Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday’s newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don’t want and turn it into something you can’t wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter—veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner—travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, multibillion-dollar industry that’s transforming our economy and environment.

Minter takes us from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to high-tech facilities capable of processing a jumbo jet’s worth of recyclable trash every day. Along the way, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters who've figured out how to build fortunes from what we throw away: Leonard Fritz, a young boy "grubbing" in Detroit's city dumps in the 1930s; Johnson Zeng, a former plastics engineer roaming America in search of scrap; and Homer Lai, an unassuming barber turned scrap titan in Qingyuan, China. Junkyard Planet reveals how “going green” usually means making money—and why that’s often the most sustainable choice, even when the recycling methods aren’t pretty.

With unmatched access to and insight on the junk trade, and the explanatory gifts and an eye for detail worthy of a John McPhee or William Langewiesche, Minter traces the export of America’s recyclables and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of consumption, innovation, and the ascent of a developing world that recognizes value where Americans don’t. Junkyard Planet reveals that we might need to learn a smarter way to take out the trash.

Genres: Nonfiction, Environment, Business, Economics, Sustainability, Science, China

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 2013

About the author

Adam Minter is a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion where he writes about China, technology, and the environment. He is the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade, a critically-acclaimed bestselling insider’s account of the hidden world of globalized recycling, and the forthcoming Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale.

Adam has covered the global recycling industry for almost two decades. In 2002, he began a series of groundbreaking investigative pieces on China’s emerging recycling industries for Scrap and Recycling International. Since then, he has been cited, quoted, and interviewed on recycling and waste by a range of international media, most recently The New York Times, Vice, NPR, BBC, The Huffington Post, and CBC. He regularly speaks to groups about the global waste and recycling trade including colleges, universities, trade groups, TEDx, and an invited lecture to the Royal Geographic Society in London.

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

 Making The Worst of a Bad Situation

“The typical pictures of poverty mask the fact that the very poor represent resilient entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers.”

~ C. K. Prahalad

Minter presents a well researched but also a sometimes too polished and overly journalistic account of ‘travels in the billion-dollar trash trade.’ Even though this sub-title seems to promise a world-wide whirlwind tour following the trash’s trail, we soon realize that the majority of this drama is going to play out on two sides of the trash spectrum: The USA and China. This limits the scope of the book somewhat but also allows Minter to really get into the nitty-grittys of the scrap industry

As the author is at great pains to display, the story he wants to tell is also personal, and is told trough a viewpoint from within an industry that he loves and has grown up with. This is supposed to allow him to highlight the good and the bad aspects as well as the morally grey areas that is bound to be there when we deal with an industry that encompasses millionaires as well as the poorest of the poor. However, this perspective also means that the author is always leaning towards a pro-industry stance and avoiding environmentalist language, which makes the book less effective overall.

POINT

The author’s clear aim is to show that under present circumstances, the hidden world of globalized recycling and reclamation is the most logical (and greenest) endpoint in a long chain that begins with the harvest in your home recycling bin.

Minter tries to do away with moral questions and wants us to treat the trash industry as we would any other industry — it provides one capitalist guarantee: If what you toss into your recycling bin can be used in some way, the international scrap recycling business will manage to deliver it to the person or company who can do so most profitably. 

Usually, but not always, that profitable option is going to be the most sustainable one. In an age of conspicuous consumption, the global recycling business has taken on the burden of cleaning up what you don’t want, and turning it into something you can’t wait to buy.

The Justification

The underlying argument that Minter uses to justify his stance is that what is happening is good since China is only doing today what the USA was doing earlier: In the early nineteenth century, American demand was sky-rocketing and European mature markets were producing loads of trash. So America’s enterprising papermakers—and its entrepreneurial rag traders—made a very contemporary choice: they looked abroad to the more wasteful economies of Victorian Europe for their raw materials.

How can we possibly deny China the opportunity to take a similar growth path? — That is the moral question the author poses.

Ignoring the other side of that moral question — But is that what we want? Can we afford one more “Saudi Arabia of Trash”?

The next important question and inherent justification is: Why China?

After all, there were always places where labor is cheaper than in China, and environmental standards even lower. Indeed, if labor prices and environmental standards are to be the sole determinants for where scrap (or waste) goes, Sudan—with labor rates well under $1 per day—would be the world’s top scrap-metal importer.

So why isn’t it?

The most important reason is that Sudan doesn’t have many factories where scrap aluminum can be transformed into new aluminum and then remelted into new car radiators. Without such end markets—or the possibility of such end markets—there’s absolutely no reason for a Sudanese to import $60,000 containers of scrap metal. In fact, the lack of such buyers means that the relatively small quantity of scrap produced in Sudan is actually exported, with much of it going to India and China.

The point is that it takes a consumerist society to even be able to absorb the trash of a much more consumerist society.

This makes us pose the next obvious question: Can we keep creating new consumerist super-countries like China today, and the USA earlier, to keep absorbing the ever-growing trash of the ever-growing economies?

COUNTERPOINT

The story minter tells focuses mostly on individuals and it is telling to notice the individuals he decides to focus on. Most of those characters, like Raymond Li, are people who share a talent for spotting value in what others throw away. It’s a talent being applied to recycling the rare and valuable elements buried inside the smartphones, computers, and other high-tech devices that middle-class people throw away like candy wrappers. More often than not, though, the genius is commercial, not technical. Today recycling is as risky and rewarding as any global business, if not more so. Huge, mind-bending, Silicon Valley–scale fortunes have been built by figuring out how to move the scrap newspapers in your recycling bin to the country where they’re most in demand.

