Cash For Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America

1. Rags and Old Iron

12 C A S H F O R Y O U R T R A S H Francis Bannerman III was angry. He had received in September 1872 what he perceived to be very poor quality goods from a Glasgow-based scrap trader named Peter Dixon. Bannerman was a Brooklyn-based businessman who bought and sold a wide range of materials ranging from old iron, lead, and copper to rope, waste paper, and war memorabilia. His complaint to Dixon regarded a shipment of grass rope trimmings and waste paper; Bannerman alleged that the shipment featured a small quantity of good material covering inferior materials damaged by tar and water. Bannerman was concerned, for he intended to sell the paper and rope trimmings to other customers and was now not only short of supplies but had already paid Dixon for the agreed shipment. The two men agreed to work out compensation, and Bannerman subsequently offered to buy more goods from Dixon, albeit “good stock no tarred manilla or wet small stuff,” at a price to Bannerman’s liking.1 A quarrel over the relative quality of what most people would consider waste might seem peculiar, but there was nothing unusual about Dixon and Bannerman’s trade and dispute. In 1872, hundreds of small dealers on both sides of the Atlantic made their living collecting, buying , and selling old metals, rags, waste paper, and other scrap materials to each other and to factories. How did this trade in waste materials between two men working thousands of miles apart come about? And Rags and Old Iron 1 12 R A G S A N D O L D I R O N 13 why did the two men make such a fuss over the relative quality and value of materials many would see as worthless filth? The practice of finding and reusing old materials is rooted in a practice as old as civilization itself. Classical civilizations in China, India, and the Mediterranean all collected and reused old materials, particularly metals that could be remelted and refashioned. Biblical verses refer to old iron’s use, converting plowshares into swords (Joel 3:10) and swords into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3). Poor people, including widows and orphans, often scavenged for subsistence. Such small-scale reuse of old materials was common in early modern Europe , where peddlers roamed villages trading new goods for old in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was common in the American colonies, where blacksmiths supplemented their stocks with old iron, silver, copper, and gold.2 Dixon and Bannerman’s relationship, however, represented a new dimension to this practice, for Dixon was based in Scotland and Bannerman in Brooklyn. Men of means had done business in old materials in colonial times; however, such trade was done to supplement or bolster other lines of work. Those individuals who dealt exclusively in old materials were seen as indigent. Bannerman, though he traded exclusively in old materials and not as a supplement to another vocation , was far from poor, having gone into his father’s successful business as a young man. Francis Bannerman II had moved from Scotland to New York in 1854 and started trading old iron in Brooklyn during the Civil War; Francis Bannerman III was heir to a thriving business in old materials. One of the reasons Bannerman was so irritated at Dixon was that the shipment was so poor that he “had for to sell it at 3/8 of a cent a pound below a lot that I got from Magee Son and Co. of Liverpool which cost me the same price as [Dixon’s],” eliminating any profit for Bannerman.3 Dixon, like Bannerman, had a local business supplying both industrial customers and other scrap dealers, and the correspondence between them was indicative of the regular transatlantic trade in waste materials by the late nineteenth century. That trade had a more recent history, one tied to developments in the industrialization of Europe and the United States. Its origins lie in the changing nature of demand for scrap materials produced by the onset of heavy industry in the nineteenth century. Beginning with paper manufacture, then extending to steel making and other manufacturing processes, industrial 14 C A S H F O R Y O U R T R A S H producers began to demand unprecedented quantities of scrap materials for mass production. This heightened demand...