In 2010, the British Green Party launched an initiative called “the new home front” calling for a national mobilization against waste equivalent to what happened during World War II, when Britain fought against Nazis abroad and waste at home. Such war-like rhetoric in the ecological discourse shows the prevalence of some serious misunderstandings on wartime recycling.

Peter Thorsheim's book remains ambiguous in this regard. On the one hand, he claims that the war forced Britons to use materials much more efficiently than before and that after the fall of France “salvage became an essential part of the war economy” (p. 55). On the other hand, what the book actually demonstrates is rather different: the wastefulness and many failures of British recycling efforts during the war. It deals not so much with recycling (the reuse of objects at the end of their useful life) as with the salvaging of objects that were still in use, such as books, manuscripts, records, wrought iron fencing from parks, and even rails, which were converted into raw material often at a greater cost than the value of the metal it contained.

The book describes in great detail the official policy and propaganda of the Ministry of Supply to persuade, but also to coerce, Britons to salvage and recycle. Salvaging was envisaged primarily for propaganda reasons: it would demonstrate to the public that the government was doing everything in its power to win the war; it would connect the domestic sphere and ordinary life with the war effort (saucepans into Spitfires); and finally, it would promote the idea of a “people's war” (hence the importance of salvaging wrought iron railings, which were seen as symbols of upper-class arrogance). Propaganda also had an international dimension, as salvaging played a role in securing help from the United States. Edward Stettinius, former head of U.S. Steel who was in charge of the lend-lease administration, insisted that Britain should increase its salvage effort and, in return, publicized these efforts in the United States to justify its huge financial help to Britain.

The book has interesting pages on the sinister resonances of salvaging: Thousands of children across Great Britain were enrolled to bring books and manuscripts to the pulp (in 1943 alone, more than 600 million books were lost). For some of its promoters, this massive destruction of books was a “thorough and long overdue purge of libraries” (p. 184). Ray Bradbury could have found the inspiration for his novel Fahrenheit 451 just as much in Britain's salvaging efforts as in the Nazis’ infamous book burnings of 1933. War recycling was fraught with tensions. The waste trade complained that municipal authorities took business out of its more expert hands; Quakers and pacifists refused to recycle their waste (since propaganda described recycling as a fundamental participation in the war effort). Compulsory recycling seemed a breach of privacy and freedom and a dangerous move toward a totalitarian society.

One can formulate two criticisms to Thorsheim's argument. First, industries generated waste in far greater quantities than did domestic activities yet nothing is said about industrial recycling. What was the effect of wartime's increased demand on energy and the material efficiency of key industrial processes? In the longer term, it seems that World War II actually marginalized recycling in one major sector: agriculture. With the massive increase of nitrate production, composting lost its importance. The second critique is that by following (perhaps too closely) the discourse of recycling promoters, Thorsheim tends to cast the misleading image of a weak Britain fighting heroically and desperately with limited material means.

As David Edgerton has demonstrated, Britain was never isolated, never fought alone; it had the largest commercial fleet, the largest trade network, and the largest empire, and its elite even envisioned that it could win the war alone (Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War [2011]). Salvaging was probably a rather small cog in Britain's war machine. Let us take the case of scrap iron, which became critical when in 1942 the United States decided to stop exporting scrap iron to Britain so as to feed its own armament effort. In total, gates and railings from parks, schools, and churches provided half a million tons of metal during the war. Domestic scrap dealers provided more than fifty times as much metal as did the salvaging effort (Table 4). The discourse on “shortages” (in iron, copper, aluminum, etc.) actually reveals the demand of a massive war machine. Aluminum (sometimes recycled from saucepans, but mainly produced in North America) was supplied in ever greater quantities. Finally, the story of salvaging could also be read as an important step in the construction of the “people's war” and the “fighting alone” narratives so dear to British national identity.