In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London’s working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people’s trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters to sell to soap manufacturers. There were the mudlarks, mostly children, who waded through the filthy banks of the Thames searching for coal, rope, and bits of metal. And then there were the pure-finders. What’s “pure” you ask? Well, “pure” was a Victorian euphemism for dog excrement. Pure-finders, mostly elderly women, spent their days scouring the streets of London for dog droppings, which they then sold by the pailful to tanneries in Bermondsey. The tanners used it to purify leather. Hence the name. We tend to think of recycling as a modern invention, something that started with the environmental movement of the 1970s. Blue bins, sorting instructions, that kind of thing. But as brilliant historians have uncovered, the story of how humans have dealt with their discarded materials stretches back millennia. For most of human history, the concept of “throwing something away” barely existed. To begin our series on environmental history, we’re tackling the premodern history of recycling. Or as pre-WWII people would have called it: reclamation, salvage, scrapping, repair, and reuse. We’ll meet rag-and-bone men and dustmen, shoddy masters and mudlarks. We’ll discover how rags became paper, how old wool became new cloth, and how virtually nothing in the premodern world was ever truly waste.
Save it for the Rag-and-Bone Man: The Premodern History of Recycling, Salvage, and Reuse
Researched and written by Marissa Rhodes, PhD
Produced by Marissa Rhodes, PhD and Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD
Marissa: In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London’s working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people’s trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters to sell to soap manufacturers. There were the mudlarks, mostly children, who waded through the filthy banks of the Thames searching for coal, rope, and bits of metal. And then there were the pure-finders.
Sarah: What’s “pure” you ask? Well, “pure” was a Victorian euphemism for dog excrement. Pure-finders, mostly elderly women, spent their days scouring the streets of London for dog droppings, which they then sold by the pailful to tanneries in Bermondsey. The tanners used it to purify leather. Hence the name.
We tend to think of recycling as a modern invention, something that started with the environmental movement of the 1970s. Blue bins, sorting instructions, that kind of thing. But as brilliant historians have uncovered, the story of how humans have dealt with their discarded materials stretches back millennia. For most of human history, the concept of “throwing something away” barely existed.
Marissa: This episode relies heavily on historian Emily Cockayne’s book Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go.[1] I’ve also used the work of anthropologist Sarah Newman[2] and historian Susan Strasser.[3] As always, we are indebted to the historians who did the painstaking archival work that makes episodes like this possible. To begin our series on environmental history, we’re tackling the premodern history of recycling. Or as pre-WWII people would have called it: reclamation, salvage, scrapping, repair, and reuse. We’ll meet rag-and-bone men and dustmen, shoddy masters and mudlarks. We’ll discover how rags became paper, how old wool became new cloth, and how virtually nothing in the premodern world was ever truly waste.
I’m Marissa
And I’m Sarah
Marissa: And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
…
Sarah: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, and Susan! Welcome and thank you to our newest auger, Ben! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more
Hey listeners, so glad you’re here today, digging into some feminist history with us. If you’re looking to expand your horizons, we’d love to recommend you check out our friends at Thinking Bodies. <this is where we’ll play their ad> you can find them anywhere you get your podcasts
Marissa: It’s really difficult for most people today to conceive of a world where almost nothing was thrown away. We’re so used to our disposable culture, planned obsolesence, single-use plastics and fast fashion and all the rest of it, that it takes some mental effort to imagine how differently our ancestors related to material goods. But here’s the thing: for most of human history, materials were simply too valuable to discard.
I want to start by discussings what we know about recyling the ancient world, because thinking about these things helps us understand how deeply embedded reuse was in premodern societies. The philosopher Plato, writing in the fourth century BCE, was already advocating for what we might today call resource conservation though he focused more on water and timber conservation in Critias.[4] In Republic, he writes about the virtue of limiting consumption.[5] So it seems the ancients were more focused on conserving resources and moderating consumption to begin with. But the practice of what we now call “recycling” predates even ancient Greek philosophy by a long shot.
