Recycling

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Recycling

Earth Day 1970 suggested to millions of Americans that environmental concern could be expressed locally. Through organized activities, many citizens found that they could actively improve the environment with their own hands. Many communities responded by organizing ongoing efforts to alter wasteful patterns. Recycling would prove to be the most persistent of these grassroots efforts. Though the effort has been trivialized by extremist environmentalists, trash and waste recycling now stands as the ultimate symbol of the American environmental consciousness.

Recycling grew out of a conservative impulse to reduce waste, rather than as an expression of environmentalism. The effort to make worthwhile materials from waste can be traced throughout human society as an application of commonsense rationality. The term "recycling" became part of the American lexicon during wartime rationing, particularly during World War II. Scrap metals and other materials became a resource to be collected and recycled into weaponry and other materials to support the fighting overseas. But the public's enthusiasm for recycling did not last. Historians point to the conclusion of World War II, and the commensurate growth in the U.S. middle class as defining points in the American "culture of consumption"—which reenforced carelessness, waste, and a demand for newness—that became prevalent in the 1950s but extended, in some form, through the end of the twentieth century. The prodigious scale of American consumption quickly made the nation the most advanced and wasteful civilization in the world. It was only a matter of time before a backlash brought U.S. consumption patterns into question. As the 1960s counterculture imposed doubt on much of the American "establishment," many Americans began to consider more carefully the patterns with which they lived everyday life. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this mindset was met by a litany of examples of American exploitation of resources, ranging from gas shortages to oil spills to toxic leaks. Many Americans began to call for a new ethic to guide everyday life, and, for many, Earth Day 1970 marked the symbolic start of a "greener" perspective.

Belittled by many environmentalists, recycling often seems like busywork for kids with little actual environmental benefit. However, such a minor shift in human behavior suggests the significant alteration made to people's view of their place in nature. Environmental concerns such as overused landfills and excessive litter contributed to a new "ethic" within U.S. culture that began to value restraint, reuse, and living within limits; and gave communities a new mandate in maintaining the waste of their population. Reusing products or creating useful byproducts from waste offered application of this new ethic while also offering new opportunity for economic profit and development. Green, or environmental, industries took form to facilitate and profit from this impulse, creating a significant growth portion of the American economy. Even more impressively, the grassroots desire to express an environmental commitment compelled middle-class Americans to make recycling part of an everyday effort. However, the consumptive momentum of the American economy in the twentieth century made it necessary for citizens to relearn the ethic to decrease waste, and often it was children and schools who fuelled community efforts to recycle. By the end of the twentieth century, many institutions and communities had made recycling a portion of waste disposal service.

Most children born after the 1980s assume the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra has been part of the United States since its founding. In actuality, it serves as a continuing ripple of the cultural and social impact of Earth Day 1970 and the effort of Americans to begin to live within limits.

—Brian Black