Earth Day 1970 suggested to millions of Americans that environmental concern could be expressed locally. Through organized activities, many citizens found that they could actively improve the environment with their own hands. Many communities responded by organizing ongoing efforts to alter wasteful patterns. Recycling would prove to be the most persistent of these grassroots efforts. Though the effort has been trivialized by extremist environmentalists, trash and waste recycling now stands as the ultimate symbol of the American environmental consciousness.

Recycling grew out of a conservative impulse to reduce waste, rather than as an expression of environmentalism. The effort to make worthwhile materials from waste can be traced throughout human society as an application of commonsense rationality. The term "recycling" became part of the American lexicon during wartime rationing, particularly during World War II. Scrap metals and other materials became a resource to be collected and recycled into weaponry and...