Japanese shops were selling recycled paper back in 1031
Recycling feels like a modern virtue, but the first recorded sale of repulped paper came from Japanese shops nearly a thousand years ago. Europeans melted scrap bronze long before that, and British dustmen once hauled fireplace ash to brickworks. For most of history people recycled because it was cheaper, not because it was green.
Archaeology hints at the pattern: in lean times, ancient rubbish dumps contain less broken pottery, ash and worn tools, suggesting more was being reused. Industrialisation sharpened the economics. Scrap iron cost less than fresh ore, so 19th-century railways bought and sold it, and the steel and car industries followed. Street peddlers made a living picking through dumps. Around 1800 drinks makers including Schweppes offered refundable deposits on bottles in Britain and Ireland, and Sweden set up an official deposit system in 1884, later extended to aluminium cans in 1982. Its return rates run from 84 to 99 percent, and a glass bottle can be refilled about 20 times.
Wars turned salvage into a civic duty, as shortages pushed households to save everything. Then the 1970s energy crisis revealed another payoff: recycling aluminium takes only 5 percent of the energy needed to make it new, and glass, paper and other metals save less but still significantly. Electronics came late. Although gadgets had been common since the 1920s, the first scheme for recycling them began in Switzerland in 1991, starting with old refrigerators.
Ideally a material comes back as itself, office paper into office paper. Metal cans can loop almost endlessly without losing purity; many materials cannot, or not cheaply, and are downcycled into something lesser. Markets are fragile too. When China announced its National Sword policy on 31 December 2017, restricting imports of dirty or hazardous recyclables, prices for scrap plastic and low-grade paper tumbled worldwide.
The economics still provoke argument. The economist Steven Landsburg has contended that recycling paper can actually shrink forests, because paper companies plant trees to meet demand, and less demand means fewer managed woods. Meanwhile the European Union, which held about half the world's waste and recycling industry in 2014, requires members to recycle at least half their waste.
Source: Recycling
