Who Bought Your Rubbish Before Recycling Existed? A Man With a Cart

Each material had an industry waiting for it. Rags were the raw material of paper, since paper was made from linen and cotton fibre rather than from wood until the later nineteenth century, and demand for old cloth was so strong that Britain and other countries restricted its export. Bones were boiled for fat, ground for fertiliser, and processed into glue, gelatine and the charcoal used for refining sugar. Metal of every kind had scrap value. Old rope was picked apart and used for caulking ships. Broken glass was remelted. Ash was used in brickmaking. A household therefore had several categories of waste that somebody would pay for.

The structure ran from the street upwards:

• •Collectors worked a territory with a cart or a barrow, calling as they went
• •Payment was in coin or in goods, frequently a donkey stone or a goldfish for children
• •Collected material was sorted and sold on to a dealer
• •Dealers graded it further and sold to mills, foundries and works
• •Some collectors employed pickers to sort at a yard
• •The whole trade depended on the price the industries would pay

Nineteenth century cities recovered a far higher proportion of their materials than twentieth century ones did, and the reason is straightforward. Every material with any value was collected by somebody who made a living from it, because labour was cheap and materials were expensive, which is exactly the reverse of the twentieth century position. Historians of waste have pointed out that the volume of genuinely discarded material was small, since food waste went to pigs, ash went to bricks, cloth went to paper and bones went to a dozen uses. That was not an environmental policy but an economic fact, and it disappeared when the relative prices of labour and materials reversed.

Collecting and sorting discarded material for resale is a large and living occupation across much of the world, employing enormous numbers of people. Estimates commonly put the number of waste pickers worldwide in the millions, working in cities across Latin America, Asia and Africa, and they recover a substantial proportion of the recyclable material in those places, frequently more efficiently than formal municipal systems. Several countries have recognised the work legally and organised it into cooperatives with contracts, negotiated rates and safety equipment, which has improved earnings and conditions considerably where it has happened. The work remains hazardous, involving contact with medical and chemical waste and with heavy machinery on tips, and it carries substantial social stigma.

The trade declined through the twentieth century and the causes are identifiable. Paper mills switched to wood pulp from the 1860s onwards, which destroyed the market for rags within a generation. Synthetic materials replaced bone products. Municipal refuse collection took the material away free, removing the reason to keep it separate. Rising wages made the work unattractive relative to alternatives. Cheap new goods made repair and reuse pointless. Scrap metal remained valuable and the trade survives in that form, with metal collection still operating commercially. Formal recycling schemes introduced from the 1980s recreated the collection without recreating the economics, since they are paid for by councils rather than by the value of what is recovered.

Rags made paper before wood pulp, bones made fertiliser, glue and sugar-refining charcoal, and metal, glass, rope and ash all had buyers, so collectors made a living gathering household waste. Cheap labour and expensive materials meant nineteenth century cities recovered far more than later ones did. Wood pulp, synthetics, free municipal collection and rising wages ended the trade, and metal collection is what survives.