What do we mean by recycling and who has done it?

One obstacle to historicising recycling derives from the many meanings and implications of the word. Several of these authors address definitional questions directly. Ruth Oldenziel and Heike Weber stipulate a range of definitions:

It now encompasses practices of reuse and recovery, strategies of reduction and austerity, and the idea of ‘green’ consumption.

As Weber and Oldenziel argue in their introduction, the story of waste and recycling is linked to a broader frame of production and consumption. This might include the reuse of products, the practices of repair and the enhancement of the products’ life cycle. Yet the historically specific situations described throughout the issue are confined to the narrow sense of the term, indeed to the even narrower sense of post-consumer reprocessing of materials generated by households. Perhaps it is harder to do history about reuse and reduction (which, it should be noted, are routinely conflated with recycling, at least in common English-language discourse). Rather than examining public records or the archives of organisations, the study of reuse requires somehow collecting evidence about what many people have done every day in their private domestic spaces. Jørgensen points out that the word ‘recycling’ has various distinct meanings, distinguishing between recycling as a cultural activity and as a technological infrastructure; most usefully, he speaks to contemporary recycling as a personal issue. He coins the idea of the ‘recycling junction’ as the place and time where consumers decide whether to discard or to recycle. This involves ‘individual values’ as much as ‘competing sets of knowledge and information, disposal infrastructures, availability of new resources and goods, and time commitments, among other factors’. In realms of scarcity, too, recycling and reuse have been matters of everyday life, personal in the most intimate sense of the term.

Recycling has always been both a cultural and an economic activity; it has always had both symbolic and material manifestations, and both moral and technological implications. But an ethic of personal frugality means different things in a culture of scarce material goods than in cultures where frugality is promoted as an act undertaken for the good of the nation, the planet or humankind and elevated beyond personal returns.

Recycling is usefully regarded as a vernacular practice, involving a set of skills and knowledge. In general, recycling skills are quite different from the skills required for repair and reuse, which themselves go beyond the skills of original construction.Footnote ¹¹ Recycling involves decision-making, determining what can be reused by somebody and what cannot, knowing what others will buy or collect, and (for some) having entrée into the markets for used materials and knowing how to sell in those markets. At the household level, recycling requires determining what is worth saving. Both Denton and Peter Thorsheim call our attention to zealous wartime recyclers who sacrificed documents that archivists and historians valued; Thorsheim describes professionals who offered to assist householders in their decision-making, to avoid destroying letters and records with historical significance.Footnote ¹² Andrea Westermann points to changes in how plastics were valued in West Germany. In different ways, these authors illuminate the process of valuing material goods in making recycling decisions – remembering that ‘donation’ implies value, whether to charity or the war effort. This valuing process incorporates skills shared by historical actors at all levels of consumer society.

The essays in this special issue make abundantly clear that recycling is a historical construct, one that has changed over time in Europe, in the historically specific context of the nineteenth century and beyond – the period of long-term growth of industrial economies and of consumer culture. It is crucial to keep that long-term growth in mind. Despite all the transitions in recycling, all the economic ups and downs, and all the military engagements, European consumer culture expanded – in some periods and some countries, quite steadily – as did its popular expression in films, radio, television and other commercialised entertainments.

It is one of the historian's tasks to periodise such long-term phenomena, to provide readers with temporal lines of demarcation. The culture of abundance represents a crucial alteration in both the habits of daily life and the workings of the economy. New products, consumption habits, distribution chains, concepts of convenience, hygiene and thrift, and the value of material goods fundamentally revised the human relationship with the material world. So profound a break seems well worth charting.

But change in everyday habits and daily thinking never happens instantly, and can never be expressed accurately with the clear lines that look good on charts. In general, young people adopt new ways, ideas and technologies quicker than old ones, rich people faster than poor ones. Many people cling to old habits while trying out or even adopting new ones. Oldenziel and Veenis offer an argument that describes one of those instances where different moralities overlapped, depending in part on a generational analysis. Their activists came from the ‘generation most disciplined in recycling’, those who had been children during the German occupation, and the authors point out the sharp contrast with ‘a younger generation of activists entering the public arena, who deliberately provoked reactions from authorities through “direct action” against what they called “the system”’.Footnote ¹³

A feedback loop, a vernacular practice, a historical construct – and recycling may be understood in other ways, as well. It encompassed well-developed institutions and government regulation, best understood not as an ad-hoc ‘strategy for survival’, but rather as a long-term activity bound to specific knowledge, trading networks and business milieus. In other words, the waste business is – and long has been – an organised operation. It has always been on the margins in many respects,Footnote ¹⁴ but considered as a system, the trade has been capable of handling large quantities of numerous kinds of materials (sometimes originating quite differently as household waste and industrial waste) and exchanging them over international borders.

