Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (review)

Paul Revere rode to Concord on a horse shod with shoes re-forged from scrap iron. New York City's Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, misstepped when he decided that residents would sort only those recyclables that actually had a market, rather than the beverage containers that went straight to the landfill. During the intervening 226 years, Americans recycled for reasons of economy, and onto that base we recently have grafted a goal of recycling to promote environmental quality. Carl Zimring's Cash For Your Trash links these habits to the industrial re-use of "ferrous scrap"—iron-based metal waste that enters steel mills, re-emerging as cars, girders, appliances, naval ships, and other useful things. The rise of big manufacturers and cheap transportation lowered the cost of scrap dealing, enabling ever-larger networks of collectors and brokers eventually to become large scrap corporations. Zimring traces the scale and organization of scrap dealing to changes in technology, society, regulation, and culture.

Scrap dealers "close the loop" by bringing post-consumer wastes to factories to be transformed into new items. Directory listings before 1920 show that cities in the East and Midwest supported hundreds of small junk or scrap dealers. By providing material as a supplement to iron ore, scrap dealers facilitated the growth of large steel mills in Pittsburgh and the Midwest. In the nineteenth century, scrap comprised 10 percent of Bessemer furnace charges and 50 percent of open-hearth charges, and demand for it increased as Midwest steel mills expanded using the new process. In the later twentieth century, mini mills accepted charges of 100 percent scrap, enabling some dealers to transform rather than sell their scrap. Because this book focuses on scrap generation and dealing, the reader will look elsewhere to learn how its consumption related to that of ore and to the production of steel over time.

People entering the business mostly were Germans and Irish at the end of the Civil War, and Italians and Russian Jews around 1900; African Americans also became entrepreneurs in scrap. They pursued a trade that required little capital, permitted self-employment, and was shunned by many people because scrap was dirty and sometimes was associated with stolen goods. By 1900 a network of operators emerged, with scavengers dominated by the very poor, featuring women and children working off the streets and out of dumps. Peddlers traveled routes to supply rural households with small items and to collect marketable wastes like old tools. Dealers purchased collections from scavengers and peddlers at their sorting yards. Processors bought large wastes like machinery, boats, or wrecked cars and reduced it to scrap using shears and shredders. Brokers made the deals between manufacturers like U.S. Steel, who bought scrap as a commodity, and large dealers who sorted, baled, and bundled scrap of particular characteristics. Brokers kept the scrap trade going and could become very wealthy if they possessed business sense, ability, and luck. The industry now is dominated by a few, very large corporations but also supports hundreds of small scavengers and dealers.

Regulation entered the scrap trade with the Progressives, when cities drove scrap yards out of wealthier residential neighborhoods and the Federal Trade Commission standardized grades for scrap as a commodity. Regulation continued with price-setting during the scrap drives of World War II and changed focus with the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 that sought to eliminate or mask yards. Today, several environmental laws established from 1969 through the 1980 redress the problem that scrap yards may recover waste metals but also generate other types of wastes. The more complex post-consumer materials shredded and sorted after World War II had constituents that are toxic when released to the environment, so many scrap yards have become Superfund sites. Scrap brokers have created trade associations to lobby for favorable regulation and to publicize the way their activities aid cultural and public policy goals like resource conservation and...