Book Review Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United

Recycling is one of the important accomplishments of the environmental movement. In the United States, cities and counties, both big and small, have enthusiastically embraced recycling as an important step in creating a greener society. Recycling has increasingly emerged as the best measure of civic engagement in the United States, attesting to its popularity as a solution to our collective environmental troubles. Yet the success of the movement offers an incomplete and misleading story of progress. In her book titled, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States, Samantha MacBride draws our attention to the unfulfilled prom-ises of recycling. Specifically, MacBride identifies three types of challenges to the successful adoption of recycling. The first, she argues, is the gradual co-optation and com-modification of the recycling movement by firms seeking to prevent implementa-tion of effective solid-waste management policies. Debated extensively within the Treadmill of Production school in environmental sociology, the commodifi-cation of the recycling program has led to consistent loss of jobs for communi-ties through the implementation of labor-saving techniques, robotics and exper