When citizens recycle waste, we consider this an act of responsible ‘green’ citizenship. Today's consumers query the environmental impact of their consumption. Shoppers wonder whether the goods they buy are properly recyclable; others translate their concerns for the environment into a daily practice of separating, storing, collecting and transporting reusable waste. Most European consumer-citizens have incorporated recycling into their daily routine. Today, modern recycling is usually seen as a product of the 1970s, when grass-root movements and environmental policies generated new consumer practices. The assumption is that recycling only gained widespread public support from industry, politics and consumers a few decades ago.

In two critical periods of German history, namely during wartime Imperial Germany and the National Socialist era, the German state resorted to salvaging waste to mobilise both people and resources at home for the war effort. Waste recycling efforts were part of preparing the national economy as well as home front morale for ‘total’ war. Since domestic waste – the generation of which was largely an urban phenomenon before the advent of mass consumer society – has traditionally been defined as a female responsibility, urban women were seen as the main pillars of waste work. Collecting, separating and storing reusable leftovers became a pervasive element of their everyday lives, as well as those of schoolchildren. Moreover, in the case of the First World War, under the umbrella of the so-called National Women's Service (Nationaler Frauendienst or NFD), women's associations set up grass-roots local waste collections before the state discovered the potential of waste for its war mobilisation efforts from 1916 onwards. The article highlights this self-mobilisation in the case of food recycling. Furthermore, it explores the continuities and differences between First World War waste salvage and later Nazi waste policies. Claiming to have learnt their lessons from the salvage drives of the First World War, the Nazis aimed at a ‘total’ waste recovery at the latest from 1936 onwards and took a top-down approach to reach it; in contrast, waste salvage drives of the First World War had been dominated by local and often female initiatives.

This article examines the origins, implementation and results of salvage drives carried out in wartime France from 1939 to 1945. In post-war accounts – including memoirs and local histories of the occupation – these salvage drives were understood simply as wartime frugality, a logical response to wide-spread shortages. Yet a careful study of the records of both the French Ministry of Armaments and Vichy's Service de la Récupération et de l'Utilisation des Déchets et Vieilles Matières combined with municipal and departmental sources reveals that these salvage drives were heavily influenced by Nazi German practices. From 1939 to 1940, even though French propaganda had previously ridiculed Nazi German salvage drives as proof of economic weakness, officials at the Ministry of Armaments emulated Nazi Germany by carrying out salvage drives of scrap iron and paper. After the fall of France, this emulation became collaboration. Vichy's salvage efforts were a conjoint Franco-German initiative, organised at the very highest levels of the occupation administration. Drawing on the experience of Nazi German salvage experts, Vichy officials carried out the salvage drives according to German models. Nevertheless, they carefully hid the German origins of the campaign from the chain of departmental prefects, mayors, Chambers of Commerce and youth leaders who organised the local drives and solicited participation by evoking French patriotic sentiment. After the liberation of France in 1944, the French Provisional Government renamed but otherwise maintained the Vichy-created salvage organisations and continued to oversee the collection of scrap iron, paper, rags, glass and bones until 1946. At that point, the government largely relinquished control of the salvage industry.

An analysis of Great Britain's campaigns to recycle books and paper reveals the paradoxes of wartime waste policies: destroying history and culture for the sake of reusing materials, and the impact of recycling on the war machinery's own wastefulness. Conscious of systematic recycling in Nazi Germany and its own dependence on imports, the British government established a salvage department only weeks after the outbreak of war. Beginning in 1940, this department required all large towns to collect recyclable materials. Salvage, beyond lessening shortages, served ideological and psychological aims, because reused materials were turned into weapons. This led to a critical redefinition of recycling as the war progressed. People who previously characterised the Third Reich's recycling programmes as typical fascist control now considered compulsory recycling in Great Britain wholly positive. However, protesters claimed the government was causing irreparable harm by salvaging items whose value far exceeded their worth as scrap. The harvesting of books, periodicals and manuscripts as ‘waste’ paper proved particularly contentious, with some arguing that their own government was adding to the destruction that bombs were causing to Great Britain's cultural inheritance.

The Netherlands is reputed to be the first Western European country with separate waste collection. The first Dutch recycling container was established in 1972 by a local action committee of women, who were involved in raising environmental awareness and in critiquing the waste of consumer society. Their initiative was a huge success. Action committees in dozens of cities followed their example in short order, supported by national politicians. Six years later, glass recycling containers dotted the country. Although novel, and a powerful icon of the politicized climate of the 1970s, Oldenziel and Veenis argue that the quick success of glass containers cannot be explained in the political context of rising environmentalism alone. The ready acceptance of glass containers and the practice of separating waste were rooted in national practices of a culture of thrift on the one hand and coercive wartime policies of reuse on the other. Based on archival material, the authors analyse the ways that recycling container activism was rooted in the tradition of the culture of thrift. More specifically, they trace how the culture of thrift had been reinforced in coercive wartime policies when authorities dealt with shortages during the German occupation and how the practice became a source of the 1970s history of glass container activism.

At one time, plastics were claimed to be the material that would not only boost West Germany's economy but also its consumer democracy. However, in the 1970s plastics were redefined as an environmental and consumer hazard. Based on protest letters and other sources, this article explores why plastic came to be redefined and traces how it became an issue of public concern. Now, this iconic material had become symbolic once more, but for negative reasons. I argue that the issue of plastics gained considerable momentum due to their crucial role in creating modern mass consumption. I further argue that the shifting significance of plastics highlights a substantial change in West Germany's political culture. While the early social market economists based citizens’ social belonging around access to economic security and affluence rather than overtly political notions of participation, people started insisting on the political aspects of their group identity as consumers; they defined both consumer information and protection as rights of citizenship.

This article investigates the making of the Norwegian recycling consumer-citizen by discussing recycling as both a cultural activity – an expression of environmentalist sentiment, an everyday habit and a social expectation – and a technological infrastructure consisting of disposal stations, legal frameworks, transportation systems and the recycling technologies themselves. Using a concept of ‘recycling junctions’ as a means of understanding historical recycling processes, the article focuses on beverage packaging to argue that effective recycling in the modern green state depends on a combination of technologically mediated convenience and green consumer-citizenship, involving a wide range of actors.

This article offers reflections on the scholarship in the special issue. It proposes that the formation of an overall narrative of twentieth-century European recycling is a complex matter, depending on issues of gender, age, class, nationality and representation. It suggests the further complications of writing histories of everyday life, points out the various meanings of ‘recycling’ and interrogates waste as an element of consumer culture.