day labourers collecting horse manure, rubbish sorters, pavement sprinklers) rose from 599 to 1,691 between 1889 and 1930.²⁴ After World War I, responsibility for city cleaning was transferred to the Building Department of the Prague City Hall, where the task was delegated to experts, including technical engineers and hygienists.²⁵ This change marked the advent of new technical and organisational solutions – such as the introduction of new types of waste bins, dust-free waste loading and transfer, motorisation and mechanisation, and plans for the construction of an incinerator.²⁶

1As in other European cities, solid waste management in Prague was a combination of several evolving approaches.

2A traditional practice, long widely adopted in keeping with the motto “out of sight, out of mind”,²⁷ was dumping waste in all sorts of places – typically in less frequented corners of the city or beyond its boundaries. As part of the city’s clean-up efforts, municipal landfills were established to collect waste. However, the city’s growth gradually made it necessary to build additional landfills. For some time, the largest landfill was the one in Libeň; other large landfills were later established in Žižkov, Dejvice, Střešovice, and Vysočany. By the early 1920s, their number fluctuated around 22,²⁸ and they were so overcrowded that they posed a significant aesthetic and hygienic problem. A pressing issue in the public sphere was that, as Prague expanded, the landfills gradually found themselves within the city’s built-up areas,²⁹ blocking new construction.³⁰ Suburban municipalities vehemently opposed the establishment of new ones, citing health risks.³¹ In 1926, the middle-class, intellectually oriented independent daily Lidové noviny wrote about the emergence and growth of dumps: “Over time, such a tip forms a small heap, then a pile, a mound, and eventually an entire mountain range, where mountain hiking could be boldly practised, were there a somewhat pleasant mountain atmosphere.”³² From 1923 onwards, Prague moved away from municipally managed rubbish tips. At the city’s expense, all landfills were “cleared away and levelled”,³³ but this did not resolve the issue of unofficial dumps or the piling up of waste in densely populated neighbourhoods. The contemporary press mentions five actively operating rubbish dumps in Prague at the end of the period under review (the turn of the 1920s and 1930s).³⁴

3In Prague, the filling in and levelling of uneven terrain, such as mines, sand pits, ravines, or other depressions, was relatively limited. Such sites were not available within inner Prague, whilst transport costs were a key problem for more remote areas. Even large-scale projects foundered on these issues. In the 1920s, for example, the City of Prague held negotiations with the Prague Ironworks Company regarding the backfilling of one of its ore mines in Nučice with Prague ash, but the estimated cost of over a million Kč (Czechoslovak crowns) to transport it to a site less than 30 km from the centre of Prague made the project economically unviable and therefore unfeasible.³⁵

4Another option for dealing with Prague’s waste, or at least part of it, was to repurpose it. During the period under review, Prague’s waste collection system generally distinguished between street sweepings, household waste, ash and horse manure, which were mostly placed separately in designated areas at the landfills. Further sorting (aside from unorganised scavengers and poor picking through rubbish) took place only to a limited extent. This was because potentially usable materials were either disposed of at home (burned) or sold to door-to-door traders dealing in rags, bones, leather, etc.³⁶ Meanwhile, progressive, economically oriented Czech newspapers reflected with admiration on foreign advancements and approaches to waste sorting. For example, an article in the periodicals Průmyslník and Rolník described in detail the organisation of work at a London rubbish dump:

No sooner has such a rubbish heap reached a certain height and volume than it is surrounded by a whole host of men, women and children, all of whom are equipped with brooms, sieves, sacks, aprons, etc. And now the searching, sifting and separating of various items begins – in short, activity like that in an anthill – as a result of which the main heap quickly disappears, transforming into a series of small piles according to the type of items found in the large rubbish heap.³⁷

5Waste sorting in Prague remained imperfect, haphazard, and poorly organised; one cannot speak of a system. In Prague, which had a strong and nearby agricultural hinterland (the so-called “golden strip of Bohemia” – the Elbe Valley, less than 30 km from the centre of Prague), one of the key methods of managing waste was its reuse as agricultural fertiliser.