Sarah: Archaeological studies of ancient waste dumps reveal a fascinating pattern. Starting in the 1850s, Danish archaeologists began examining “middens” which are historical refuse heaps. These early digs established the methodology of stratigraphy in which archaeologists studied soil layers (strata) to determine human chronologies.[6] During periods when resources were scarce, these middens contain significantly less household waste: less ash, fewer broken tools, less pottery. The implication is clear. When times were tough, people found ways to reuse and repair rather than discard.[7]
Marissa: Here’s where things get interesting from an archaeological perspective. Metal objects pose a particular challenge for historians of recycling because a successful ancient recycling economy can become essentially invisible to us. When recycling means re-melting, the original object simply ceases to exist. That beautiful bronze statue might have started life as a dozen cooking pots, which themselves might have begun as armor from a forgotten battle. The transformation is total, and the evidence vanishes.
Sarah: The Romans were perhaps the most systematic recyclers of the ancient world, at least when it came to metal. Pliny the Elder, the famous Roman historian, wrote in the first century CE about the reuse of scrap copper in Roman foundries. He noted that metals were recast as armor, weapons, or articles for personal use such as bronze mirrors. The melting and recasting foundries he described were located at the Italian port city of Brindisi.
Marissa: During times of war, the Romans would melt down old weapons, armor, and tools to create new ones. This wasn’t just thrift; it was survival. Resources were often limited, and melting down existing metal was far easier and less expensive than mining for new materials. There’s even evidence that Romans melted down old bronze coins to create bronze statues, believing that large statues would hold more monetary value than their single-coin counterparts.[8] So even currency wasn’t safe from the recyclers!
Sarah: And it wasn’t just metal. Even human waste had value in the ancient world. The use of sewage as fertilizer was common in ancient Athens, where the city’s waste was channeled to the Cephissus river valley for agricultural use. In China, references to using human excreta as fertilizer appear as early as the Western Han dynasty (c. 200 BCE), though it didn’t become common practice until the Song dynasty (c. 960 CE).[9]
The Japanese city of Edo developed an entire economy around what was euphemistically called “night soil.” Compost merchants would gather human waste to sell to farmers. And here’s a detail I find absolutely wild: the excreta of wealthy people sold at higher prices because their better diet was thought to leave more nutrients in their waste. So even poop had a class system.[10]
Marissa: So how did this poop recycling work? Most of the world’s night soil systems were similar. In Tudor England, the night soilman, also called a gong farmer, performed one of history’s most unpleasant yet essential jobs: emptying cesspits and privies of human waste. They worked exclusively at night to spare citizens the sight and smell, hauling away excrement in carts to designated dumping grounds outside city walls. Despite the foul nature of their work, night soilmen were reasonably well-paid, reflecting both the job’s necessity and its social stigma (a kind of hazard pay?). The waste they collected was often sold as fertilizer to farmers, creating an early recycling economy. Their labor helped prevent disease outbreaks in densely packed urban environments where sanitation infrastructure was primitive or nonexistent.
Sarah: In the Victorian era, entrepreneurs had developed techniques to process night soil into manure. For example, James Powell, who called himself a “manufacturing and analytical chemist.” He bragged about his ability to turn night soil, bones, and other noxious substances into low-odor manure. Powell even bragged about having tricked a local policeman into taking powdered night soil as snuff (which is ground tobacco that is sniffed up the nose.) In his Muck Manual, Frederick Falkner wrote that crude night soil was too potent to be used directly as fertilizer. He recommended mixing it with charred or dried peat and finely sifted coal ash.[11]
By Powell’s time, however, the night soil business was one of diminishing returns. In 1842 Edwin Chadwick gathered evidence about the feasibility of the night soil business. He came to the conclusion that it was not worth the expense of carting it. One London contractor said: “I have given away thousands of loads of night soil; as we have no means of disposing of it and we know not what to do with it.”[12] Cockayne argues that only in the East End was the night soil trade profitable because of its close proximity to market gardens. These diminishing returns led to the evolution of the fertilizer business toward non-night-soil alternatives.
Marissa: If there’s one material that defined premodern recycling more than any other, it was rags. The story of how worn-out clothing, bedsheets, and textile scraps became the foundation of the paper industry is one of the great tales of a circular economy before such a term existed. For those of you who didn’t take a papermaking class in college (I’ve never met anyone else who has), let me explain the process very succinctly. You essentially take some kind of pulverized fiber (wood pulp, rag pulp, etc.), suspend it in water and drop fine mesh screens into the water and scoop upward, leaving a film of wet, pulverized fiber on the top of your screen. Right after the fibers matte together (which happens when you pull the screen out of the water) but before it dries, you transfer the sheet of matted fibers onto a surface to dry. The dried sheet of matted fibers is…. You guessed it… paper!
