When citizens recycle waste, we consider this an act of responsible ‘green’ citizenship. Today's consumers query the environmental impact of their consumption. Shoppers wonder whether the goods they buy are properly recyclable; others translate their concerns for the environment into a daily practice of separating, storing, collecting and transporting reusable waste. Most European consumer-citizens have incorporated recycling into their daily routine. Today, modern recycling is usually seen as a product of the 1970s, when grass-root movements and environmental policies generated new consumer practices. The assumption is that recycling only gained widespread public support from industry, politics and consumers a few decades ago.
Waste and its reuse have constituted an important field of economic activity for most of human history, including modern times. While the collected articles of this special issue exemplify the significance that waste salvage had in mobilising resources in Europe, Asia, and North America in World War II, this introduction situates these cases in a longterm perspective. It explores the continuities and ruptures inside the structures, markets, and actors of the salvage business from late nineteenth century waste reclamation, including the sanitary era of municipal waste disposal, to the more recent era of 'green' recycling. It argues that we need to rethink waste's role within business history by delineating four basic characteristics of the waste business: the moral economies that govern wasting and reusing; the informality of the trade and its operations; the trans-sectorality of the waste streams; and the reverse logistics of the waste salvage trade. Introduction: waste economies and times of warFor most of human history, waste and its reuse have been an important field of economic activity, even if this field became largely invisible in an era of modernisation, industrialisation, and mass production. The articles of this special issue, along with our introduction, highlight the immense scope and significance of the 'business of waste ' (Stokes et al., 2013), but more importantly, they carve out some of the specific characteristics of what it means to deal and trade with waste. They do so by taking the extreme example of World War II as a vantage point: a period when warring states restructured their economies, enforced salvage drives, and began to interfere directly or indirectly with the existent structures, actors, networks, and material flows of the traditional waste and recycling business -referred to at the time as waste salvage or the scrap trade. We argue that the war period can serve as an entry point for historians to uncover otherwise largely hidden actors, structures, and channels of the waste trade because the wartime economy brought them to light; the salvage business underwent substantial transformations in belligerent states which left behind manifold traces in trade statistics, business records, and archives.
In two critical periods of German history, namely during wartime Imperial Germany and the National Socialist era, the German state resorted to salvaging waste to mobilise both people and resources at home for the war effort. Waste recycling efforts were part of preparing the national economy as well as home front morale for 'total' war. Since domestic waste -the generation of which was largely an urban phenomenon before the advent of mass consumer society -has traditionally been defined as a female responsibility, urban women were seen as the main pillars of waste work. Collecting, separating and storing reusable leftovers became a pervasive element of their everyday lives, as well as those of schoolchildren. Moreover, in the case of the First World War, under the umbrella of the so-called National Women's Service (Nationaler Frauendienst or NFD), women's associations set up grass-roots local waste collections before the state discovered the potential of waste for its war mobilisation efforts from 1916 onwards. The article highlights this self-mobilisation in the case of food recycling. Furthermore, it explores the continuities and differences between First World War waste salvage and later Nazi waste policies. Claiming to have learnt their lessons from the salvage drives of the First World War, the Nazis aimed at a 'total' waste recovery at the latest from 1936 onwards and took a top-down approach to reach it; in contrast, waste salvage drives of the First World War had been dominated by local and often female initiatives.
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