Indeed, as these essays show, when new historical actors have tried to take over the physical handling of scrap, they quickly learned how sophisticated the system was; the organisation of the waste trade was complex, multifaceted and networked. Most often, in wartime Europe, they were replacing Jews, who were first denied their livings as recyclers and later deported and murdered. These entrepreneurs had skills, knowledge and contacts not necessarily accessible to strangers, and the industry was difficult to run without the networks and the people who comprised them, now purged as ‘undesirable’ by the Nazis and their collaborators. Denton offers a description of the ‘messy reality of paper and scrap metal salvage’ in wartime France, where the collected materials piled up on railway platforms, city hall courtyards and school playgrounds. Decades later, Oldenziel and Veenis's Dutch women glass activists and Westermann's West German plastics activists encountered – and in some cases confronted – similarly well-established systems and networks, developed during and after the war to serve the functions of the arrangements and structures once dominated by Jews.

Issues of gender, age, nationality and, of course, class are important to the historical actors who play roles in this tableau of twentieth-century European recycling. In nearly all these articles, women and children are central. Weber describes the role of gender and age in Germany during both world wars – a significant one, she insists. Whereas some scholars have suggested that in other cases male politicians and bureaucrats asked women to help implement plans the men had made, Weber shows that women ‘acted as the main instigators of wartime waste collections rather than being mere auxiliaries of the male-run state’ in the case of waste collections during the First World War.Footnote ¹⁵ German wartime salvage drives also exploited children as waste workers and collectors. Thorsheim demonstrates that the British National Federation of Women's Institutes played a primary role in collecting wartime salvage from villages. Veenis and Oldenziel indicate that their Dutch women considered participation in recycling efforts a manifestation of ‘women's moral compass and special role in helping social change’.

These gender considerations have intersected with issues of class, race, nationality and culture. Apart from environmentally interested recyclers from the 1970s onwards, recycling has always been the province of marginalised people, the more so as industrial society developed. Poor people waste less and reuse more; they recognise the value of scavenged materials and know about (or know people who know about) the markets for salvaged goods. Ostracised people – especially, in Europe, Jews – have dominated the trade. In both France and Germany, Denton shows us, the dominance of Jews in the waste trades is a central factor in the history. Most Jewish chiffonniers were not citizens of Vichy France, so they were not affected by conscription. In both countries, ‘the salvage industry depended on Jewish technical expertise, from the lowest rag-and-bone men to the large firms that triaged, processed and resold the material. For Nazi Germany, this dependency was seen as a liability.’ Weber suggests that the ‘purification’ of the waste trade (that is, the removal of Jews) was an essential piece of the same government programme that promoted a consciousness of waste to the nation, at the household level.

At the same time, wartime patriotism had the potential to attract higher-status people to recycling and reuse. Denton describes how scrap iron collection in Vichy France ‘became a nationwide patriotic mobilisation effort supported by an extensive propaganda apparatus’.Footnote ¹⁶ The drive was ‘personally directed’ by the Minister of Armaments; ‘its purpose was not only to gain critically needed scrap iron for war industries but also to boost morale’. The strategy was to enlist people who were important on the local level, men like presidents of chambers of commerce, railway stationmasters and mayors, ‘providing them with a set of general, voluntary instructions’. Similarly, many of Thorsheim's enthusiastic British paper recyclers were from the middle and upper classes. ‘Wartime paper recycling, although promoted as an embodiment of thrift and efficiency’, he writes, comparing the propaganda to George Orwell's doublespeak, ‘functioned as a form of unsustainable consumption that left indelible scars’.Footnote ¹⁷

What has motivated consumers to recycle?