Sarah: Paper recycling was first recorded in 1031, when Japanese shops began selling repulped paper. But it was in medieval and early modern Europe that the rag-to-paper trade reached its full flowering. In this era, paper for writing and printing was made almost exclusively from recycled linen rags. The process involved collecting worn textiles, macerating them and suspending the macerated fibers in water as Marissa just described.
Marissa: This created an entirely new profession: the ragpicker. Ragmen, rag-women, ragpickers, rag-rakers, rag-gatherers, and rag-collectors fanned out across towns and cities, going door-to-door and picking through refuse piles to find usable textile scraps. Keep in mind, premodern people had a different threshold for what was considered a rag. For example, my mom used to use bleached, old towels as rags. She’d rip them up and use them for very dirty jobs. But the condition that her rag towels were in would have still been considered good in a premodern world. People almost NEVER wore newly purchased textiles. Only the top 5% of society would even consider it. Everyone else wore second-hand textiles that had been altered for fit. They wore and mended these many times over until it was physically impossible to use them anymore. Then they’d be repurposed into various household items like drop cloths, menstrual rags, and polishing rags until they were disintegrating. Many householders used old rags or stockings to fill children’s stuffed animals. It was once these uses were exhausted that rags were finally ready for the ragpicker.
Sarah: As Cockayne notes, these workers lived on the margins of society, but their labor was essential to the functioning of the literate world. “It is curious,” remarked the journalist James Hamilton Fyfe in 1862, that rags, which symbolised beggary, “constitute one of our chief national wants.”[13] Indeed, the entire infrastructure of literate civilization rested on the shoulders of people who spent their days picking through garbage.
Marissa: The paper industry’s need for rags was enormous. Hamilton Fyfe mused, “the consumption of paper has increased much more rapidly than the use of clothes and the consequent formation of rags.”[14]According to reports from the Victorian era, for every ton of paper produced, mills required about five percent more than that weight in rags. With hundreds of paper mills operating across Britain alone, the demand seemed insatiable. As a result, rags became valuable commodities. So much so that people stopped making rag-rugs and other household crafts that made use of rags.
And there was money in it for people who were willing to do the tedious and unhygienic work of rag collection. Female ragpickers collected used linens from houses and tailors to sell to papermakers. Ragpickers were typically people trying to stay out of the workhouse as they only made about 2-3 pence per pound of rags. It was certainly not a living but it kept food in their bellies and paid for them to rent a bed at one of the many lodging houses for itinerant populations in London (see our From Respectability to Ruin to Ripper Victim episode for more on this).
Sarah: The connection between clothing and text was intimate. Early modern people understood that the shirt on their back might one day carry the words of Shakespeare or the decrees of Parliament. Some authors of the period even played with this idea. The poet John Taylor imagined that the immortality of writers like Chaucer, Sidney, and Shakespeare was permanently woven into the natural material fibers of the paper they were printed on. Taylor quipped that the Commentaries of Julius Caesar were “good for nothing but stoppe mustard pots.”[15]
Marissa: As with all makeshift work, the rag trade was not without its dangers. A physician named Dr. John Syer Bristowe produced a report for the Privy Council in 1865 on the health hazards of working with rags. Consignments sometimes included contaminated material, and disease could spread through the paper mills. Collections were constantly contaminated with other materials. Cockayne tells a story about how, in the 1880s, the Rag Brigade boys in London went around collecting wastepaper for repulping. They accidentally collected six pairs of silk stockings in their paper piles. There’s also documentation of workers finding the desiccated body of a baby in a bag of rags at an Edinburgh paper mill.[16] According to Bristowe, there were documented cases of smallpox outbreaks linked to infected rags.
Sarah: The recycling of paper itself was also common. Wastepaper and parchment found countless uses: spine supports in bookbinding, guards to protect pages, flyleaves, pastedowns, and even flexible binding covers. Medieval bookbinders routinely repurposed manuscript leaves from one book as components of another. When you opened a fifteenth-century volume, you might find fragments of a twelfth-century theological text peeking out from behind the covers. Even the violent seizure and dispersal of manuscripts after the Dissolution of the Monasteries (16th century) contributed to this practice, as pages from dismembered religious texts found new life as structural elements in Protestant-era books. By the Victorian era, the need for paper pulp was so dire that shopkeepers and merchants sold their superseded accounts to bookbinders to be pulped into pasteboards.
