Kayak Magazine April 2022 Back Issue

For as long as there have been people living in what we know as Canada, there’s been trash to deal with. Discover how garbage has been handled in the past, and more recent options to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

It’s great that we have lots more ways now to keep things out of the dump, but recycling is a pretty new idea. For thousands of years, people had to deal with their own garbage. It was messy, but historians and archeologists can learn a lot from what people threw away.

During the Second World War, kids and others collected certain types of garbage to be made into everything from tires to tanks. Today, many of us try to compost and buy second-hand clothes to help cut down on the stuff we send to the landfill. You can even try to guess what old-fashioned ways (and new ones, too) people have tried to get rid of their trash.