How was waste disposed of before landfills as noted in the nonfiction book, Toms River?

Waste is the by-product of commercialism, industrialism, and the way people live. Fagin illustrates how there used to be an entire subset of people whose jobs it was to dispose of waste. They scrounged for castaway objects, mostly. They took waste and burned it or changed it in some way so they could sell it to someone else. These jobs are all gone now. (Not that they were desirable to begin with – the people who had these bottom feeding jobs led short and painful lives.) In their place are municipal landfills. Fagin says that while the industries of creating products for sale never changes, there really is not much of an industry for how to get rid of waste, byproducts, or garbage.