6For Prague, waste incineration was not an option during the period under review – the establishment of an incinerator was only beginning to be considered and discussed at the time. Although Prague had already been exploring new technical solutions in the first decade of the 20th century (and had been approached by foreign firms with offers and brochures),³⁸ negotiations only began to take a more concrete form in the mid-1920s. In 1926, Škoda Works in Plzeň, Czechoslovakia’s largest engineering firm, approached the City of Prague with a project that was eventually implemented.³⁹ The incinerator in the industrial suburb of Vysočany began operations in 1934 and completely redefined Prague’s existing waste management mechanisms.⁴⁰

1Fertilisation and the art of managing it are hallmarks of modern agriculture. In the 19th century, public education in the Bohemian lands focused on improving fertilisation in every respect, both in terms of quality and quantity. As early as the 1850s, the influential progressive Czech agricultural journal Hospodářské noviny recommended that farmers use other sources of plant nutrition alongside farmyard manure, namely so-called waste manure consisting not only of household waste but also of various waste collected in public spaces – such as dust and mud from roads, clay and sludge from clogged sewers, ash and building debris. Fertiliser produced in this way “was to be the peasant’s pride”.⁴¹ Compost, in which the above-mentioned components were gathered, turned, and aerated several times a year over a period of 1–3 years,⁴² remained highly valued even after industrial fertilisers had come into use. However, industrial fertilisers were initially affordable only to larger farms. In peasant farming, they were still regarded as a “rare commodity” as late as the 1880s.⁴³ Even later, it was common on a single farm to combine, alternate, and mix different types of fertiliser, depending on the nature of the soil, the crops grown, and the availability and price of fertilisers.⁴⁴

2Solid waste in Prague also provided a range of components suitable for composting. These included, first and foremost, horse manure, mud and dirt from the city streets – so-called street sweepings; followed by organic waste from marketplaces and household waste (organic kitchen waste, ash).⁴⁵ Manure from the winter covering of fountains, waterworks and water pipes, where it served as insulation against freezing, was also a potential source for agricultural use.⁴⁶ The most highly prized product was always horse manure, which was sold directly by municipal yards with stables and was also responsible for the high fertilising value of street sweepings. Household waste collected from individual homes at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries had a lower fertilising capacity.⁴⁷

3The main advantage of compostable urban waste was its low cost and availability in large quantities. Presentations on the benefits of using urban waste increasingly drew on chemical analyses of its fertilising properties, intended to convince peasants of its effectiveness. Various data from different sources were used, but all shared the same final recommendation regarding the suitability of using solid urban waste in agriculture. Prague’s waste, as a valuable fertiliser, was still being promoted in the Czech environment in the 1920s, with appropriate scientific backing. As early as 1925, Venkov, the official journal of the Government Agrarian Party, published an article referring to research in Switzerland, where the use of urban waste was reportedly, in some cases, “more effective than fertilisation with farmyard manure or artificial fertiliser”; the following uses were mentioned: peatland cultivation, sugar beet cultivation, and vegetable cultivation.⁴⁸

1The primary objective of the original business plan put forward by the supplier, i.e. the City of Prague, was to address the urgent problem of reducing/disposing of the growing volume of waste for reasons of aesthetics (rubbish dumps “growing into veritable mountains”) and hygiene. The elimination of health risks – groundwater pollution, rubbish dumps as breeding grounds for flies, microbes and rodents, which could be a potential source of disease and epidemics; odour and dust caused by the transport of open railway wagons carrying rubbish and ash – became increasingly significant, particularly after the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.⁶⁹ A striking example was the dysentery epidemic in Prague in 1922, the spread of which was linked to the Vysočany landfill and resulted in 200 people being infected and 8 deaths.⁷⁰

2From an economic perspective, the city’s interest in selling solid waste as fertiliser gradually declined. The widening gap between the rising costs of cleaning the city and the revenue generated from waste sales was becoming a problem. We have reliable data for the late 19th century indicating that the financial contribution from the sale of waste to the city budget covered approximately 10% of the costs of cleaning the city (e.g. in 1898, the costs of cleaning the city amounted to 244,963 gulden and revenue from the sale of household waste, including ash, amounted to 26,746 gulden).⁷¹ A decade later, in 1909, according to data from the technical engineer Čížek, the ratio of revenue costs had deteriorated (revenue from the sale of rubbish amounted to 35,783 gulden, i.e. 4.1% of costs).⁷² As the volume of solid waste steadily rose, the city was able to sell an ever-smaller proportion. Between 1901 and 1905 alone, the proportion of rubbish and ash sold fell from 88.3% to 64.4%, leading to their accumulation (see table 1). Nevertheless, the sum obtained from the sale of waste was still considered sufficiently substantial: “too significant to allow the city’s revenues to be reduced at the expense of modern methods of disposing of such waste through incineration and chemical processes”.⁷³

