The papers in this session examine the differences and similarities in wartime recycling practices in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe and their relationship to similar efforts in peace-time. Chad Denton highlights the importance of Jewish expertise and labor as he traces industrial-scale metal recycling from its origins during the first World War to their subsequent nazification and extension across occupied Europe. Heike Weber focuses on the Nazi recycling regime itself and details the development of a closed-loop economy that was steeped in and perpetuated the racist expansionist ideology of the Third Reich. Outlining in the transnational reach of Nazi-style industrial-scale recycling, Anne Berg examines the interconnections between administrative and industrial innovations that undergirded the regime’s zero-waste economy and found their most brutal expression in the concentration camp system. As much as the genesis of industrial-scale recycling was transnational in nature, so were the lessons that were drawn from wartime endeavors. Roman Köster illustrates how the state-mandated recycling of Nazi Germany destroyed its own foundations, while Great Britain appropriated lessons learned from wartime recycling instead and revitalized its salvage business in the postwar decades, thus prefiguring the “greening” of recycling in the name of environmental protection in the 1960s and 1970s. Together, we are interested in understanding the role of and relationships between the state, the industrial sector, ordinary citizens and waste workers (voluntary and forced) in the forging of an economic order of Europe dominated by Nazi Germany and their transformation after that order’s collapse.