In August 1955, LIFE magazine published an article with the now-vaguely-sinister, then-celebratory title, "Throwaway Living." The idea, it seems, was that humans had entered a kind of wanton Golden Age, when cleaning up after ourselves was just one more quaint waste of time, and tossing more and more of our used-once items into the trash was another sign of modernity's relentless ascendancy over the drudgery of the past.
