In the twenty-first century, voices of gloom speak of economic and ecological crises. We are urged to cut back on consumption and to use fewer resources. In the words of a recent British environmental campaign to, ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’. So-called sustainable innovation is seen as emerging as an important force for change in business and society in which products and services are developed with the aim of reducing environmental and resource impacts, and of improving efficiency (Larson 2000; Roy 2000). Yet at the same time in modern Europe we live, in the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2005), in a ‘liquid society’ where the well-being of its members hangs on the swiftness with which products are consigned to waste. ‘ In that society nothing may claim exemption from the universal rule of disposability, and nothing may outstay its welcome. The steadfastness, stickiness, viscosity of things inanimate and animate alike are the most sinister and terminal of dangers, sources of the most frightening of fears and the targets of the most violent of assaults’ (Bauman 2005: 3).

Recycling, and its counterpart destruction, both offer possibilities for the creation of the new in which objects and materials have to be rethought. It is this creativity in reshaping and rethinking the possibilities of things that I wish to address in this essay. My case study is the Bronze Age tell site of Százhalombatta, Hungary. Here people lived surrounded by clay, yet they made striking, deliberate decisions about the recycling of ceramics. They also made decisions about when to end the lives of things in what might be termed a ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter 1942; Bauman 2005) which enabled them to start making things anew.