Recycling of Municipal Solid Waste

The term recycling has become commonplace in the lexicon of environmentalists since the so-called environmental crisis of the 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, recycling is commonly associated with a process whereby materials are remade into the same or different products. This process needs to be distinguished from a plethora of other terms such as waste reduction or minimization (the process of actively seeking to reduce waste by not purchasing or using materials in the first place), reuse (the use of a product or material for the same or other purpose without a change to the material itself), and the rise in charitable giving, which is a formalized system of reusing materials. This entry explores recycling by examining both its cultural-historical context and the current theoretical and policy-driven research being undertaken by geographers.

In discussing recycling, caution should be exercised in the ways in which researchers approach the notion of waste, which is largely a term that has developed in industrial and postindustrial societies, where the economics of resource use are such that materials can be “wasted.” Accordingly, these everyday terms need to be placed within a cultural and historical context. First, recycling is still undoubtedly a term applied more widely in Western industrialized societies, although the emerging economies of China and India are now beginning to grapple with the major issues of waste management at a range of scales. Second, recycling of waste has a far longer history than many people appreciate and one that was not conventionally linked to environmental concerns. These “traditional” forms of recycling have been focused on economic imperatives that have necessitated the innovative reuse or recycling of products, particularly in times of economic strain, such as the National Salvage Campaigns developed during and after World War II in Britain. Third, it should be noted that the contemporary social constructions of wastes are closely aligned to the conspicuous levels of consumption that emerged after World War II in Western countries and to the debates surrounding how people and governments address waste, which needs to be seen in the wider context of what we can term sustainable consumption.

This entry also explicitly considers contemporary notions of waste recycling and is focused on what is termed municipal solid waste (MSW). This refers to household and other commercial (nonindustrial) waste, commonly collected from individual households and retail and catering businesses.

Although both academic and policy-related attention has focused on MSW, it should be noted that for most countries, this is a relatively minor proportion of the total waste stream. For example, in England and Wales, the total amount of waste collected during 2004 was 335 million tons. Of this, only 9% was household waste.

The Wheelabrator waste-to-energy plant in Worcester, Massachusetts, converts 2,000 tons of garbage to electricity every day.

Source: Bill Eager, National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

In terms of the political imperatives for recycling of MSW, a range of initiatives has developed to encourage governments and individuals to recycle their waste. Perhaps the boldest international statement was that provided in Chapter 21 of the United Nations Agenda 21 document, where waste was highlighted as a key issue. From this international scale, both economic regions (e.g., the European Union) and national states have developed comprehensive policies for tackling the waste problem, finally percolating down to local authorities. This effort has been given greater impetus recently with concerns over the role played by methane gases emitted from waste landfill sites in contributing to global climate change. For this reason, and also given the lack of suitable space for land-filling wastes and opposition to waste incineration, the key environmental issue for many local authorities and communities is how to respond to the growing amounts of MSW.

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