Recycling

History

Before the advent of mass production in the industrializing United States, industrial and consumer sides of recycling were inextricably intertwined. Manufacturers depended on consumer waste for many raw materials, including rags for paper and bones for fertilizer and glue. Peddlers and ragmen traded old materials for new goods and allowed people with little cash to obtain consumer items. Thus, as historian Susan Strasser has described, waste and recycling were essential parts of women's domestic economies, especially in rural areas. Disposal and production linked consumers and manufacturers in a symbiotic relationship.

By the end of the 19th century, recycling entered a new paradigm. With increasing urbanization, industrialization, and mass production, household commodities were more affordable and increasingly ubiquitous. Domestic reuse declined, while waste increased and became more concentrated in cities. The first curbside recycling program was introduced in Baltimore in 1874 to manage urban waste and simultaneously create “wealth from waste” by diverting useful materials to industrial processes. By the turn of the century, peddlers and small collectors were replaced with specialized transatlantic businesses that traded in massive quantities of consumer and commercial discards.

This new economy of recycling set the stage for the differentiation between industrial and consumer scales and methods of recycling. From this time to the early 21st century, most items made from recycled materials have drawn their raw materials from industrial scraps or waste from an industry's own production (such as when the sludge created from cutting granite is used in ceramic floor tiles), rather than from consumer discards, which require more time and energy to collect and sort. The known origins and homogeneity of industrial scraps allow reprocessing to become more streamlined and lets producers skip sorting altogether. Motivations for industrial recycling are almost exclusively internal. Industries can and often do save money by not having to pay for additional raw materials or disposal. In the United States, however, the extraction of virgin materials is often subsidized while the recycling industry is not, meaning that virgin materials are often cheaper than their recyclable counterparts.

Effects

Recycling can reduce waste, the need for virgin materials, energy consumption, air pollution, and landfill leachates, but the reduction occurs in varying degrees for different processes. Although recycling is usually more environmentally friendly than obtaining and processing virgin material, it is not environmentally benign. First, recycling institutionalizes disposables by treating them after they have been created. Second, while recycling can decrease resources required to make a product, it still necessitates expenditures of energy and virgin materials and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases, and waste. For example, recycling paper involves using water and electricity to separate paper fibers, which must then be de-inked, a process that results in toxic sludge. Recycling can create products that are “downcycled” because they are not as robust as their predecessors; nor are such products usually recyclable (polyurethane plastics, for example, are often turned into asphalt or other end-of-the-line objects). These criticisms come to bear on different materials in different ways. For example, recycling aluminum uses 95 percent less energy than processing bauxite ore and eliminates some of the most environmentally detrimental aspects of mining. Glass and paper recycling have smaller energy savings and use many of the same processes that virgin materials require.

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