When the Solution is Worse Than the Problem
By: Historical Insights
Tags: Innovation, History, Science, Climate Change, Environment

Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1900 (public domain)

In the late 1800s, cities around the world were growing both in population and size.

People were living farther away from work, and they needed a way to get around town. In order to do so, they became dependent on an unsustainable, environmentally harmful method of transportation.

This method of moving people around cities was a dirty one — urbanites complained constantly of the pollution from these vehicles. Luckily, a new technology was around the corner — one that would help to clean up the terrible urban pollution.

I’m writing, of course, about the scourge of horses in the cities of the late 1800s and the miracle technology that replaced them — the car. We wouldn’t normally see the personal automobile as an environmental savior, but it seemed that way in the late nineteenth century.

It turns out that plastic, another of our greatest environmental villains, was once pitched as the solution to a big environmental problem. Both of these stories can serve as a cautionary tale — that, if we are not careful, our attempts to be more sustainable may just create new — and worse — problems.

The horse was the key to the transportation systems of many industrial cities in the late 1800s. By 1900, London alone featured perhaps 11,000 Hansom cabs, in which one horse would pull two or three people.

There were a few thousand more buses, in which a team of 12 horses would pull larger numbers of people. Pretty much every delivery in the city was carried out by literal horsepower as well.

This meant that there were well above 50,000 horses in London. Other major cities functioned similarly. New York was similar — New Yorkers took 100 million trips by horse a year; there were 150,000 horses in the city by 1880.

Imagine walking through this on your way to work (public domain)

This may sound great to those of us living with global warming — the horses did not produce significant amounts of CO2 or particulate pollution.

But the horses created several awful problems. The first was that the average horse produced 22 pounds of manure per day. Multiply that by New York’s 150,000 horses, and the city was looking at (and smelling) over 3,000,000 pounds of horseshit a day and over a billion pounds of horse manure per year.

Some of this could be used as manure for nearby farms, but the volume became overwhelming, especially when you consider that the method for removing the manure relied on… more horses, which produced more manure. Streets became overwhelmed with manure, to the point that cities employed people to sweep the crosswalks in the hope that people could have a narrow path through the muck.

Horses also died all the time — 15,000 a year in New York alone — and were often left by their owners to rot in the gutter. With each corpse weighing 1,500 or more pounds, the logistics of removing them to a burial ground were very difficult. Horse corpses left in the street bred insects and disease.

The environmental problems seemed like they would continue to get worse indefinitely. By 1894, the Times of London predicted that “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” Urban planners were at a loss; cities were rapidly becoming unsafe and almost uninhabitable.

An 1898 automobile advertisement (public domain)

Into this crisis came an invention that promised to clean up the cities of the world — the car. Henry Ford introduced an affordable car for American families, the Model T, in 1908.

Combined with electric streetcars, the automobile made urban horses unnecessary. By 1912, there were more cars than horses in New York, and by 1917 horse-drawn public transportation was made a thing of the past.

The end of the manure crisis is often seen as an example of the fact that capitalism, innovation, and technology can usually combine to solve seemingly insurmountable problems. But what if capitalism, innovation, and technology combine to solve one problem but create a worse one?

The horse manure problem, while worrisome for Late-Nineteenth-Century people, was a localized one. The solution has contributed heavily to climate change, a global problem that will affect almost every species on earth.

One of the other scourges of our modern environment, plastic, was also once seen as a solution to environmental problems. In the late nineteenth century, an astounding array of household goods were made of ivory.

Ivory was durable and smooth — piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and buttons were all frequently manufactured out of ivory; in the gilded age, high-quality ivory goods were the mark of a prosperous household. Up to a million pounds of ivory were being used per year.

The demand for ivory led, of course, to increased elephant hunting. As early as 1867, The New York Times had noticed that elephant numbers were plummeting in places like modern-day Sri Lanka.

It published an article hoping that a new material could be found “long before the elephants are no more and the mammoths used up.” Other animals — like tortoises — were also under severe threat because their bodies were being used to make consumer goods.

Ivory traders in the 1880s (public domain)

Luckily for the elephants, John Wesley Hyatt, a New York inventor, experimented tirelessly until he developed a new substance — celluloid, the first plastic.

Celluloid was used to make photographic films and small items like combs. Celluloid was fairly useful, but the real breakthrough was Bakelite plastic, developed by Leo Baekeland around World War II.

Baekeland developed a plastic — made from formaldehyde and coal byproducts — that could replace shellac, a substance that is naturally secreted by beetles. These new plastics had the durability and hardness that allowed it to replace ivory (and tortoise-shell, and cattle horn, and wood, in many cases) as a manufacturing material.

Plastics were seen as the solution to the decline in elephant populations — now, the animals would not have to be hunted for their tusks. This was true, but, as with the car, we eliminated a problem by creating a much bigger one.

The plastic the Leo Baekeland devised in the middle of the last century will be here for several more centuries. Plastic pollutes our land and our oceans; plastic particles are found in pretty much every organism and ecosystem on earth.

A 1921 Du Pont ad for pyralin, a plastic that could emulate ivory or tortoiseshell (public domain)

It seemed in the late 1800s that humans’ modern lifestyles had created terrible problems in the environment — in the cities, horses and their excrement were making life unlivable; in remote parts of the world, elephants were being hunted for their tusks.

We “solved” both of those problems with technology, telling ourselves that growing human population and rapacious consumption were not at the core of the problem. Instead, we could innovate our way out of it.

Now we find ourselves trying to solve the problems created by Henry Ford and Leo Baekeland. We would love to keep consuming and traveling at the rate to which we’ve become accustomed.

But we should pay attention to examples like these. At least during the late Nineteenth Century, it turned out that solving the problems caused by consumption with the unbridled consumption of something else can backfire.