Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Outside the art world, people were equally ambivalent about the rubbish rising around them. The salvage campaigns of the two world wars are sometimes portrayed as short-lived blips in the unstoppable advance of a culture of disposability and carelessness, as if only military zeal or a brute struggle for survival were momentarily able to entice people to conserve resources. This may be too cynical a view. What is striking is how many civic groups and individuals conscientiously collected glass and paper in the decades before and after the Second World War at the same time that their neighbours were throwing more of them in their bins. In Britain, commentators in the mid-1930s noted a rise in salvage – the recovery of paper alone ran to 1.5 million tons in 1937. In the 1960s, most local councils still collected paper, and The Times, in its ‘Home Forum’, advised people to compost kitchen waste, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Many youth groups and charities routinely ran paper collections; almost a third of Britain’s paper consumption was reclaimed in 1971. The 1973 oil crisis showed how easily people responded to calls for salvage. Boy scouts, schoolchildren and voluntary organizations picked up a record 200,000 tons of paper off the streets the following year. The problem was finding a buyer. The price of waste paper at mills had dropped from £30 to £21 a ton. It was this that made most local authorities pull out of recycling. When Bristol stopped its paper collection because of expense, the Revd F. B. Welbourn took the matter into his own hands and painstakingly separated newsprint and glossy paper from magazines with glued bindings that made them unacceptable to industry. By 1977, such stalwart efforts were no longer good enough. Bales of unwanted paper were piling up in sheds and church halls.40

  Bad prices, not bad people, were what caused the decline in recycling in the age of affluence. The unprecedented drop in the price of materials squeezed the margins for recycling in industry. The fortunes of collecting and re-use also reflected technological developments. The history of the tin can is a good illustration. Few objects were as complicit in the triumph of disposability. Patented in 1810 by a British merchant, the tin can, by sealing and preserving food, revolutionized food culture; curiously, the dedicated tin-opener emerged only half a century later. Ham, beans and condensed milk could now travel long distances and be available when needed. The Crimean War and the American Civil War might have taken different courses without the tin can. It was military campaigns like these that popularized tins and processed food such as corned beef. Tin was a crucial element, because it stopped the can from rusting and spoiling the contents. The problem was how to re-extract it from the millions of cans once the corned beef had been devoured. In 1905, a German factory, Goldschmidt, developed a process to do just that. Washed and dried, old tins were thrown into sealed iron containers where the air was sucked out and chlorine pumped in; the latter reacted with the tin, leaving behind iron scrap. The de-tinned scrap went straight to Goldschmidt’s neighbour, Siemens, which made new steel from it. The secondary tin found its way back to the tin industry. Collecting old tins became big business. By the 1920s, around half of all the tin used in Germany and the United States was reclaimed. All this changed as the canning industry, in the inter-war years, found ways to produce lighter cans with a thinner coat of tin (lightweighting). The US abandoned de-tinning in 1929. Goldschmidt clung on, briefly rewarded by the boom in cans in the 1960s and ’70s. But the odds were stacked against it. The tin cover was getting thinner and thinner, and soda cans now had an aluminium top. The global drop in the price for tin was the final nail in the coffin.41

  The 1970s and ’80s set in motion a recycling renaissance. Campaigns against litter were older. A ‘Keep Britain Tidy Group’ was launched in 1958, although it was more concerned with abandoned cars and how they scarred views of the green and pleasant land than with environmental pollution as such; the chairman of the group, T. R. Grieve, was the managing director of the oil marketing giant Shell-Mex and BP.42 By the early 1970s, a new environmentalism was gaining followers. They had read Rachel Carson’s warnings about chemicals’ lethal effects on birds, wildlife and humans in Silent Spring (1962) and were shaken by the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972), with its scenarios of rampant growth and consumption eating up the finite resources of the planet.43 Waste confronted a new species of eco-citizen. In 1971, in one of their first campaigns, Friends of the Earth dumped thousands of non-returnable bottles outside Schweppes’s London headquarters. Recycling became a moral duty to the planet.

