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Junkyard Planet
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Junkyard Planet

Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

Adam Minter
Bloomsbury Press, 2013
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Editorial Rating

8

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Recommendation

Adam Minter, a Shanghai-based journalist and son of a scrapyard owner, tours the world’s waste “grubbing” hot spots to provide a savvy view of the processes, triumphs and failures of the scrap industry. He focuses mainly on recycling metals, but also covers plastics and the contentious topic of “e-waste.” His research highlights the importance of profit in the chain of waste-management and recycling. Some of the worst health and environmental side-effects relate directly to recycling cheap plastics, a business with minuscule margins. In contrast, profitable metal recycling is a worldwide “green success.” getAbstract recommends this ecological travelogue to those seeking to understand the global impact – and opportunities – of booming consumption and the resulting disposal of products. The recycling picture is more complex than you might think, given the mix of materials, motives and morals involved.

Summary

“Third-Best Option”

Americans throw out a lot of Christmas tree lights. Most US recyclers don’t care about extracting these lights’ low-value, low-grade copper, but Chinese buyers take them. A recycling plant in Shijiao shreds them and recovers the copper wire for resale. Some waste remains, and the leftover plastic insulation is hard to sell, though some of it ends up as slipper soles. Processors seldom burn it in the open, a practice that once created clouds of polluting smoke. If recyclers don’t extract copper commercially from consumer junk, miners must extract more of it from the ground. Environmental costs mount either way, but mining “virgin” metals is costlier.

The global recycling industry churns hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Recycling, a primary driver behind globalization, benefits from citizens’ green intentions as it relies on consumption. In this trade, profitability and “sustainability” go hand-in-hand – to a point.

Enlightenment and Waste

Small, local scrap merchants and traders used to buy America’s “recyclable” waste. Now, a few big corporations handle most of it. They truck your household recycling to their plants for sorting...

About the Author

Southeast Asia-based journalist Adam Minter writes for Bloomberg View and for recycling-oriented publications such as Scrap and Recycling International.

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