In the foreword to the 19th edition of the Brockhaus (1896), refuse was treated “as a key concept of our age,” and waste disposal was included among the 240 lemmata “that characterize our present intellectual and social situation.” A historical analysis of relevant lemmata in 18th and 19th-century encyclopedias reveals highly diverse conceptual fields [8]. In 1732, J.H. Zedler included under Abfall (refuse, waste, but also decline) infidelity towards God and rulers, differences in level in watercourses, and the decline in ore content in mining [5]. Even in the middle of …