This book explores the philosophical, social, and aesthetic implications of twentieth-century America's obsession with eliminating waste. Through interdisciplinary engagement with fiction and popular culture, William Little traces the way this obsession finds expression in powerful social forces, and shows how such forces are governed by an idealism that links the proper treatment of waste with the promise of salvation. He does this by examining various aspects of history and culture from the drive to consume conspicuously or the Progressive-era ethos to manage society with science, to the contemporary demands to "reduce, reuse, and recycle."