Marissa: If rags fed the paper industry, another kind of textile recycling fed the clothing trade itself. This is the story of shoddy and mungo, and it begins in a small market town in West Yorkshire during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1813, a man named Benjamin Law of Batley developed a process that would transform the wool industry. Law had observed saddlers in London stuffing saddles with flock that had been made from reclaimed woolen fabric. The material was ground up in machines similar to those used to process cotton for paper. Law saw an opportunity.
Sarah: His innovation was to take soft woolen rags, shred them in a machine fitted with iron teeth, and mix the resulting fibers with virgin wool. The blend could then be spun into yarn and woven into cloth. The process, and the cloth it produced, became known as “shoddy.” Yes, that’s where our word comes from! This was happening during some of the most dangerous years of the Industrial Revolution. The Luddite movement was in full swing, with workers destroying machinery they saw as threats to their livelihoods. There were murders, hangings, and mill owners formed private armies for their own protection. Law kept his methods secret, but competitors were on his tracks.
Marissa: Twenty-one years later, in 1834, Law’s business partner Benjamin Parr developed a variation of the process. Mungo, as it was called, was ground from harder rags: closely woven fabric, dress-coats, and tailors’ cuttings. The resulting fibers were finer than shoddy. There’s a charming etymology attached to the name mungo. According to local tradition, it comes from the Yorkshire dialect. When Parr was told his machine wasn’t working, he allegedly responded that “it mun go,” meaning “it must go.” It’s unclear whether this is actually true or just a story Yorkshiremen tell themselves.
Sarah: The transformation of Batley and its neighboring towns was remarkable. In 1813, when the shoddy industry started, Batley had a population of about three thousand, and woolen manufacture was small-scale. By 1860, the population had more than tripled, and the town was thriving with dozens of mills in the valley. Dewsbury likewise more than tripled its population. Entire towns rose on the back of recycled wool. It was said that the birds flew backward in Batley to stop the soot from getting in their eyes, such was the industry’s impact on the local environment. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of early recycling’s environmental credentials!
Marissa: Nothing was wasted in the shoddy trade. Seams cut from the rags, and parts not suitable for processing, were left to rot and then sold to farmers to manure crops or used for bedding and stuffing. The dust extracted by fans in the mills found its way to farmers in what came to be known as the Rhubarb Triangle. Even the international dimension was significant: tens of thousands of tons of waste cloth began to be imported from Europe.
Sarah: As one Victorian writer colorfully described it: “Hither are brought tatters from pediculous Poland, from the Gipsies of Hungary, from the beggars and scarecrows of Germany, from the frowsy peasants of Muscovy, to say nothing of snips and shreds from monks’ gowns and lawyers’ robes, from postilions’ jackets and soldiers’ uniforms, from maidens’ bodices and noblemen’s cloaks.”[17] These heterogeneous collections were shredded by machines called “devils,” re-spun, and re-woven, thus resurrected into new material for the backs of people who little dreamed of the various vicissitudes through which their clothes had passed.
Marissa: In Victorian London, the primary constituent of household waste was coal ash, and this ash, known as “dust,” formed the basis of an entire economy of recycling and reuse. The dust-yard system that emerged in London in the late eighteenth century was perhaps the first organized, municipal-wide solid waste management system. Contractors operated large yards where household waste was collected and sorted. The key was that dust had genuine market value. Mixed with clay, it made fine bricks. Spread on fields, it served as fertilizer. Brickmakers used cinders to fire their kilns.
Sarah: The dustmen who collected this waste were colorful figures in urban life. Householders would arrange for them to come by once a week, and their distinctive cry became part of the city’s soundscape. But alongside the official dustmen operated the “flying” or “running” dustmen, independent operators who ran their own somewhat shady businesses. These flying dustmen would offer to clean out a household’s dustbins for a tip. If the tip wasn’t to their liking, they were apt to drag their muddy boots along the carpet or smear the wallpaper with slime. Nice! Once their cart was full, they sifted through the dust for whatever of value they could find. Unlike the large contractors, they had no way of disposing of the leftover material. So they would wait until dark, drive out to some deserted road, and let the contents spill out as they drove along.