These essays offer a range of explanations of why consumers have recycled – or, more precisely, have offered up their used materials for recycling – in specific historical circumstances. In the articles that address wartime recycling, some amalgam of patriotism and propaganda provides the impetus. Both Weber and Thorsheim offer persuasive depictions of recycling enthusiasm in combatant nations. It stands to reason that the story was different in occupied countries. Indeed, as Denton demonstrates for Vichy France, salvage drives under wartime occupation illustrate the tangled pathways of economic collaboration. But a reading of these essays together shows how different and complicated the history was in different occupied countries. For occupied Norway, Jørgensen describes ‘very strong communal feeling in the resistance to the occupying powers, where old class distinctions were replaced by a new national identity, though the distinctions between the necessary co-operation of everyday life and active collaboration with the occupying Germans could sometimes be fluid and uncomfortable’.Footnote ¹⁸

The obligation to contribute to a community during hard times has a moral component, one of the many kinds of morality that come into play in these essays. Jørgensen reminds us that ‘“waste” is not only a technical term, but also has moral connotations. Wasting was seen as sinful and counter to the gospel of efficiency that entered into Norwegian kitchen discourse, particularly in the 1930s.’Footnote ¹⁹ Westermann shows how not only nationality but language has structured Europeans’ understandings of the moral aspects of recycling. ‘The semantic thread of “disorder” weighed strongly in the German-speaking context’, she writes, ‘because Abfall (waste) had the primary connotation of religious dissent, i.e. of “renouncing one's faith”. This meaning continued to resonate, encouraging the quasi-religious tone’.Footnote ²⁰

Interestingly, the consumers described in these essays all recycled for reasons other than saving the earth. Indeed, Oldenziel and Veenis specifically argue that the culture of thrift that Europeans knew as they came out of decades of war and depression was more important than environmental awareness for the Dutch recycling movements of the 1970s.

Waste as an element of consumer culture

One contribution these essays make is to help scholars understand better the relationship between waste and consumption. Denton describes how in wartime France, townspeople hoarded their old rags, scrap metal disappeared and bones were given to starving dogs, rather than being transformed into glue. In other words, when consumption dropped, so did the amount of material wasted. Of course, the opposite has been a theme for municipal reports and sanitary science texts since the end of the nineteenth century: when consumption rises, so does the quantity of waste.

Much of the waste created by twentieth-century consumer culture has come along with increased cleanliness or convenience, and sometimes both. These are easy enough to denigrate, for people who take running water and electricity for granted. The historical perspective encourages us not to. As Oldenziel and Weber suggest in their introduction, nineteenth-century sanitary reformers considered urban wastes as ‘health hazards that should be removed from city centres immediately.’ Later on, hygiene concerns ‘began to favour “sanitary” throwaway packaging ranging from paper to (later) plastic’.Footnote ²¹

The ‘throwaway’ concept, of course, has at least as much to do with convenience as with sanitation. Increasingly, throughout the period these essays cover and the time since, the material constraints of daily life create a world that restricts actors to limited choices. People and institutions wielding economic power construct the overall systems of production, distribution and disposal within which consumers act. Convenience is constructed within those systems and the choices they offer.

Issues of waste and recycling have been, then, political issues in twentieth- and twenty-first-century consumer culture. In some cases, they raise the simplest questions of power – who owns and controls the waste? Weber offers an example from Germany in the First World War, where the separate collection of kitchen waste became a matter for laws regulating the ‘ownership’ of that kind of waste. More complex political issues encompass more complicated matters of ideology, as Westermann suggests in showing that the development of the plastic debate became essential to competing visions of what post-Nazi Germany would be like.

Writing the history of recycling politics and policies requires a broad interrogation at the intersection of social values, business development, environmental ideas, technology and consumer culture. Understanding recycling as a historical construct helps us understand both its promise and its limits as a path to sustainable economies. Our historical perspective, in other words, provides a vantage point from which we as citizens and consumers can observe our daily lives. We should certainly avoid simplistic historical analogies and refrain from doing history solely from presentist concerns. And, as pioneering environmental historian Donald Worster told us at the conference where earlier versions of many of these articles were presented, historians need to remind the public that we cannot – and generally would not want to – return to the past. But it is not amiss to hope that history, like anthropology or foreign travel, can offer understandings of a variety of ways to be human, glimpses into possibilities that may help in developing the new ideas, concepts, practices, policies and technologies that the planet needs so badly.