January/February 2001
By Si Wakesberg
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for Scrap.
Recycling—the word has a ring to it that sounds as if it has echoed down the ages. Yet, surprisingly, the word only entered the English language late in the turbulent 1960s, and even then few people heard it or knew what it meant.
A personal, unofficial search confirms the absence of the word recycling prior to the 1960s. The 1959 edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language contains no such word in its voluminous pages. Likewise, the 1956 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia, a thick and impressive volume, has no reference to recycling anywhere.
Before that, we heard about recovery, solid waste, and scrap. When the term secondary materials was coined, some industry members found it more objectionable than the word waste. In their opinion, waste materials were recoverable. Secondary was a put-down, like riding third class or steerage.
The Concise Dictionary of New Words says recycle came into use in the 1960s, with the original definition reading: “to convert waste into usable material.” The related words of recyclable and recyclability entered the language in 1971 and 1973, respectively. A former staff member of the National Association of Recycling Industries (NARI—an ReMA predecessor) with a long memory says she saw the word recycling in a logo of Container Corporation of America sometime in the mid-1960s.
Perhaps William Safire, the authoritative wordsmith whose column on the English language appears every Sunday in the New York Times, will someday make an official search into the history of the word recycling. Unofficially, that’s all that I could find.
I first heard that significant word sometime in 1970 when I was working for the National Association of Secondary Material Industries (NASMI). The association had previously been called the National Association of Waste Material Dealers and, in 1974, changed its name again to NARI.
Looking back, it was M.J. “Manny” Mighdoll, then executive vice president of NASMI, who took up the word recycling and used his PR talent to make it a guiding concept for the organization. Today, all of us feel as if we’ve lived with that word forever. Some scrap professionals, in fact, seem to have come down with “recycling fatigue,” insisting that they’re really in the scrap—rather than the recycling—business.
But at that time—in 1970—the shadow of the environment loomed large. Young people had adopted “the environment” as a cause, and recycling readily became a vital part of the positive side of the environmental agenda.
I haven’t forgotten the reaction of my kids when they learned that I worked for a “good” industry. “Gee, dad, I didn’t know you were in recycling!”
That, of course, was before Superfund, OSHA, and so much more, in the days when recycling was new and had a halo around it.
NASMI didn’t stand still. Armed with its new recycling slogan, the association joined forces with the New York Board of Trade and several auxiliary organizations (including the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel, another ReMA predecessor) to sponsor the first Recycling Day in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria on Feb. 2, 1971. The event attracted a large crowd.
What stands out in my mind is the presence of Mayor John Lindsay, a handsome and imposing figure, who not only spoke but also issued a proclamation naming this Recycling Day. Another speaker was the administrator of New York City’s environmental protection agency, Jerome Kretchmer, who later became one of the city’s best-known restauranteurs.
Recycling Day in New York threw a benevolent spotlight on the scrap industry. The American public suddenly saw the scrap trade in a different light thanks to a new word in the English language—recycling. The industry had climbed up the ladder from junk to waste to secondary to recycling, an accepted term.
By that time, NASMI had created its logo with the slogan “Recycling Resources” in the middle and had published the proceedings of the Recycling Day event. In 1974, it took a leap into the future by changing its name to NARI.
As the years passed, a kind of revisionist thinking about recycling has taken place, and the word seems to have lost its innocence. In 1996, for example, a New York Times Magazine article attacked the entire concept of recycling as uneconomic and unnecessary. Also, environmentalists—recycling’s allies at the start—have been grumbling and taking potshots at the industry.
But in those heady days of the 1970s, it appeared as if we’d found the key to saving the environment and that recycling was, to quote Manny Mighdoll, “the most constructive response developed to answer the challenge of environmental management.” Then our thoughts and our hopes were for a world that would eventually embrace recycling—not just the word but the idea—and, in so doing, add materially to the world’s resources. •
Author’s Note: In the September/October 2000 issue, I wrote a short dedication to Maury D. Schwartz in which I mentioned several employees of his company, Pacific Smelting Co. But memory sometimes playing tricks, I omitted the name of a major player at that company—Allen Klatzker—who did much to make that zinc firm the success it was. Since Allen is an old friend of mine, I hope he will forgive this memory lapse.
Recycling—the word has a ring to it that sounds as if it has echoed down the ages. Yet, surprisingly, the word only entered the English language late in the turbulent 1960s, and even then few people heard it or knew what it meant.