As environmentally conscious Americans marked America Recycles Day on Tuesday, many may assume that recycling is a product of the environmental movement of the 1970s, the decade that saw the first Earth Day and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
But, though that time was an important turning point in the history of the idea, recycling in America goes back much further than that. In fact, some experts suggest that it worked better before the 1970s than it does today.
If creative reuse counts as recycling, people have been doing that for millennia鈥攂ut early American recycling systems go back to the colonial era, when new materials were hard to come by. For example, metal was a scarce commodity at the time, says Carl Zimring, an environmental historian and professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.鈥攚hich is why Paul Revere would have had a scrap-metal yard. It鈥檚 likely that the horse he rode to announce that the British were coming was wearing horseshoes made out of what he collected, argues Zimring.
Into the 19th century, as peddlers traveled the countryside to sell manufactured goods, they also purchased recyclable materials from the households they visited, according to Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Rags were used to make paper, for example, and leftover beef bones could make fertilizer. Even well-t0-do Victorian-era American women who would buy a dress from Paris would send it back to the city to get alterations that incorporated whatever the new fashion trend was, whether it was new sleeves or collars, rather than buying a new dress. A 1919 survey in Chicago estimated there were more than 1,800 individual scrap-material dealers. (They didn鈥檛 all have good reputations, though: used materials were in such high demand that recycling carried a whiff of criminality, as it gave value to stolen goods.)
鈥淭he idea that you threw stuff out when it wore out is a 20th century idea鈥� and a product of 鈥渁 consumer culture that suggested that the new was better than the old,鈥� says Strasser.
During the Great Depression, the need to reuse continued. Manufacturers marketed products by their dual-use potential. Families used biscuit containers as lunch boxes and flour sacks as fabric for clothing. And during World War II, Americans were famously encouraged to collect scrap metal, paper and even cooking waste鈥攖hough many experts now say these items mostly piled up, unused, and that these campaigns were propaganda efforts to get schoolchildren involved in the war and gin up support.
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