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Recovery of Recyclable Materials in the United States
Material
Weight Generated in Million Tons (million metric tons)
Approximate Percent Recovered for
Recycling
paper 86 (78) 50
plastics 29 (26) 11
glass 15 (13.6) 100
steel 14 (12.7) 48
aluminum 4 (3.6) 30
Source: Greenstar North America
Recycling
Recycling will not solve all environmental ills. To achieve sustain-ability, people must do more than recycle to conserve natural resources.
But recycling certainly helps lessen pollution, waste, and natural resource depletion, even if it alone cannot fix these problems. Recycling technology continues to grow, and entrepreneurs have invented new uses for wastes while the recycling industry has found ways to make recycling less expen-sive and more streamlined.
This chapter reviews the history of U.S. recycling programs and looks into methods in which technology has improved energy savings. The chapter discusses specialties in the recycling industry such as metals and rubber recycling. It also reviews the chemistry involved in turning a waste material into a recycled material. In addition, this chapter provides an example of one of history’s largest recycling programs, which took place during World War II. Well-managed recycling programs have contributed and will likely continue to aid in sustainability.
The grAssrooTs hisTory of reCyCling
Recycling has been part of civilization for thousands of years. In 1030 b.c.e., Japan employed an organized system of collecting wastepaper for the purpose of turning it into new recycled paper. Little recycling or waste management seems to have taken place during the Middle Ages.
Recycling returned, however, as a way to make businesses more profit-able. In 1690, the Rittenhouse Mill near Philadelphia turned rags from used cotton or linen into new paper. England and the new colonies estab-lished a variety of recycling businesses from that point onward, reusing metals, paper, and cloth. By the mid-1800s in the United States, peddlers who traveled door to door paid a few pennies to families in return for any discarded items. The peddlers then resold the items to craftsmen. By the end of the century, some towns had set up recycling programs similar to the curbside pickup programs used today—the first curbside program began in Baltimore in 1875.
Recyclers carved out enterprises in large cities in the early 20th cen-tury, putting aluminum cans, twine, rubber, and burlap bags to new uses.
Cities such as New York built organized recycling programs; Chicago put its prisoners to work sorting waste. World War I and II increased the necessity to salvage as much recyclable material as possible. For this
purpose, the federal government set up the Waste Reclamation Service during World War I to run a recycling effort. In World War II, the War Production Board’s Salvage Division ran one of the most ambitious recy-cling programs ever established.
Prosperity returned in the years following World War II and with it came a variety of convenience products that encouraged disposal rather than reuse. By the 1960s, hazardous wastes created serious health threats on land and in water. The public and the U.S. Congress began to see waste as a serious national problem, and by 1965 Congress passed the Solid Waste Disposal Act to assist local governments in setting up waste pro-grams. The aluminum industry took the lead by building a large proj-ect for recovering and reprocessing beverage cans. Little by little, towns built centralized recycling centers to help take in aluminum and paper.
The idea blossomed, and within two decades the United States had 10,000 recycling centers.
The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, signified a shift in the relation-ship between the public and the environment. Communities, families, and students became committed to environmental projects. Waste, pollution, habitat loss, and biodiversity grew into topics of conversation among uni-versity professors as well as the public. A new type of environmentalism called grassroots environmentalism began. Community and school recy-cling leaders reminded anyone who would listen that individuals could come together for a single purpose and make a difference in aiding the environment.
In 1989, the University of Arizona archaeologist William Rathje led his students on an assignment they called the “Garbage Project.” The team set out to investigate landfills to learn about how Americans produced and discarded waste. Rathje noted what their collections revealed: “Despite all of the concern directed at fast food packaging and disposable diapers, the archaeological data demonstrated that both items together accounted for less than 2 percent of landfill items. . . . By volume nearly half of all of the refuse excavated by the Garbage Project has been newspapers, magazines, packaging paper and non-packaging paper, such as computer printouts and phonebooks.” Rathje also found large volumes of construction and demolition wastes, adding to a vast amount of resources available for recy-cling but going to waste.
The American public embraced certain aspects of recycling with more enthusiasm than others. For example, by 1995 Americans had recycled
Recycling
more than 47.5 billion aluminum containers, but they did a poor job in recycling paper (as the Garbage Project showed). Some communities took recycling more seriously than others. Many California towns embraced grassroots recycling projects with such enthusiasm that the state govern-ment took notice and adopted many of the local processes. Nationwide, an environmental organization called the Grassroots Recycling Network became a resource for communities that wanted to start their own recy-cling programs. Today, recyrecy-cling advocates work toward the achieve-ment of zero waste in which near 100 percent of all wastes can be put to use. The Zero Waste Alliance of Portland, Oregon, has explained, “Zero waste strategies consider the entire life-cycles of our products . . . With this understanding, wastes can be prevented through designs based on full life-cycle thinking. Indeed, we should work to ‘design’ our wastes, if any, so that they have future applications.” Until society achieves suc-cess in zero waste, recycling serves an important role in natural resource conservation.