Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community Development

In this book, we examine the potential for sustainable forms of community development to emerge within the United States. To do this, we reconstruct the recent history of urban recycling programs in the United States. In particular, we examine the relationship between politics and markets as they first created and later destroyed recycling programs in the Chicago metropolitan area. We note two shifts in the history of recycling. First, there was a shift away from the focus on waste as a panacea, something that could “save the environment” and/or provide job opportunities for the desperately poor. Instead, waste became treated as a commodity that could generate revenues. Second, there was also a shift away from recycling as an activity in which marginalized social groups and community-based organizations engaged toward its control by large firms, many of which now operate in global markets.