Marissa: At the dust-yards, the sorting work fell primarily to women and children. They were sometimes called “hillwomen,” and they sifted through mountains of ash to extract anything of value. Charles Dickens wrote about the dust trade in Our Mutual Friend (1856). He wrote about the poor dustmen and dustwomen who spent their days sorting through the dust heaps as well as a more entrepreneurial sort who had made his fortune on dust.[18] Any rags, bones, or metal the hillwoman found, they could sell to marine store dealers. Old boots and shoes went to manufacturers of a pigment called Prussian-blue. Tin objects, such as kettles, went to trunk makers, who used them to make clamps. Despite dire warnings in the press about the filthy conditions, the dustmen, the sifters, and their children continued their trade. Children grew up into the business, generation after generation.
Sarah: Which brings us back to Henry Mayhew and his monumental 1851 work London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew spent years interviewing the poorest residents of the world’s richest city, and what he found was an entire shadow economy devoted to extracting value from things the better-off had discarded. Mayhew catalogued dozens of street trades, but among the most fascinating were what he called the “street-finders.” These were people who literally picked up their living from the public thoroughfares. They included the pure pickers we mentioned at the start, cigar-end finders known as “hard-ups,” dredgermen or coal-finders, mud-larks, bone-grubbers, and sewer-hunters called “toshers.”
Marissa: The bone-grubbers and rag-gatherers could be recognized at once by the greasy bag carried on the back. Usually they had a stick in hand, armed with a spike or hook for more easily turning over heaps of ashes or dirt thrown out of houses, discovering whether they contained anything saleable at the rag-and-bottle or marine-store shop. Mayhew estimated there were between eight hundred and one thousand such individuals working London’s streets.
Sarah: They would spend nine or ten hours per day searching for anything of value before returning to their lodgings to sort what they had found. White rag could fetch two to three pence per pound (as we mentioned earlier), but this was depending on condition. All rag had to be dry before it could be sold. Colored rag was worth about two pence per pound. Bones, worth about the same, could be used as knife handles, toys, and ornaments, and when treated, for chemical processes. Bones were also useful for soapmaking, grease, glue, and glycerin production.
Marissa: Metal was more valuable. Street-grubbers could be seen scraping away the dirt between paving stones of non-macadamized roads, searching for horseshoe nails. Brass, copper, and pewter were valued at about four to five pence per pound. In a typical day, a bone-grubber might expect to earn about sixpence. Barely enough to survive. The mudlarks were perhaps the most pitiable. Mostly children or adults on the verge of destitution, they scavenged the banks of the Thames at low tide for coal from barges, rope, wood chips, and anything else that might be sold. The working conditions were filthy and dangerous, involving wading through raw sewage. One young mudlark told Mayhew that he had been three years at the work and supposed he would remain a mudlark all his life. “What else could he be? There was nothing else he knew how to do.”
Sarah: The toshers, or sewer-hunters, operated in an even more dangerous environment. Before the building of the Thames embankment, London’s sewers opened directly onto the foreshore. Toshers would explore this underground network with fishing nets, searching for coins, nails, and other valuables. Their work was profitable but uncommonly dangerous. London’s sewers were ancient, dilapidated, and of unknown extent. Collapse was an ever-present risk, as was suffocation from accumulated gases. As Cockayne suggests, the best reuse often happened in the private space of the home, where, as the everyday work of women, it was typically unrecorded. But Mayhew’s work captures the public face of Victorian recycling: an army of the desperate extracting every last scrap of value from a society that produced waste in unprecedented quantities.
Marissa: No figure better embodies the premodern recycling economy than the rag-and-bone man. Known by various names across cultures, including ragpicker, old-clothesman, junkman, chiffonnier, bone-grubber, and totter, these itinerant collectors formed the essential link between households and the industries that transformed their discards into new products. The rag-and-bone man collected unwanted household items and sold them to merchants. Scraps of cloth and paper could be turned into cardboard. Broken glass could be melted down and reused. Bones had countless applications. Even dead cats and dogs could be skinned to make clothes or sold for their fur. Traditionally, this was work performed on foot, with the scavenged materials kept in a small bag slung over the shoulder. Some used carts, sometimes pulled by a horse or pony.
