When did recycling become common?

Question

I need some background information on recycling. What event made people realize it was necessary? When the "Think Green" movement became popular, etc. I'm looking for some on-line sources for a paper that I have to write.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment...

Answer 2

I feel that recycling is just a scam for industries to get their raw materials at a greatly reduced price! I don't thing anyone benefits from it but the owners of huge manufacturing plants. How about the people who provide new plastic, paper and metals? Maybe they should get all the recyclables to reduce demand on the environment instead of loosing their jobs. Recycling came slowly after huge corporations and politicians decided to lie to the people to get them to seperate and give freely, their raw materials. It's all for greed.

Answer 3

Interest in preserving our environment has existed for over a century, but was an interest of a tiny minority until such time that the masses had sufficient leisure time and disposable income to enjoy the world we live in, which I figure was not until a generation after WW II.

Recycling has been around for several decades.

Terminology, like "Think Green" maybe around for less than a decade.

Answer 4

when people realized that they could make lots of money out of garbage and started  convincing others to bring it to them in order to 'save the environment'

human cause is an amazing way of making business :)

try researching the subject on websites that have good sources like articles and essays

try this link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling and scroll down to references and search those on the same website

wikipedia is a great site

Good Luck!

Answer 5

You have asked an interesting question, Silver.

In all honesty, I don't know the answer.  WWI, WWII, and the Great Depression of course all brought out a great deal of the recycle, reuse, and make do, bravo of people.

The 1970's gas crunch, and the trend of many folks during that time period to "return to the earth," brought out a lot of recycling ideas.

Problem is at varrious times in our history, some products have been more earth friendly, and have now moved away from that, even though the companies promote recycling.

Like milk and soda.  Both use to come in glass bottles, that were recycled by rewashing, sterilizing, and refilling with product, then redistributing.  Children use to have contests to see who could find the oldest soda bottle.  Now soda and milk come in plastic, which because of the low melting point, cannot be sterilized and remade into another plastic food container.  It MUST be made into something else that does not hold food.  New plastic bottles are made each time to hold milk and soda.  Not terribly environmentally friendly, especially when compaired to glass, which is actually a natural product (volcanos make glass all the time).

The problem is, there was no "one time period" in American History that brought recycling here to stay forever.

During the Great Depression, people recycled, because they had no choice.  During World War II, people recycled, because they had no choice, and it was patriotic in the extreme.  

After the 1970's gas crunch, it became popular for a while, with fears about gas shortages, and the Cold War still going on.  

Then in the 1980's the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall came down, and it became an extremely "yo me" time for Americans.  Computers were here to stay, and more and more of our everday products became made of plastic.  Disposable & convient was in, and recycling other than aluminum cans was silly.  Farms failed right and left, but nobody cared, because there was still food at the grocery store.

Things like beaches covered in tons of washed up trash, and new insites that millions of computers and electronics were going to the dump ever year brought recycling back into popularity in the 1990's.  Recycling has pretty much become more and more mainstream since then.

What is interesting to me is your question asked in a different way...When did recycling become NECESSARY?

My husband and I live on a permaculture farm.  We produce almost all of our food, even the fuel for our vehicles.  We produce very little that cannot be composted and returned to the earth in a year.  Indeed some of our "garbage" only goes to the transfer station, because we are required by law to dispose of it there...otherwise we would just compost it right here on our farm (we allow the on-farm butchering of livestock, and have to by law dispose of hides and such at the dump instead of composting and returning the bennifits to our own soil).

The way people use to live, they produced almost nothing that wasn't totally recyclable, because of it's organic nature.  It would simply rot away if dropped onto the ground.

Basically, your research needs to be from the industrial revolution forward.  That would be the time that man started to create a significant amount of "stuff" that was not natural, and not organic.  Plastics were invented in the 1930's.  

Problem is, as I pointed out, companies have kind of gone back and forth between being more environmentally friendly, and then embracing a new modern way of doing things (almost always with plastics) and actually becoming less environmentally friendly.  

Why am I so against plastics?  Because 97% of the plastic ever created (since the 1930's) still exists here on earth.  Only the 3% that has been incinerated no longer exists.  Plastic is entering our food chain...bad stuff.

~Garnet

Homesteading/Farming over 20 years

P.S.  Here's a link:

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/toc.html

Scroll down...click on chapter nine and you can read that information.