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

A firestorm of protest greeted Mayor Michael Bloomberg's April 2002 announcement that cash-strapped New York City would cut its support for curbside recycling by eliminating its popular, but costly, plastic- and glass-container pickup program. Less than a year later the program was not only back, but producing revenues for the city. Confident that it could salvage and resell enough to make a profit, a New Jersey recycling company agreed to pay $5.15 per ton for the privilege of collecting the city's glass and plastic trash, an enormous savings over the $67 or more per ton that the large, mainstream waste-management companies were demanding the city pay them to collect it.

As Carl Zimring points out in Cash for Your Trash, this episode is important not only because it demonstrates the popularity of municipal recycling programs in modern America, but also because it shows how recently awareness of the importance of the scrap industry—dedicated to collecting and recycling the nation's discards for a profit—penetrated the American public's consciousness. The book is a fascinating examination of the business and social history of this long-misunderstood industry. Zimring's thesis is that until the 1980s stimulated the public's interest in recycling, the scrap industry was not appreciated for what it was: a significant, dynamic sector in the American economy that recycled iron, steel, and other valuable materials in the nation's ever-growing waste stream, keeping them out of its landfills. Instead, it was viewed by most Americans as a declining industry, an ugly artifact of working-class poverty and a source of urban crime and blight best relegated by zoning laws to the most distant, least traveled outskirts of their towns and cities.

Zimring begins his history of the industry with an analysis of its origins in the tiny, multitudinous, mostly immigrant-owned junk shops, junkyards, and garbage-hauling and rag- and metal-scrap-peddling enterprises that clustered in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century towns and cities. Focusing on entrepreneurs in the scrap-metal trade, he describes how the most ambitious and successful rose up through the ranks to become scrap dealers, many of whom operated in regional, national, and even international markets, even before World War I. After the Depression and World War II the industry continued to expand, enjoying the sort of growth we associate with most other postwar businesses. Growing through mergers and acquisitions as well as investments in new, capital-intensive technologies and alliances with certain automakers and steel companies, Luria Brothers, the biggest scrap dealership, was even investigated by the Federal Trade Commission during the 1950s and 1960s for antitrust violations.

Despite their economic success, the scrap dealers continually struggled to establish their legitimacy as an industry by organizing trade associations, promulgating ethical codes and quality standards, and publishing articles in trade journals in which they touted their valuable service to the nation as conservators of its scarce resources. As Zimring shows, despite a brief burst of patriotic recycling during World War II, their message fell on deaf ears until very recently. He argues that there were two main reasons why Americans failed to recognize the industry's positive role in the economy: the success with which zoning was used to hide it from public view and the deep disconnect in American culture between the consumption and disposal of consumer goods.

Although his focus on the iron and steel scrap trade leads Zimring to exaggerate the importance of industrial-waste recycling in the twentieth-century economy as a whole, and although he doesn't tell us nearly enough about how scrap dealers managed their own wastes, Cash for Your Trash is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of American solid-waste management. Its concern for the businessmen who collected discarded metal from the dump and took it back to the steel mill for reuse complements Susan Strasser's work on women...