When did recycling start?
Answer:
A: Recycling has really been around for perhaps thousands of years! For example, ancient cultures that
began making metal products, could melt down old broken items like pots or swords and make new ones.
More recently, during World War I and II, people would have paper drives and metal drives to collect
materials for the war effort. Nothing was wasted! When landfilling became a cheap way dispose of trash
in the 1940's and 1950's, recycling was less popular. But modern recycling of glass, paper, cans, etc.
became more popular again in the 1970's with drop-off recycling centers, and in the late 1980's and
1990's with curbside collection. Mother nature is, of course, the ultimate recycler... without the natural
decay or composting process, we'd all be covered in leaves and other dead organic matter
The day Al Gore turned 21
Before any of us were born. I was lucky enough to know my great-grand mother, she told me in her youth there was zero-rubbish. Everything was recycled and re-used. We think we're so smart with recycling, but we're years behind.
go to this website to find out http://www.recycle.com/faqs.html...
Its been around for thousands of years. People did not throw things away. there was probably more recycling (per percentage of total garbage) 40 years ago then there is today.
Caveman would have recycled when he saved a coconut shell to use as a cup or bowl.
There has always been recycling - just not as you know it nowadays. When I was a child, nothing was thrown out - it was repaired or butchered for its reusable parts. Clothes were passed on or went to the jumble sale. Food was organic although we didn't call it that - slugs and caterpillars had to be pulled off the veg before we ate it - indicating totally pesticide free produce. Newspapers were used to wrap rubbish in before it went in the bin - no plastic bags, as we have now. Veg peelings were composted.
Carrier bags were paper and we all used the bus to get around and the train for longer trips. Holidays abroad were a novelty and only for the very wealthy. We even wrote letters instead of emails (ok - so some things are more environmentally better!)
So to answer - recycling is an idea 'recycled' to appear to be a modern invention.
The practice of and term "recycling" first arose during the 1970-72 era when hippies who had read Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring"saw the Viet Nam war coming to an end and selected environmentalism as the next great cause.
Recycling and life started hand in hand.
NO RECYCLING - NO LIFE
why?
-Dead cells in a living organism are recycled within the body (plant, animal) and usable material is sucked back in and the rest is thrown out to be decomposed and be used again...
Today we are trying to practise "external recycling" to limit man made products - that are hard to decompose naturally and that use too much of natural resources
This is how "external recycling" works:
In a lot of ways a "collective" form society as practised in ancient world did a lot of external recycling:
-Hand me downs - vessels, clothes, jewelery were handed from father to son, mother to daughter - the more hands these passed the more valuable and precious they became.
-Food: from man - to domesticated animals to wild animals and rodents to insects and then finally to bacteria
As families have become nuclear, and as we turn more territorial, we need external sources to educate us about the value of recycling...
In Britain they were rag & bone men. They went around collecting household unusables. This they sorted and passed on for sale. Old clothes became fiber in paper.
Today they still work but use trucks not horse drawn carts. See Steptoe & Son.
Asia has their own version by the name karang guni.
If you go the north stones from Hadrian's wall are found in a lot of the subsequent buildings near the abandoned wall. But before the Romans left Northumbrians recycled coins acquired from Romans into trinkets they sold to Romans.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.
I have been recycling in one form or another since I was six. I am 58 now.
I think it was with the cave man who killed his food, ate it and recycled hides into clothes, bone into knives, teeth and feathers into jewelry and so on.
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