  The sense of environmental risk was matched by a concern about future resources. Significantly, some of the earliest recycling initiatives were joint affairs between industry and social movements. In York, in 1975, Oxfam struck a deal with the Redfearn Glass manufacturer over recycled glass. The first bottle bank, in Oxford, was opened two years later by the Glass Manufacturers’ Federation. Some of this was an effort to contain an environmental backlash. In Berlin, for example, it was the private recycling firm RGR (Recyclinggesellschaft für Rohstoffgewinnung) that worked together with a citizen initiative to start separate collections of paper and glass in 1975.44

  On their own, it is doubtful how much these efforts would have accomplished. The oil crisis turned out to be a temporary spike in the long decline of material prices. In the past, salvage had risen and fallen on such tides. What has been different since the 1970s is that governments have started to interfere. Laws and regulation kept recycling afloat at low tide, when the price of secondary materials was falling. Rising demand from Asia since the 1980s further propped it up. After decades of being burnt or shovelled underground, waste resurfaced as valuable stuff – Wertstoff, to use the apt German term. A range of measures was used, from making it more expensive to dump waste to requiring companies to take back products at the end of their life. Regulations governing material recovery by manufacturers were introduced in Germany (1972), France (1975) and Sweden (1975), followed by polluter-pay principles. Japan passed its waste law in 1970; the European Community followed five years later with its waste directive, which laid out the hierarchy of the three ‘R’s: reduce, re-use and recycle. The new ideal (formalized in law in the 1990s) was of the economy as a circular metabolism instead of a one-way road to the dump.45

  One country was lagging behind: Britain. In 1974, the Labour government had called for a ‘war on waste’ and agreed that the world ‘cannot afford the luxury of a throwaway society’.46 It considered incentives for consumers to return waste as well as charges for industries using non-recycled materials. In the end, cost and the Conservatives trumped conservation. With privatization and competition the new gospel, the Thatcher government was not going to run to the rescue of the paper industry and local councils when the market for secondary materials hit a new low. By 1985, there was only one outer borough in London left which offered a kerb-side recycling collection. Not surprisingly, ‘bring systems’ made for disappointing recycling rates. Even the ‘dirty man of Europe’, however, ultimately cleaned up its act – with a little help from Brussels. The 1999 European Landfill Directive, which English law was forced to implement, set a maximum landfill level of 50 per cent by 2013 for municipal waste, accompanied by stiff fines.

  The picture since the 1970s has been uplifting and depressing in equal measure. In the United States, a mere 7 per cent of materials was recovered in 1970 – not counting composting. Two decades later, it was 14 per cent; by 2010, it had crossed the 25 per cent threshold. Today, Americans recycle a third of all their glass containers and PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) bottles. In the European Union, too, paper recycling has steadily gone up, reaching over 70 per cent today. At the same time, advanced consumer societies continue to generate large volumes of waste. In 2010, the average French person threw out four times as much as in 1970. In the United States, waste fell slightly in 2008–09 – waste tends to decline in a recession – but it was a temporary dip, and in 2010–12 levels stabilized.

  Europe has performed a bit better and managed to lower waste generation by 8 per cent between 2000 and 201
3 – especially in Germany, Britain and Spain – as well as stepping up recycling efforts. But that still means people on the old continent on average generated 481kg of waste in 2013, a phenomenal amount in the annals of human history and bringing it down only to the already high levels of the 1990s; only 131kg of this was recycled in 2013. If we get our hands dirty and pick through the bins, however, it is far from clear whether these figures translate into an actual decline of municipal waste. Large-scale tests in German cities, for example, have revealed that up to 50 per cent of what people threw into the yellow bin designated for packaging was ‘incorrect’ and consisted of other waste. The household bin may be a little bit lighter but only because some non-recyclable waste ends up in a recycling bin. And not everything that ends up in a recycling bin is actually recyled. In the case of plastics, for example, German sorting plants manage to fish out only 15 per cent of materials that will then be re-used in production.47 The bulk is either burnt (for heat) or exported to China, both processes that turn waste into value but hardly genuine recycling. Whether waste can be reduced much further only time will tell. It will certainly be a formidable challenge. Between 1997 and 2004, for example, packaging waste in the EU-15 increased by 10 million tonnes; it was only because 12 million tonnes made it to recycling that bins did not burst.

