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Paper and Landfills

Paper and landfills have an important relationship that is historical, social, and material. Industrial methods of paper manufacture and landfill disposal together displaced the rag and bone men and other urban recyclers of the 19th century. By the late 20th century, paper became the most common material found in municipal solid waste (MSW), the biggest threat to scarce landfill capacity, and a significant contributor to the carbon dioxide footprint of landfills. In the 20th century, the prominence of paper products has transformed the labor practices associated with modern landfills. The materiality of paper, specifically its tendency to catch on the wind and spread on- or off-site, has resulted in paper becoming a category that encompasses all forms of landfill litter. The “paper pickers” who are commonly employed at landfills as a consequence exemplify the distance between the labor practices of modern landfills and the forms of recycling for which paper was once synonymous.

Brief History

For hundreds of years, paper production involved a form of reuse that stood in marked contrast to the practice of dumping and burying associated with landfills. Beginning in China, paper was made from recycled rags, silk, or animal skins. After the invention of the printing press in 15th-century Europe, paper became more widely available as part of a growing print culture, and the supply of rags dwindled. While books and other durable printed materials remained largely in the possession of elites, paper commodities owed their production, in part, to the castoffs of common urban households. After the Industrial Revolution, the rag and bone men of England collected old rags in a horse-drawn cart to be resold as raw material for papermaking, an early form of urban recycling. In the mid-19th century, paper was successfully derived from the fibers of wood pulp, an innovation that led to the industrialization of papermaking, which ultimately provided paper to mass consumers at a greatly reduced cost and made possible the birth of modern bureaucracies and corporations. As a powerful force in the changing political economy of literacy, paper transformed from a product of urban recycling to a force of rural deforestation.

Over the course of the 20th century, the once-familiar sight of rag and bone men collecting recyclables was gradually replaced with sanitation workers collecting bags of anonymous rubbish for mass disposal. Even when used clothing is recycled in the 21st century—rather than being reused—the clothing typically enters an international rag trade that includes Africa and, particularly, India. In part, the changing pathways of waste disposal and recycling are a consequence of material changes in houses. The spread of modern landfills throughout the United States shortly after World War II coincided with increasing use of oil and gas in central heating. With declining use of fireplaces and wood-burning stoves, it was less common for household rubbish to be burned prior to its collection by sanitary workers, a shift that affected methods of paper disposal most of all.

Composition in Landfills

In the 21st century, paper products, including magazines and newspapers, are the most common material found in MSW, making up approximately one-third of the garbage that households throw away after recycling, according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) statistics. As a consequence, paper is one of the most common materials dumped at municipal solid waste landfills. This has consequences for the economics of waste disposal as well as landfill labor practices and forms of management. As a capital asset of a waste company, a land-fill is valued based on its existing capacity, which includes the actual limits of its permitted growth as well as the area it could potentially expand into in the future. Municipalities make similar assessments of landfill capacity in order to plan for their future waste management needs. Paper is a bulky material, which, compared to organic wastes, breaks down more slowly over time. The space that paper occupies is politically and economically significant not least because, in addition to taking up space, paper represents trees that have been cut down and whose carbon dioxide stores are being re-released into the atmosphere. For all of these reasons, there have been considerable efforts to improve the recycling of paper products since the 1970s.

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