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Book Review
| Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. By Carl Zimring. Piscataway, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xi + 220 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95; Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. By Elizabeth Royte. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. viii + 311 pp. Includes bibliographical references and index. $24.95; Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. By Heather Rogers. New York and London: New Press, 2005. xi + 288 pp. Includes bibliographical references and index. $23.95; Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. DVD. Directed by Heather Rogers. AK Press. 2005. 19 minutes. $12.
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| There must be something about garbage right now because no less than three books in the past year attempted to unearth or chronicle American habits of refuse, waste, and recycling. Two of them, Garbage Land and Gone Tomorrow, come from the trade press and provide entertaining if frustrating accounts of journalistic endeavors to find out where our contemporary trash goes and why Americans know so little about it. By contrast, the third, Cash for your Trash, comprises an important contribution to the complex practices of American disposal and recovery through a detailed history of the junk and scrap industries. Recently available on DVD is Heather Rogers' short documentary that shares the title of her book, Gone Tomorrow, which provides an engaging visual account of the politics and history of garbage. |
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Zimring's book will prove the most useful and engaging for professional scholars. It fills in gaps between Martin Melosi's and Joel Tarr's histories of waste management infrastructure and Susan Strasser's history of the culture of recovery and disposal in American households. As Zimring demonstrates, these are in fact gaps that none of the earlier approaches acknowledged existing: the vast and complex world of brokers between households and final disposers and users of wastes and recoverable materials. In a pattern established by Melosi and Strasser, Zimring's story spans all of American history, from the colonial period to the present. However, in a relatively short monograph, the strengths of the account do not lie in its broad sweep, but in the details of the twentieth-century struggles of small scrap firms to stay competitive in a cutthroat and volatile marketplace, caught between technological innovation in manufacturing and cultural denigration of waste dealers and the waste trades. |
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In Zimring's account, the scrap business is an immigrant business and he offers a highly compelling, if somewhat historically unnuanced theory that scrap dealing was open to immigrants only because of their innate association with "dirt" in the native-born American imagination. Furthermore, the predominance of Jewish immigrants in the scrap business reinforces a suggestion that Jews were the most stigmatized immigrant group in American history. Certainly anecdotal evidence indicates that Jews did play a dominant role in the industry. However, more comparative demographic data would have been useful here (though perhaps hard to recover), given that other scholars have shown Italians and Dutch immigrants dominated waste hauling and salvage in certain urban areas. Indeed, the study could have benefited from exploration of how these immigrant groups interacted with each other in these tightly controlled markets and whether they exploited each other's stigmatization. To be sure, Zimring's approach is a composite portrait, and what his study lacks in specifics can provide fruitful opportunity for further investigation. This book is rich in many details and shows that garbage research is hardly a closed field. |
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Much of the history of the scrap industry is highly technological. Some readers may find the parts of the book detailing changes in metals forging, manufacturing, and disassembly tough going, especially because Zimring occasionally uses trade-specific terms before defining them (for example "skull crackers" appear at least twice before they are described as "an eight thousand pound ball"). Similarly, other engineering and chemical processes remain inadequately explicated, which is too bad, because when Zimring does describe for the general scholarly reader, he shows a knack for this skill. |
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