3Following the creation of Greater Prague in 1922, the profits from the sale of solid waste were negligible within the city’s waste management. In 1925, Prague spent 21.78 million Kč on city cleaning, but the item in the city’s financial statements entitled “Removal of solid waste by rail and to the tip”, which included rubbish, horse manure and ash, recorded a profit of only 0.23 million Kč, i.e. a mere 1.1% of the city’s cleaning costs.⁷⁴ After 1926, when the Jeneč cooperative was established, the sale of urban waste to peasants was highly unprofitable – the costs of transport, together with a flat-rate fee paid to the cooperative, amounted to 3.2 million Kč in the financial statements.⁷⁵ The collection and disposal of solid waste, with its growing volume and stagnant (slightly volatile) demand, were logistically difficult to manage. The City of Prague was approaching a critical situation – waste management reliant on peasant collection was inevitably collapsing; health and other considerations, as well as public opinion, did not allow a return to the original practice of landfills. Although plans for the construction of an incinerator had been in progress since 1926, a relatively long period of several years had to be bridged.

4From an agricultural perspective – the demand side of the market – several key factors shaped the purchase of waste as fertiliser. In the 1920s, the tone of specialist treatises shifted (in line with both foreign and domestic experience), and they no longer rated waste fertiliser very highly. This marked a shift from original enthusiasm to, at the very least, reserved opinions. Attention was drawn to the risk of farm animals being injured by nails, shards and fragments, or of damage to agricultural machinery, which persisted because of imperfect sorting of solid waste. The composition, quality and quantity of household waste and street sweepings fluctuated – they were difficult to predict, varying by season and by city district (working-class districts, middle-class districts, and the affluent villa districts).⁷⁶ The fertilising potential of street sweepings declined as a result of the motorisation and electrification of urban transport, which replaced horse-drawn power, and the fertilising potential of household waste declined due to a reduction in the proportion of ash caused by the incipient transition of households to gas heating.⁷⁷ Whilst the use of waste fertilisers could lead to increased yields, it could also result in crop diseases (e.g. potato scab⁷⁸). Furthermore, fertilising with urban waste could only be beneficial for a limited time, “until the soil becomes saturated”.⁷⁹

5Between the 1880s and the 1930s, peasants gradually stopped using Prague’s urban solid waste as fertiliser. As late as the 1870s and 1880s, demand for so-called waste fertiliser was so high that public tenders were issued, and small-scale farmers queued for hours with their carts outside the landfill to collect it. By the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a well-developed rail transport system was in place, which the city used to stimulate demand in its immediate vicinity. As a result, demand remained sufficient, and peasants were willing to pay for the waste. By the 1920s, however, the situation had changed entirely. The peasants from Jeneč were unable to fulfil their ambitious business plan. The cooperative’s collaboration with the city did not develop as anticipated. The City of Prague, overwhelmed by waste, more than doubled the number of waste wagons sent to Jeneč (17,000 railway wagons in 1929), whilst at the same time, problems arose over payment for the promised free transport.⁸⁰ The cooperative tried to expand its client base through advertising, seeking customers who would purchase waste fertiliser year-round,⁸¹ but demand for waste from peasants was insufficient. Positive trends in the prices of industrial fertilisers, which had already become standard in the interwar period, also worked against waste fertilisers.⁸² Sales were so low that by 1928 the cooperative in Jeneč was offering them for spreading and fertilisation free of charge, at a rate of up to 15 wagons a day.⁸³ Yet even this failed to increase interest in them. The dump in Jeneč grew unchecked, and the natural consequence was the cooperative’s gradual decline. It is no exaggeration to say that the market for waste fertilisers had practically collapsed just before the incinerator was put into operation.

1In Prague, the system for utilising solid waste in agriculture persisted for a surprisingly long time compared with other major European cities. It remained the core of waste disposal until the early 1930s. In the 1880s–1930s, when devising strategies for solid waste disposal, the city sought to streamline a practice that had proven itself over many decades, seeking tools to improve it (in the sense of expanding its territorial reach), rather than replacing it with a different system. Although Prague was familiar with modern methods of waste disposal by incineration (Brno, then the second-largest city in the Bohemian lands, had had its own incinerator as early as 1902), the fact that Prague was surrounded by highly productive agricultural land with a high capacity to absorb fertiliser delayed the city administration’s decision to build an incinerator. The deteriorating quality of waste fertiliser and the increasing availability of substitutes reduced its appeal to peasants. Existing literature generally emphasises the hygienic, aesthetic and economic reasons that led cities to change their waste management practices when establishing modern waste disposal systems. From the perspective of the research presented in this study, we add that, in the case of Prague, the countryside itself played an active and significant role in the decline of the use of urban waste as fertiliser in rural areas.

1This study was carried out with the support of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic, institutional support RO 0826 (Eduard Kubů), and the Cooperatio programme, the research area of History, conducted at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (Barbora Štolleová).