In the 1800s, there were no blue recycling bins, no sorting, no recycling trucks rumbling in the aisle. Recycling as we know it did not exist. But people were much better.
"People have recycled a lot more than we do now," says Susan Strasser, author of Waste and needs: a social history of waste. If the elbows of a shirt were worn, you would remove the sleeves, turn them inside out, and voila: new shirt. If a dress goes out of style, you add new buttons or send it back to the seamstress to make a more trendy dress. Finally, the fabric would be transformed into a quilt or rag carpet or simply into a rag.
"Before the disposal of municipal solid waste, things would pile up in your home if you didn't reuse it," says Strasser. "Besides, the people who did things understood the value of material goods that we don't have at all. Literally, if everything you wore, sat or used in your home was something you made or your mother or uncle or the street guy did, you had a very different sense of value in goods materials. "
She explained that the household manuals even included discussions on how to fix the glass, including using garlic as a glue.
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How the Earth was made on Vault HISTORY.The 19th century equivalent closest to modern recycling? The ragpicker, said Strasser. The ragman went from house to house to buy old fabric for an international trade in rags to make paper. The railways have largely stopped collecting door-to-door rags.
When garbage collection began in the late 19th century, many cities separated reusable waste from garbage destined for landfill. Just like today, workers sorted via conveyors as early as 1905. Cities sold reusable waste to industries. And many people have kept their organic matter to feed the animals.
But in the 1920s, the separation of sources was not in progress. At that time, there was not much recycled apart from the metal in the scrap yards.
"But there really was a relatively short period of time that people didn't recycle," says Strasser.
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Recycling: from World War II to the 1960s
During the Second World War, people recycled nylons, cans, cooking fats and even tin in toothpaste tubes for the war effort.
And in the 1960s, the first recycling programs linked to people's concern for the environment began to appear, explains Martin Melosi, author of Fresh Kills: a story of consumption and rejection in New York. When Rachel Carson and others were pushing the science of ecology and Lyndon B. Johnson began to adopt many environmental laws.
"As the environmental movement begins to take hold nationwide, recycling has been seen as a personal manifestation of helping the environment," says Melosi. "There was a feeling of connection to the environment, similar to what it is now for my grandchildren," he says.
At the very beginning of environmentally friendly recycling, the few people who did it transported everything to private recycling centers.
"It was not practical for the whole population, and people who drive cars to bring things to recycling centers pollute in a different way," says Melosi.
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Full landfills facilitate recycling on the curb in the 1970s
Beyond the benefactors, however, most people in the disposable society of the time did not think too much about preserving or reducing usage ... until the landfills began to fill up in the 1970s.
"Landfill was the most popular form of disposal after WWII," says Melosi, and recycling is one way to reduce the tipping of the scales. "It eliminates waste from the waste stream, thereby preserving the landfill. Recycling therefore begins to have an economic and strategic role, different from the simple safeguarding of the environment. "
Street-side recycling programs have solved the convenience problem, although the prevalence varied from city to city. In 1960, just over 6% of municipal solid waste was recycled. Since then, recycling rates have risen to around 10% in 1980; 16 percent in 1990; 29% in 2000 and more than 35% in 2017. This reduced the amount of waste going to landfills from 94% in 1960 to 52% of the amount generated in 2017.
The concept of zero waste has emerged in the new millennium, prompting people to produce less waste by considering the front end of the problem - the disposables that people use rather than the back end. Most of the waste companies that were happy to support recycling have not embraced the Zero Waste idea. Producing products that leave a small environmental footprint is extremely difficult, says Melosi, and requires a complete culture change.
"It's fundamentally difficult to do," he says.
Yet, in some cases, the lessons of the 19th century have even become fashionable: rag paper is a popular choice for wedding invitations.