  Putting these figures alongside each other prompts a number of thought-provoking observations. It is quite misleading to see today’s passion for recycling as a return to the lifestyle of a century or so ago. Recycling co-exists with an intensive, high-volume disposable lifestyle that has kept waste levels at a plateau reached in the 1970s–’80s and far exceeds anything seen in earlier periods; recycling bins even encouraged the triumph of the disposable bottle over the returnable version. Today’s Americans discard as much packaging waste as their grandparents – and that is after recycling bottles and newspapers. Bins continued to get bigger and fuller during the early stages of the green revolution, in spite of bottle banks and landfill directives. Only since 2000 has household waste levelled off. Yet, while waste has been reined in, it has scarcely been reduced, at least among households. It is worth noting here that municipal waste is only a small share of total waste – around 10–15 per cent in developed societies – and that commercial and industrial waste has fallen more sharply.48 All that Americans, for example, have managed to do is to roll back their personal garbage to the levels of the 1970s. Even after all the recycling and composting, the bin today is 10 per cent fuller than it was in 1960 during the peak of affluence when the throwaway mentality came under attack.49

  There has, secondly, been a remarkable role reversal among nations. In 1965, an average American threw away four times as much as a Western European. Today, it is Danes, Dutch, Swiss and Germans who generate the most waste. While often singled out for their excess, Americans are no more than average wasters today. That the United States has been pushed off the podium is, in part, because other societies have caught up with it as they have got richer and bought more packaged, processed foods – 87 per cent of packaging is for food and drink. In that sense, everyone is a bit more American now. What is less often appreciated is that Americans have also become a bit more European, returning their bottles, composting more and leaving leaves and cut grass on the lawn. Some twenty American states imposed a ban on organic garden waste in the early 1990s. Such measures played a significant role in overcoming the landfill crisis of the 1980s, symbolized by the notorious odyssey of the garbage barge Mobro in 1987, which set off from Islip, Long Island, only to be refused harbour first in North Carolina and then in Belize, and to end up virtually back where it had started, in New York, where its waste was eventually incinerated.

  Waste, these divergent national trends show, cannot be treated as shorthand for national consumerism. Consumer cultures vary. People can be thrifty with money (the Germans and the Swiss) yet throw away more than people who live on credit (Americans). Germans go through a lot of plastic (5.5 million tons a year) but also recycle a lot of it (42 per cent). It is, similarly, wrong to imagine a natural affinity between making things and caring for them at the end of their lives, on the one side, and between a service–leisure society and wastefulness on the other. Britons and Americans started to recycle more at the very time they stopped making cars and clothes.

  The speed with which recycling has been taken up by countries previously stigmatized as throwaway societies means we should be cautious about interpretations that see waste behaviour as rooted in national traditions and culture. Salvage drives and the pursuit of self-sufficiency during the Nazi years did not automatically predispose later generations of Germans to become world champions in recycling: in the 1960s and ’70s, they were notorious for throwing out plastic bottles and packaging. It was the state and a new grassroots movement – the Greens – that turned habits around through changes in law, taxes and awareness, and through smaller bins in the home, kerb-side collection and bottle banks. Nor are recent peasant societies naturally more inclined to recycling. After a slow start, Britain – the commercial society par excellence – today recycles more than Finland or Portugal.

  Recycling has increased everywhere, but at different speeds and in conjunction with other forms of waste treatment. By 2010, Germany, Austria and Belgium recycled 60 per cent of their municipal waste – Portugal and Greece barely managed 20 per cent; Turkey almost nothing. In Japan, intense recycling co-exists with incineration. In the Netherlands, by contrast, the shift to incineration since the 1980s has meant there is little incentive for residents to reduce their waste. The content of bins also continues to vary. In Sweden, 68 per cent of municipal waste is paper – in France and Spain, it is merely 20 per cent.50 Swiss and Danes dispose of lots of textiles; Germans don’t.

