Waste and its reuse have constituted an important field of economic activity for most of human history, including modern times. While the collected articles of this special issue exemplify the significance that waste salvage had in mobilising resources in Europe, Asia, and North America in World War II, this introduction situates these cases in a longterm perspective. It explores the continuities and ruptures inside the structures, markets, and actors of the salvage business from late nineteenth century waste reclamation, including the sanitary era of municipal waste disposal, to the more recent era of 'green' recycling. It argues that we need to rethink waste's role within business history by delineating four basic characteristics of the waste business: the moral economies that govern wasting and reusing; the informality of the trade and its operations; the trans-sectorality of the waste streams; and the reverse logistics of the waste salvage trade.
Introduction: waste economies and times of warFor most of human history, waste and its reuse have been an important field of economic activity, even if this field became largely invisible in an era of modernisation, industrialisation, and mass production. The articles of this special issue, along with our introduction, highlight the immense scope and significance of the 'business of waste ' (Stokes et al., 2013), but more importantly, they carve out some of the specific characteristics of what it means to deal and trade with waste. They do so by taking the extreme example of World War II as a vantage point: a period when warring states restructured their economies, enforced salvage drives, and began to interfere directly or indirectly with the existent structures, actors, networks, and material flows of the traditional waste and recycling business -referred to at the time as waste salvage or the scrap trade. We argue that the war period can serve as an entry point for historians to uncover otherwise largely hidden actors, structures, and channels of the waste trade because the wartime economy brought them to light; the salvage business underwent substantial transformations in belligerent states which left behind manifold traces in trade statistics, business records, and archives.
