- In the 1800s, there were no blue recycling bins, no sorting, no recycling trucks rumbling down the alley. Recycling as we know it didn’t exist. But people were way better at it. “People recycled far more than we do now,” says Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. When garbage pickup started in the late 19th century, many cities separated reusable trash from garbage designated for a landfill. Just like today, workers sorted via conveyor belts as early as 1905. The cities sold the reusable trash to industries. And many individuals saved their organics to feed to animals. But by the 1920s, source separation wasn’t happening. By then, not much was being recycled apart from metal at scrapyards. “But really there was a relatively short period of time that people didn’t recycle,” Strasser says.During World War II, people recycled nylons, tin cans, cooking fats and even the tin in toothpaste tubes for the war effort. And by the 1960s, the first recycling programs linked to people’s concern for the environment started popping up, says Martin Melosi, author of Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City. That’s when Rachel Carson and others were pushing the science of ecology and Lyndon B. Johnson started passing a lot of environmental legislation. “As the environmental movement begins to take hold on a national scale, recycling was seen as a personal manifestation of helping the environment,” Melosi says. “There was a sense of connection to the environment, similar to how it is now for my grandkids,” he says.
In the early days of environmentally-bent recycling, the few people who did it carted everything to private recycling centers. “It wasn’t practical for the whole population, and people who were driving cars to bring stuff to recycling centers were polluting in a different way,” Melosi says. Beyond the do-gooders, though, most people in the throw-away society of the time didn’t think too much about preservation or reducing use…until landfills started filling up in the 1970’s.
To read the full story, visit https://www.history.com/news/recycling-history-america.
Author: Sheila Mulrooney Eldred, History.com
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images, History.com