People have always recycled. This process had no official title and was done automatically: if you wanted to live a long and happy life you saved every item that could possibly be used for another purpose and used it for that purpose.
In the United States, the culture changed dramatically during and after World War II. I remember horror stories of people who made so much money working in defense plants that they threw away perfectly good items when they were through using them: "I found a perfectly good child's coat and leggings in their trash after they moved. Can you believe it?"
This throw-away culture blossomed, until in the 1970s we rediscovered what our elders had known all along, and began "recycling."
Betty Craiglow has this to say about recycling during her Louisiana childhood in the thirties and forties:
My mother and father, both from long lines of thrifty, recycling, make-do families, were masters of stretching a dollar. We probably thrived on less than anyone today can imagine. Some of the art of frugality filtered down to my generation, and even less to my children's generation. I find myself hesitating before discarding things, wondering if another use might be found for them.
"You're cutting off too much potato with those peelings," I can still hear my mother telling me after I was grown. And you know what? When I peel potatoes today I use a potato peeler so I don't cut off too much potato.
People think recycling is a modern day environmental gimmick. Think again. All her life my mother, who was a child of poverty, clothed with castoffs and fed with leftovers both her family and others less fortunate around her. Rummage sales, forerunners of today's garage sales and flea markets, were popular in her day and nobody surpassed Mother at scrounging.