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About 150 years ago recycling was common practice in the Netherlands. Individual entrepreneurs collected such items as glass, metals, old fabrics and organic waste and sold them on for secondary use. The metals and fabrics were reused and the organic waste served as fertilizer for the land or feed for farm stock. This relatively effective and stable entrepreneurial system came under increasing pressure from the end of the nineteenth century by intensive industrialization, the subsequent economic boom, population increase and urbanization. A centralized, government-controlled system based on collection, incineration and landfilling was developed to deal with increasing amounts of waste and to minimize the health effects of untreated waste in urban centres. Until the late 1950s waste was perceived as something to get rid of and keep out of sight. This perception changed in the 1960s.

The next 40 years saw the …