The return to recycling
If you think today’s emphasis on recycling represents a revolution in human behavior, think again. Before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of cheap consumer goods, throwing things away was a last resort as homeowners repaired, repurposed, and recycled home goods until there was little left to use. Then they gave the leftovers to the ragman. Susan Strasser, the Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware, said Thursday that recycling’s history gives it a place near and dear to the American heart, a place usurped by the Industrial Revolution’s production of cheap consumer goods but partially restored in recent times. “In all cultures, people reuse stuff. That’s what the Industrial Revolution interrupted,” Strasser said. Strasser, author of the book “Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash,” spoke at Harvard’s Geological Lecture Hall as part of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology’s fall lecture series, “Trash Talk.” In her lecture, titled “Rags,...