Sarah: In nineteenth-century Britain, rag-and-bone men typically lived in extreme poverty, surviving on the proceeds of what they collected each day. Mayhew’s 1851 report estimated that those 800-1,000 bone-grubbers and rag-gatherers mentioned above lived in lodging houses, garrets, and ill-furnished rooms in the lowest neighborhoods. In the West Riding of Yorkshire, rag-and-bone men would collect waste woolen and rag products from householders to sell to the shoddy factories. The connection between these street collectors and the industrial mills was direct and essential. Without the ragmen, the mills would have no raw material. Without the mills, the ragmen would have no market.
Marissa: The trade was not without its regulations. In Paris, ragpickers were regulated by law and could operate only at night. They were required to return unusually valuable items either to their owners or to the authorities. When Eugène Poubelle introduced the rubbish bin in Paris in 1884, he was criticized by French newspapers for meddling with the ragpickers’ livelihood. Although it was solely a job for the lowest of the working classes, ragpicking was considered an honest occupation, more on the level of a street sweeper than a beggar. The ragpickers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not recycle the materials themselves. They would simply collect whatever they could find and turn it over to a “master ragpicker,” usually a former ragpicker who had accumulated enough capital to operate as a middleman.
Sarah: Conditions for rag-and-bone men improved somewhat after the Second World War, but the trade declined during the latter half of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s, only a few hundred remained in London, squeezed out by competition from more specialized trades and pressure from property developers to build on rag merchants’ premises. The BBC’s popular television comedy Steptoe and Son helped maintain the rag-and-bone man’s status in British folklore, but by the 1980s they were all but gone from British streets.
Marissa: While much of premodern recycling was driven by individual necessity and small-scale enterprise, some early attempts at systematic recycling schemes emerged well before the twentieth century. One of the most successful was the bottle deposit system. As early as 1799, A & R Thwaites & Co in Dublin announced that they would pay two shillings a dozen for returned bottles of their artificial soda water. Schweppes, who were also in the business of artificially made mineral waters, had a similar recycling policy from about 1800, entirely without legislation compelling them to do so.
Sarah: In fact, when the government was leading the charge, such as during war time, results were often disappointing. For example, during WWII, Britain’s Ministry of Supply placed advertisements in newspapers for a bone salvage scheme. They organized exhibitions teaching folks how to prepare bones for salvage and explaining their uses. Householders were asked to stop giving their animal bones to their dogs and to prepare them for the salvage pail instead. Despite the concerted effort and war time enthusiasm, the Ministry of Supply reported low yields: “less than one fourth of the tonnage entering dwelling houses was recovered.”[19] It was simply too inconvenient for it to become habitual for Britons. The bone salvage pails stunk and attracted vermin. Householders were also asked to clean, bake and lime the bones before putting them in the salvage buckets and most people just weren’t willing to take the time.
Marissa: Schemes certainly worked best when the reuse made financial sense. For example, glass bottles were expensive to manufacture, and the product inside, whether mineral water or beer, was worth far less than the container. It made economic sense to recover bottles, wash them, and refill them. A well-made glass bottle could be reused around twenty times before it became too worn or damaged. Sweden formalized this approach in 1884, establishing an official recycling system with refundable deposits for glass bottles. The bottles were standardized in 1885, making the system more efficient. This early container deposit legislation achieved remarkable results, with recycling rates eventually reaching between eighty-four and ninety-nine percent depending on the type of container.
Waste glass, known as cullet, could also be processed for other uses. The Victorians ground glass to be used as the roughage on sand paper or to make glass wool or fiberglass. Glass had long been melted and reformed into all kinds of objects. The Pilkington brothers in St. Helens uses ground waste glass to strengthen their bricks. It wasn’t the glass that improved them but the iron contamination found in cullet that did the trick.[20] In a different vein, the Victorians were also fond of upcycling older stained glass windows. The wealthy imported them from Europe and used them in their homes.
Sarah: Some of these Georgian and Victorian schemes demonstrated that financial incentives could dramatically increase recycling rates. They also showed that industry could implement effective recycling programs voluntarily when it made economic sense, without waiting for government mandates. The principle established in Georgian Dublin and Victorian Sweden remains the foundation of bottle deposit programs around the world today. As Cockayne argues, recycling is not only about economic or ecological value. It involves cultural judgment, social norms, taste, and memory. What people were willing to reuse, and what they refused to let go, varied enormously depending on context and circumstance.
