Introduction

The recycling movement of the 1980s had two distinctive characteristics. On one hand, recyling had been propelled back onto the national environmental agenda by the garbage crisis that emerged in the 1980s and immortalized in images of the wandering garbage barge from New York. The underlying strength of the movement was largely rooted in the burgeoning community-based “Not In My Backyard” opposition to toxic hazards that both the development of new landfill capacity and the construction of municipal solid waste incinerators would bring, and in the standoffs resulting when cities and counties attempted to site new facilities in the face of organized citizen resistance.

 Thus in this latest incarnation, recycling was almost exclusively framed as a solid waste management alternative and as such reflected a strikingly narrower set of concerns than had earlier recycling movements.

On the other hand, recyling had crystallized as a popular idea like never before. In the media events leading up to Earth Day 1990 an extravagant 20^th anniversary celebration of the first Earth Day recycling was undeniably at center stage. Reflecting a central theme of Earth Day events, which were strongly characterized by a focus on personal responsibility for the environment, recycling was portrayed as the single most accessible expression of the concept of “think globally, act locally”: a way to square one’s personal behavior with one’s principles, and something everyone could do. “Recycling,” observed one participant at the 1990 National Recycling Congress, “has  a lot of power right now”. It had become a mainstream movement supported by all the major environmental group.