Cash for Your Trash

"Carl Zimring is a marvellous historian, and he’s done the legwork of putting together the data and history to show that this is not a new business. He dove into the statistics from the 19th century, that showed England had been exporting rags and steel to the US as early as the 1850s. The idea that the scrap export trade started with the US dumping things on China is completely wrong. So long as there was a demand for raw materials and there were the logistics to fill it through recyclables, there was a scrap export trade. Zimring goes into the colonial period and discusses how small companies – by which I really mean small family workshops – at the time of the industrial revolution would go door to door for people’s old metal pots and pewter mugs. They would buy them, bring them home, and melt them down in blacksmith shops. That really is the origin of the scrap trade. He covers the US, but of course this process also happened in the UK and everywhere else where the industrial revolution was going on, with the suddenly intense demand to make stuff. Zimring puts together in a very readable way the true outlines of what this business looked like before we even had the word “recycling” – which actually didn’t exist until the 1920s and didn’t properly come into its modern usage until the 1960s. Of course if you want to go further back, the scrap recycling industry has been around ever since someone suggested beating a sword into a plowshare… That’s something that Susan Strasser covers in her book as well. It started to emerge in the late 1960s and really came into its own in the 1970s, in the US primarily. It came out of a nascent environmental movement and paralleled the growth of that. We tend to forget how polluted the US was in the 1950s and 60s. There was a popular backlash against pollution and environmental degradation, and part of that was to ask how people could preserve more of the resources they were allegedly wasting. If you read some of the trade journals in the 1960s and 70s, there’s almost irritation on the part of the scrap recycling industry, the people who had been doing this business since the dawn of the industrial revolution, that this was seen as a new concept – when they had been doing it on an industrial scale for many years. There’s almost a class aspect to what recycling means in the developed world. I’ve found that if I speak to environmental groups, I can show them images of an American junkyard that processes millions of tonnes of material in the course of its lifetime, and they will ask me questions about “real recycling” – which is when we have that kind of stuff put into the proper blue and green bins and it’s taken away to an environmentally sound recycling facility. One of the messages in my book is that those blue and green bins are very closely connected to what happens in your local junkyard. And that’s something that your local recycling movement has had a hard time getting their mind around – that there is something legitimate about the recycling industry that predates their interest in it."