Marissa: Consider the reuse of religious objects after the English Reformation. The materials that made up Catholic church objects were reused for secular purposes. Altar stones became stairs or sinks. Clerical vestments became cushions. Sacred objects were stripped of their spiritual significance and transformed into ordinary household items. Centuries later, the process reversed. In the late Victorian period, wealthy Catholics, newly permitted to practice their religion openly, imported second-hand Gothic oak carvings and stained-glass windows from Europe. This was an attempt to make visible the historic nature of their faith, the rich trappings of which had long ago been anonymously absorbed into Protestant homes across Britain.
Sarah: The secondhand clothing trade also reflected cultural attitudes about class and status. Dealers known as upholders, fripperers, or “phelipers” operated in medieval English towns including London, Coventry, Norwich, and Nottingham. Botchers remade garments from old ones. One medieval preacher, the Franciscan friar Nicholas Bozon, even used a repairer of old clothes as an analogy for Judgment Day: “the simple folk will be exalted for their good deeds and the haughty abused for their pride. Then God will do as the mender of old clothes, who turns the lappet to the front and what was uppermost, downwards.”
Marissa: Cockayne’s research reveals that the work of reuse was often invisible precisely because it was done by women in private domestic spaces. Patchwork quilts, repaired garments, preserved foods, composted kitchen scraps: all of this essential recycling work went largely unrecorded because it happened in the home rather than the marketplace. The hidden labor of women shaped the material world for each future generation.
Sarah: Before we wrap up, we should spend a moment on another crucial dimension of premodern recycling: the scrap metal trade that fueled industrial growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As industrialization spurred demand for affordable materials, ferrous scrap metals became increasingly coveted because they were far cheaper to acquire than virgin ore. Railroads both purchased and sold scrap metal throughout the nineteenth century, creating networks for the circulation of used iron and steel. The growing automobile industry of the early twentieth century likewise became a major purchaser of scrap.
Marissa: Many secondary goods were collected, processed, and sold by peddlers who scoured dumps and city streets for discarded machinery, pots, pans, and other sources of metal. By the First World War, thousands of such peddlers roamed the streets of American cities, taking advantage of market forces to recycle post-consumer materials into industrial production.
Sarah: It’s hard to imagine in a world where planned obsolescence is the norm but for most of human history, recycling was expected. For example, Johann Gutenberg’s printing press, invented in 1436, utilized an innovative alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that allowed printers to melt down and repurpose the type letters regularly, preserving valuable materials while enabling the production of countless different texts. The technology that made the spread of knowledge possible was itself built on a foundation of recycling. So even the Gutenberg revolution was, in a sense, a recycling revolution. Every page of every book printed with movable type depended on the ability to melt down and reform metal letters again and again.
Marissa: I want to spend a moment on something Cockayne emphasizes repeatedly in Rummage: the invisibility of so much recycling labor, particularly the work done by women in the home. This is such an important point. We’ve been talking about dustmen and ragpickers and shoddy masters, all of whom operated in the public sphere and therefore left traces in the historical record. But the vast majority of premodern recycling happened privately, in domestic spaces, and was performed by women as part of their everyday household duties.
Sarah: Think about it. Patchwork quilts made from scraps of worn-out clothing. Garments let out, taken in, turned inside out, passed down from older children to younger ones. Kitchen scraps fed to pigs or composted for the garden. Candle stubs melted down and reformed. Bones boiled for soup stock, then saved for the bone-grubber. Fat rendered for soap. This was constant, daily work, and almost none of it was recorded.
Marissa: Cockayne describes her own grandmother’s approach to materials. She never bought new fabrics for her patchworking. Instead, she saved offcuts from needlework projects and salvageable parts of worn-out garments. This kind of thrift was simply how women were expected to manage a household. It wasn’t seen as particularly virtuous or noteworthy. It was just what you did. And because it wasn’t seen as noteworthy, it largely escaped the historical record. We have detailed accounts of the shoddy trade because it was an industry with records and statistics. We know about the dustmen because journalists like Mayhew found them colorful and wrote about them. But the countless women who kept households running on minimal resources, finding second and third and fourth uses for every scrap of material, they’re largely invisible to us.
Sarah: It’s a good reminder that the history we have access to is always shaped by what previous generations thought was worth recording. And domestic labor, women’s labor, was rarely considered worthy of documentation.