  Roughly, Europe today is made up of three waste regions: a Northern one, stretching from Belgium and Germany to Scandinavia, with few landfills and a lot of recycling but also a lot of household waste; a Mediterranean one, where landfills continue to be more plentiful and recycling is modest; and Eastern Europe, where hardly anything is recycled and the bulk of municipal waste ends up in a landfill. The typical fee and taxes to send non-hazardous municipal waste to landfill in Northern Europe is three to four times higher than in Eastern Europe. For all the progress made towards greater harmony by the European Union, plenty of dissonances remain. Bio-waste (food and garden), for example, lacks a common standard. Plenty of Dutch and Spaniards recycle theirs, whereas it goes to landfill in Croatia and Portugal.51

  Nowhere was the road to recycling more twisted and dramatic than in Eastern Europe, where socialism charted its own path. In the communist lexicon, waste was a capitalist phenomenon and typified the reckless squandering of human energy and material resources for short-sighted profit and imperial expansion. In the hands of socialists, it was valuable ‘old raw’ or ‘secondary material’, a source that never dried up, as propaganda had it. In a way, socialists picked up the earlier capitalist crusade for efficiency led by Hoover and others. Shortage of raw materials – the result of geographic destiny and inefficient planning – made recycling an everyday concern in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Collecting waste saved hard currency. Hungary had lost territories and faced an embargo, which made salvaging everything from metal scraps to door handles a matter of life and death for its metal industries. In 1951, when collections got under way, 2,000 tons of iron were gathered in a single week. For the Communist Party, ‘the material squanderers must be subject to disciplinary action’.52 But people also had to be enticed. Socialist ideals were not enough. Rags paid for shoes; bits of hog leather could be traded in for pepper and rice. In 1950s East Germany, half a kilo of used paper secured a precious roll of wallpaper; a kilo of bones one bar of hand soap (Feinseife).

  Salvage drives were the socialist equivalent of the fair-trade campaigns in the West. Instead of consuming ethical coffee, young pioneers showed their ‘solidarity with Vietnam’ by gathering old newspapers and rags. The German Democratic
Republic perfected a nationwide network for the collection of secondary materials, the so-called Kombinat für Sekundärstofferfassung (SERO), which in the 1980s brought a pink elephant – its mascot, ‘Emmy’ – to the lakes of Mecklenburg and the chalk hills of Saxony. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, SERO operated 17,200 collecting points and 55,000 containers; there were additional points for metal recycling and containers for food waste. More, not fewer, returnable bottles made the rounds.53 East Germans recycled an estimated 40 per cent of their refuse – something Britons only managed in 2010 and Italians and Spaniards have yet to accomplish.

  It would be unwise to get too nostalgic, though. Waste collection was driven by the needs of dirty industry, not the environment – East Germany raised some 10 per cent of its raw materials through recycling. A good deal of salvage was immensely wasteful, with firms holding back materials to meet artificial targets. A lot of old scrap rusted away, unwanted by industry. Under socialism, recycling went backwards as well as forwards. Hungary in 1960 collected one third of old tyres, miles ahead of its capitalist neighbours. But, by 1973, this had dropped to 3 per cent. When it came to recycling municipal waste, socialist states fell behind in the 1980s; West Germans already collected more paper than their brothers and sisters across the Wall in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the collapse of socialism amounted to a major disruption in existing channels and habits of recycling. Within a couple of years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, only a hundred collection points were left in East Germany. Elsewhere back-purchase systems lost their subsidies and gave way to cheaper, privatized forms of disposal. In the Czech Republic, paper and glass collection all but collapsed. If the 1990s were golden years for recycling in the West, they were a lost decade east of the Elbe.54 Recycling had to start again from scratch.