There comes a time when social norms fall out of and then back into favor. Take, for example, recycling. In the early days of frontier America, folks had to make do with what they had. Neighbors helped each other and reciprocated when the circumstances warranted. What was once one person’s old barn became another’s two-wheeled cart, and so forth.
In the manufacturing boom of the Industrial Revolution, inexpensive goods flooded the market, and advertisers beckoned us to drop the old and replace it with the new. This seemed to work well until the 1970s when certain people despaired over the landfills filling up, and a new age of convenient curbside recycling emerged.