Marissa: So what can we learn from this history of premodern recycling, salvage, and reuse? First, the idea that recycling is a modern invention is simply false. For most of human history, the concept of throwing things away barely existed. Materials were too valuable, labor too cheap, and necessity too pressing to permit the casual disposal that characterizes our contemporary throwaway culture.
Sarah: Second, successful recycling has always required both economic incentives and cultural acceptance. The shoddy trade flourished because recycled wool was cheaper than virgin material. Bottle deposits worked because they made financial sense for both producers and consumers. But recycling also depended on social norms that valued thrift and saw waste as shameful.
Marissa: Third, the workers who made recycling possible, from ragpickers to dustmen to pure-finders, have always been among the most marginalized members of society. As Cockayne notes, the history of successful reuse is often the story of people on the margins. Recognizing this history means acknowledging the human cost of our material economy, both past and present.
Sarah: Fourth, institutions have not always supported attempts to reuse and recycle materials. Medieval craftsmen sometimes had to circumvent guild restrictions to supply growing consumer demand for recycled goods. Today, we face similar challenges in creating regulatory frameworks that encourage rather than hinder recycling.
Marissa: Finally, as Cockayne reminds us, recycling presents no linear history of improvement, nor a straightforward decline. Instead, practices have pinged and ponged throughout history, responding to changing economic conditions, material availability, and cultural values. The premodern history of recycling offers both inspiration and caution. Our ancestors were ingenious in finding uses for materials we might consider worthless. But they also faced the same challenges we do: coordinating individual actions, overcoming resistance to change, and ensuring that the benefits of recycling are shared fairly across society.
Sarah: As we confront the urgent environmental challenges of our own time, from plastic pollution to climate change, to the excessive use of water by AI servers, we might find guidance in looking backward as well as forward. The ragpickers and dustmen, the shoddy masters and the pure-finders, they all understood something we are still learning: that there is no such thing as “away.” Everything we discard goes somewhere, becomes something.
Marissa: Emily Cockayne’s Rummage illustrates this so well because it goes in reverse chronological order; from WWII backward. So in one chapter, we learn about how old things were salvaged and reused. Then we move to the next chapter when the old things from the previous chapter were new. Very cool. It’s a brilliant reminder that the choices we make about our material world are not merely technical or economic. They are deeply cultural, shaped by memory and meaning, by what we value and what we are willing to let go. Understanding that history is the first step toward building a more sustainable future.
Thanks for listening. Until next time.
Notes
[1] Cockayne, Emily. 2020. Rummage : A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go. London: Profile Books Ltd.
[2] Newman, Sarah. 2023. Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
[3] Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. 1st Owl books ed. New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Co.
[4] Plato, Critias, 111b-c (written 360 B.C.E.), translated by Benjamin Jowett
[5] Plato, Republic, Book 2, 373, translated by Paul Shorey
[6] Newman, pp. 43-45; Find an example of a midden strata study here: https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/midden/article/view/16890/7206
[7] For example, see https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/15978513/ix_nordic_tag.pdf#page=21
[8] Peña, J. Theodore. 2020. “Recycling in the Roman World : Concepts, Questions, Materials, and Organization.” In Recycling and Reuse in the Roman Economy. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198860846.003.0002.
[9] Du, Xin-Hao, Yuan-Ming Song, Ji-An Cai, and Yong-Guan Zhu. 2024. “Utilization of Human Excrement in Pre-Modern China, Its Theoretical Interpretations and Ecological Significance.” Soil Ecology Letters 6 (1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42832-024-0226-6.
[10] Walthall, Anne. 1988. “Village Networks. Sōdai and the Sale of Edo Nightsoil.” Monumenta Nipponica 43 (3): 279–303. https://doi.org/10.2307/2385051.
[11] Cockayne 160-161
[12] Cockayne, 160
[13] Cockayne, 133
[14] Cockayne, 133
[15] Cockayne, 256
[16] Cockayne pp. 7-8
[17] Matthew Tait, Yorkshire: Its Scenes, Lore and Legends Elaborated from a Prize Essay, p. 37
[18] Cockayne, 148-149; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/883/pg883-images.html
[19] Cockayne, 61
[20] Cockayne, 108-112
Discover more from DIG
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
0 Comments