Marie Kondo, the star of Netflix’s new show ‘Tidying up with Marie Kondo’. Image: Netflix.

It’s caused a wave of donations across the globe from New York to Brisbane with donation bins overflowing and thrift stores barely able to keep up with the piles of bags appearing at their doorsteps.

At the heart of this trend is a worrying statement about today’s culture of consumerism, where people are able to throw away literally thousands of pieces of clothing without so much as a second thought.

As some of the biggest producers of waste in the world, Australians shouldn’t be surprised that we have a long history of throwaway culture that dates back as far as the Victorian era.

No such thing as ‘away’

The latest tome on decluttering, New Minimalism, points out that there is no such thing as ‘away’. As in, when we throw something ‘away’ it doesn’t really go away (if only it did).

When I donate or discard something it disappears from my life but must remain somewhere: in someone else’s possession, recycled into something else but still ultimately destined for landfill. That thrill I get from being rid of unwanted objects that were weighing me down, that joy sparked by a tidy drawer, has lasting consequences outside my home.

This is painfully evidenced by salvage excavations undertaken by archaeologists across Melbourne. The working-class Little Lon district yielded over 500,000 artefact fragments and the recent Metro Tunnel digs close to 1 million.

Beneath the city sky scrapers are countless cesspits (old-fashioned long-drop toilets) that households used to discard their excess rubbish when the pits were phased out in the 1870s. Despite a weekly rubbish collection, people found plenty of trash to fill the pits. It was a city wide KonMari™ clear out 19th-century style and it’s still there.

Just as our landfills will be in 150 years on a vastly larger scale.

I spent many years painstakingly cataloguing artefacts before it really clicked that Victorian era Victorian’s were incredibly wasteful. You would think that items shipped half way around the world in the 19th-century would have value, be carefully mended or sold second hand. But there is plenty of evidence from Melbourne’s archaeology that this wasn’t the case: perfectly good ceramics discarded because they were no longer fashionable, complete bottles thrown out even though a bottle washing factory was located a couple of blocks away, a rubbish pit at a drapers shop filled with seemingly good clothes and shoes.

How much of this decluttering can the world take?

What your rubbish says about you

“There’s something intimate about examining someone’s rubbish, “ says Dr Sarah Hayes.

Rubbish reveals an incredible amount about individuals and society.