Carl Zimring

Carl Zimring is an environmental historian interested in how attitudes concerning waste shape society, culture, institutions, and inequalities. He is the author of several books that focus on aspects of the histories of technology and the environment, with particular attention to discards and the systems that create, classify, and manage discards.

Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (Rutgers University Press, 2005) is a history of changes and continuities in how Americans salvaged and recycled materials from the colonial era to the end of the twentieth century. Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (New York University Press, 2015) is a long history of the emergence of environmental racism in the United States, examining how concerns about waste and race in the early republic evolved through the Civil War and Reconstruction, providing the context for structures of environmental racism identified in the late twentieth century. Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) emerged from conversations with design faculty and students at Pratt. This book considers secondary aluminum use worldwide since World War II as a precursor to twenty-first century attempts at industrial upcycling, with an eye for using history to inform the potential and limitations of contemporary sustainable design strategies.

Collaborative books include Technology and the Environment in History (2020), a monograph written with Sara B. Pritchard. This overview of themes discussed by historians in the Envirotech special interest group of the Society for the History of Technology is the inaugural book in Johns Hopkins University Press’s Technology in Motion series published in cooperation with the Society for the History of Technology. Zimring and Steven H. Corey edited Coastal Metropolis: Environmental Histories of Modern New York City (2021), part of the University of Pittsburgh Press’s History of the Urban Environment series. With William L. Rathje, Zimring edited the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage (SAGE, 2012), an interdisciplinary reference work on a variety of aspects of wastes and wasting throughout history and across the planet. Zimring joined journal editor Fredric Quivik in editing a special issue of IA – The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology on industrial waste and assisted geographer Michael Conzen in editing two volumes of essays on the historical geography of the Illinois & Michigan Canal Corridor.

Articles and review essays include ones published in Environmental History, Technology and Culture, Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Contemporary History, Progress in Industrial Ecology, Ethnoarchaeology, and Entreprises et Histoire. Topics explored in articles and chapters include the complex environmental legacy of automobile shredders, the  history of New York City’s curbside recycling program, considering the sustainability of land-use in and around Chicago in the recent past, the rhetorical context behind passage of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, the social history of Gilded Age scrap recycling workers in the United States, the historical dimensions of critical discard studies, the ways artists and recreation activists have shaped visions of the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek, (with Michael Bryson) the past, present, and future of Chicago’s Bubbly Creek, and (with Joel Tarr) the development of St. Louis’s influential smoke control ordinance of 1940.

Zimring joined Pratt in 2012 to create the Institute’s sustainability studies minor, which he coordinated until 2022. He then became the director of the Center for Critical Discard Research. Before arriving in Brooklyn, he helped create the first sustainability studies BA program in Illinois at Roosevelt University. He previously taught at Oberlin College, Michigan Technological University, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Carnegie Mellon University. Research support includes funding from the Smithsonian Institution, the Hagley Museum and Library, Columbia University Seminars, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the American Society for Environmental History’s Samuel P. Hays Fellowship.

Zimring teaches seminars on waste and the histories of technology and the environment, as well as the general education Sustainable Core course.

B.A., University of California at Santa Cruz; M.A., University of Chicago; M.A., Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University.

Selected Publications
Hyunah Keum and Carl A. Zimring, “Materialized Disaster: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Disposable Plastics.” Chapter in Scott G. Knowles, Alexa Dietriech, and Rodrigo Ugarte, eds., COVID Studies: A Reader. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026.

Carl A. Zimring, “Waste and Recycling in Global Capitalism: Profits and Profligacy,” Oxford Bibliographies in Environmental History, ed., Lisa M. Brady. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.

Carl A. Zimring, “Arts and Recreation as Environmental Activism: Reimagining Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek and Gowanus Canal in the 21st Century.” In Philip Hayward (ed.), Blue-Green Rehabilitation: Tourism and Leisure in River Cities. Egham, UK: CABI, 2025, pp. 42-59.

Carl A. Zimring, “Dirty Work Reconsidered: On the Historical Dynamics of Work, Whiteness, and Waste in Industrial Society.” In Mary E. Mendoza and Traci Brynne Voyles (eds.), Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2025, pp. 71-100.

Iris Borowy, Viktor Pál, and Carl A. Zimring, “Introduction: The Waste of Conflict. The Conflicts of Waste,” Journal of Contemporary History 59, No. 2 (March 2024), pp. 223-233.

Carl A. Zimring, “A Circular Economy? Aluminum Recycling in Historical Perspective,” Cahiers d’histoire de l’aluminium/Journal for the History of Aluminium 69-70 (December 2022-June 2023), pp. 132-145.

Carl A. Zimring and Steven H. Corey eds., Coastal Metropolis: Environmental Histories of Modern New York City. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.

Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring, Technology and the Environment in History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

Carl A. Zimring, “A Sustainable City? Nature, Land, and Justice in Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 46, No. 5 (September 2020), pp. 1180-1185.

Carl A. Zimring, “Moving from Kaiser to Aluminum Recycling,” Enterprises et Histoire 89 (December 2017), pp. 137-142.

Carl A. Zimring, Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Carl A. Zimring, “Upcycling in History: Is the Past a Prologue to a Zero-Waste Future? The Case of Aluminum.” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2016, No. 3, pp. 45–52.

Carl A. Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Carl A. Zimring and Michael A. Bryson, “Infamous Past, Invisible Present: Searching for Bubbly Creek in the 21st Century,” IA – The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology 39, Nos. 1 & 2 (2013), pp. 79-91.

Carl A. Zimring and William L. Rathje, eds., The Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Inc., 2012.

Carl A. Zimring, “The Complex Environmental Legacy of the Automobile Shredder,” Technology and Culture 52, No. 3 (July 2011), pp. 523-547.

Michael A. Bryson and Carl A. Zimring, “Creating the Sustainable City: Building a Seminar (and Curriculum) through Interdisciplinary Learning,” Metropolitan Universities 20, No. 4 (July 2010), pp. 105-116.

Carl A. Zimring, “‘Neon, Junk, and Ruined Landscape’: Competing Visions of America’s Roadsides and the Highway Beautification Act of 1965,” in Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller (eds.), The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008, pp. 94-107.

Carl A. Zimring, “Recycling Is Not Garbage: Market Agents and Municipal Recycling in New York City,” Progress in Industrial Ecology 3, No. 4 (December 2006), pp. 329-343.

Carl A. Zimring, Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Carl A. Zimring, “Dirty Work: How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the American Waste Trades 1870-1930,” Environmental History 9, No. 1 (January 2004), pp. 90-112.

Joel A. Tarr and Carl A. Zimring, “The Struggle for Smoke Control in St. Louis: Achievement and Emulation,” in Andrew Hurley (ed.), Common Fields: The Environmental History of St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1997, pp. 190-220.