Recycling. You know her and love her and maybe even sing her praises. When I was first starting to live zero waste, it was all I was obsessed with. I learned the rules, I educated my friends and coworkers how to recycle according to the rules, and it was most of what I talked about online in my early content creation days.
But it’s an extremely flawed system. At least these days.
Today I want to explore the history of recycling, why we used to do it out of necessity, and how it turned into just another product of capitalism focused on profit.
What is recycling?
Let’s first cover the quick definition of recycling. According to Wikipedia, “Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects.”
So it’s not just turning your old plastic water bottle into a park bench; it’s also cutting up an old scrap of clothing to make cleaning rags, using water from your dehumidifier to water your plants, and even using brown bananas to make banana bread! It’s a pretty vague term that can be applied to any kind of waste and making anything useful out of it.
That being said, recycling these days is really just seen as the blue bins we all put out on the curb (at least in the US). But recycling wasn’t always so niche!
Pre-Industrial Recycling
According to Wikipedia, there is much historical evidence from around the world that humans have been recycling and reusing for centuries and even millennia!
From Wikipedia, “there is evidence of scrap bronze and other metals being collected in Europe and melted down for continuous reuse. Paper recycling was first recorded in 1031 when Japanese shops sold repulped paper. In Britain, dust and ash from wood and coal fires were collected by "dustmen" and downcycled as a base material for brick making.”
Recycling Pre-Municipal Waste Disposal
Humans also didn’t use to have trash pick-up services and landfills. Today, it’s a very “out of sight, out of mind” game we play with our garbage. Before that, humans were very aware of their waste because things that went unused would pile up in the home. It was inconvenient to let things go to waste. Now it feels inconvenient to hold onto items to repair or recycle them at home.
Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, says in this history.com article, “Before there was municipal solid waste disposal, stuff would pile up in your house if you didn’t reuse it,” Strasser points out. “In addition, people who made things had an understanding of the value of material goods that we don’t have at all. Literally, if everything you wore, sat on, or used in your house was something you made or your mother or uncle or the guy down the street made, you had a very different sense of value of material goods.”
Though there is one example from the 1800s that is similar to what we see in recycling today: the ragman. The same History.com article states that “the ragman went from house to house to buy old cloth for an international trade in rags to make into paper. Railroads largely put an end to the door-to-door rag collecting.”
The train, plus the creation of the first municipal trash pickup service, which started in New York in 1895, led us to see modern recycling start to take shape.
The Recycling Boom, Bust, and Boom Again
As soon as trash pickup services became mainstream, so did recycling. At this time, landfills were still new, as was the idea of waste. I feel like humans found much more value in their things during these times. As early as 1905, workers would sort legitimate garbage from usable waste. The cities sold the reusable trash to industries. And many individuals saved their organics to feed to animals.
Then, there was a short period of time in the 1920s in which all that was being recycled was scrap at junkyards from things like machinery and cars. This was the roaring 20s, after all, and life for some folks was wealthy and abundant. Much like today, I imagine it felt like there was just so much to go around that the idea of reusing, repairing, and the like felt like a waste of time when we can just buy something new.
Then, you can probably see it coming: everything changed with the Great Depression and WWII.
Recycling boomed again at this time out of necessity. People losing their jobs by the masses meant less money to spend on new things. War rationing meant fewer new items to go around as well. Pretty much all metal at the time was reused, as were nylons and other textiles. But not only out of necessity, but the government also put out pro-recycling propaganda in many war-fighting countries. Wikipedia states that “Massive government campaigns, such as the National Salvage Campaign in Britain and the Salvage for Victory campaign in the United States, occurred in every fighting nation, urging citizens to donate metal, paper, rags, and rubber as a patriotic duty.”
Modern Recycling
If you thought the hippies of the 1970s were why we have recycling today, think again! Well, think more broadly. Absolutely, the rise of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s helped pave the way, but as with many other recent topics I’ve covered (such as biofuel and climate policy), it was the OPEC Oil Embargoes of the 1970s that put the US and other global powers in a pinch for resources and energy.
Wikipedia states that “A considerable investment in recycling occurred in the 1970s due to rising energy costs. Recycling aluminium uses only 5% of the energy of virgin production. Glass, paper and other metals have less dramatic but significant energy savings when recycled.” After several years of people recycling on a personal level in order to take personal action for the planet, it was a relief for environmentalists to see the government taking action on this important issue. Even though that action was due to other factors.
It was then that curbside recycling really became mainstream. In University City, Missouri, they launched the nation’s first municipal curbside recycling pickup in March 1973. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that it became available for much of the rest of the US. My current city didn’t get it until 2009!
Even more recently made mainstream is e-waste recycling. It’s extremely valuable since tech is full of precious metals, but it’s also extremely harmful to send tech to the landfill. It wasn’t really until the tech boom of the early 2000s and into the 2010s that e-waste recycling became mainstream. Though you still can’t recycle tech in your curbside bin.
Why recycling rates are so low
I think this is why recycling rates are still so low. Many people in the US have lived most of their lives without recycling. Gen Z is really the first generation to have been recycling our entire lives. And maybe not even all of us! I didn’t have recycling until I was a teenager.
Not only this, but recycling is, fortunately/unfortunately, a business. I’m glad recyclers can make money, but this is also recycling’s biggest downfall, in my opinion. Many people don’t recycle out of necessity these days; we do it out of guilt for the planet. Many recyclers don’t recycle out of necessity either; they recycle to make a profit.
It’s often cheaper to make new plastic and new paper. Thankfully, glass and metal recycling is extremely valuable and cheaper than making new, so these numbers are relatively high.
Most people in the US live in a world of abundance. And when our trash and recycling are whisked away every week, it truly is out of sight, out of mind. We don’t see the consequences of throwing away, on average, 5 pounds of waste per day per person. We have money to throw away our clothes and buy new ones. We have the means to buy new notebooks, new books, new furniture, and new tech all the time versus repairing and recycling what we can.
Another issue is that we are simply recycling badly. We are wishcycling, which means putting stuff in our recycling bin in the hopes that it will be recycled even though it won’t. We aren’t following the rules, we’re recycling food waste, and just generally using the recycling bin as a second garbage bin. Please follow your rules; it does help increase recycling rates!
The future of recycling
I think we are about to see a resurgence of recycling out of necessity for a few reasons:
Americans are struggling to get by financially. It makes economic sense for us to reuse and recycle as much as we can in our own homes, such as reusing a pickle jar as a jar or cup, cutting old textiles into cleaning rags, recycling our old e-waste to make some extra cash, using every scrap of our food to we don’t throw it away, and so forth.
Metal is a finite resource. I think about this every time I put a piece of metal in the recycling bin. If we don’t recycle it now, a new job in the future may be scrappers who have to dig in the landfill for old pieces of metal to be melted back down and made into something new. Recycle it now instead of throwing it away!
We’re running out of landfill space. It’s not the fastest-growing problem we’re facing, but especially on the East Coast, where there are more people and fewer places to put a landfill, plus the fact that those landfills are older than the ones in the West, this is a problem we have to consider.
The planet depends on it. Once climate change sets in as reality for everyone else, people will need to take planet-saving measures seriously. Recycling, reusing, composting, and the like will become an essential part of life as we learn how to further adapt to a warming climate.
It feels like the attitude toward recycling in and of itself is being recycled. Humans used to recycle before we even had that word for it, out of necessity, and I see us going back that way, too. Right now it’s still seen as a thing that hippies do, but it’s extremely important for the planet, for your own wallet, for the economy, and for our health!
Let us know how you feel about recycling below.
As always, remember that your small actions make a big difference in the long run :)
Emma
