Of the plastic we do recycle, some is sold to Asian companies that blend it with virgin plastic to form everything from car bumpers to synthetic fleece jackets to plastic lumber. The reworked plastic is then often shipped back to the United States, burning more resources, while the toxic by-products from recycling conveniently stay in Asia.

If recycling is to some extent a feel-good ecological exercise, the deeper question is, How did we end up here? People used to recycle routinely, less for environmental reasons than for economic ones. Scavengers were gleaning resources from rubbish even before American cities began organizing waste collection in the early 19th century. They combed trash heaps for chairs and stew pots, bones to boil into soap and fertilizer, and rags to reprocess as paper. This practice continued into the 1940s, as freelance waste collectors sifted through many people's trash each week.

In the decades after World War II, trash became big business. The key to sustaining the country's postwar industrial boom was a frenetic new consumer culture. But as the 1950s wore on, most people already owned what they needed. The producers responded with "built-in obsolescence." Companies like General Electric began making products such as toasters and light bulbs that were designed to wear out, styles began to change more rapidly, and totally new "needs"-electric can openers, fabric softener-were invented. As Vance Packard pointed out in his 1960 best-seller, The Waste Makers, innovation in products was replaced with a parade of different and not necessarily improved styles.

But what to do with all the waste? Before World War II, cities unloaded their garbage at smelly open pits on the outskirts of town. With the onset of suburban sprawl and the increasingly unsafe and unsightly conditions at dumps, many cities turned to the latest in solid waste management: the "sanitary landfill."

Jean Vicenze, the engineer who built the country's first landfill, in Fresno, California, in 1937, worked in the Army Corps of Engineers during the war and fine-tuned a method of compressing waste tightly into the ground and covering it over with dirt to clean up after the troops. The consolidation kept pests out, and adding a layer of dirt hid waste and reduced its stench. (Some 50 years after its christening, Vincenze's Fresno landfill was declared a toxic Superfund site.) As Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb point out in