This focus on the success stories of the trash trade means that the book too focuses only on the economic development that is associated with this trade, but not on the environmental carnage that is exported by making an economy dependent on trash as raw material. This is precisely what has happened in the parts of China (called “Dead Zones” by residents) that the book highlights. That moral question is swept under the rug under the glitz and glamour of capitalist success of a few individuals who are making big money there.

What differentiates an environmentally concerned book from a ‘sustainable-sell’ of a book is focus. It is all about where you focus — either you can choose to spotlight on some guy who has “made it” and then gloss over the workers by saying that it was their choice; or, like The Story of Stuff, the focus can be on the thousands of people and on examining the tragedy behind why they made that choice.

Someone somewhere is rich in a Dead Zone! A lot of consolation that is.

Making The Best of a Bad Situation: The Constant Refrain

In Sum: Basically Trash is Huge and is an integral part of industrialization and an inevitable byproduct of consumerist culture. Deal with it. Don’t damn the guys trying to make something out of it.

The tiresomely constant refrain of the book is that the trash trade as it exists today is the best we can make of a bad situation; and it is a refrain that fails to convince, primarily because the author seems to be using it as small change to be thrown at the environmentalist camp.

For most, the term ‘recycling’ is an environmental imperative, not a business. But without financial incentives, no ethical system is going to transform an old beer can into a new one.

The global recycling business, Minter tells us, no matter how sustainable or green, is 100 percent dependent upon consumers consuming goods made from other goods. This unbreakable bond—between raw material demand, consumption, and recycling—is one of the dominant themes of the pages to follow. The calculus is simple: the only reason you can recycle is because you’ve consumed, and the only reason you can consume certain products is because somebody else recycled. Around the world, we recycle what we buy, and we buy a lot.

If this book succeeds, it won’t necessarily convince you to embrace the oft-gritty reality of the recycling industry, but it will certainly help you understand why junkyards look like they look, and why that’s not such a bad thing. In my experience, the worst, dirtiest recycling is still better than the very best clear-cut forest or the most up-to-date open-pit mine.

Recycling is better—I won’t write “good”—for the environment. But without economics—without supply and demand of raw materials—recycling is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in glorifying garbage. No doubt it’s better than throwing something into an incinerator, and worse than fixing something that can be refurbished. It’s what you do if you can’t bear to see something landfilled. Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn’t mean you’ve recycled anything, and it doesn’t make you a better, greener person: it just means you’ve outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it’s overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter.

Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there’s always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place.

In the end, despite its shortcomings, this is a useful book to read. It goes deeper into the mechanisms of the trash trade and the constraints/drivers of the industry than anything else I have read. Keeping the author’s slightly apologetic tone aside, it is an informative and productive read. Now I turn to some of the important takeaways from the book for the general reader.

TAKEAWAYS: On Consumption & Production Choices

1. Reduce, reuse, recycle - in that order:

Despite what some recycling companies will tell you, many goods—such as smartphones—are only partially recyclable, and some—like paper—can only be recycled a finite number of times. In that sense, recycling is just a means to stave off the trash man for a little longer.

If your first priority is the environment, recycling is merely the third-best option in the well-known pyramid that every American schoolchild learns: reduce, reuse, recycle. Alas, most people have very little interest in reducing their consumption or reusing their goods. So recycling, all things considered, is the worst best solution.

2. Understand what Recycling can and cannot do:

Recycling is not a magic process in which everything you throw away turns into something useful. Most of the things that you consume cannot be meaningfully recycled and that means that your feeling of responsible citizenship by throwing it away ‘correctly’ is just plain ignorance.

Recycling also requires some effort from your side:

You need to segregate waste so that effort can be reduced at the other end. The less you do, the more really poor and really badly paid people will have to do, in unimaginably dangerous conditions.

You need to make sure that your trash is more easily 'processable' - you can read up on this and innovate, but start with simple measures such as removing the paper coverings on your pepsi bottle, emptying a bottle of liquid contents before dumping them, etc.

3. Demand products that are better designed:

a. Start with defining “good design”.

What is a 'well designed' product?

Recycling is a difficult and highly technical industry. Especially when dealing with complicated products such as electronics and even daily household products such as toys. When it comes to specific waste material such as e-waste and plastic, it is almost as if the production process and the design of the products is done with the single objective of making recycling that much more difficult.



For example your smartphone might contain precious rare-earth metals, gold, and other components that are valuable but almost impossible to extract due to the way in which they have been utilized and put together, especially so these days in an effort to make it slimmer for your convenience!

Is it fair to use up and throw ‘rare-earth metals’ using technology that makes it impossible to reclaim them? Do future generation have no need for ‘smart’ phones? These elements are called ‘rare-earth’ elements for a reason! By employing them thus, companies are effectively throwing them away the moment they are mined.

b. These difficulties should be addressed at production level. Recycling friendly production norms are badly needed, and should be demanded by customers when they buy products.

Companies can be forced to innovate towards green-extractable production processes, whereby the important components of these products are not lost to humanity forever just because it was used for a few months by a teenager who was too bored to go and hike!

The so called ‘awesome design’ advertised by companies must be exposed for what they really are  — shoddy pieces of engineering. They are not really marvels of design unless they can be recycled - otherwise they are just badly engineered products, designed for inefficiency.

4. Make better choices among available products:

Buy simpler single material products - those are the well designed ones, purely because they can be productively employed even after you are done with them.

The next time you buy something, think how pretty they would look after you are done with them too. If you cannot imagine a good future for what you are about to buy, you are buying a bad future for yourself too.

5. Reiterating: Reduce, reuse, recycle - in that order

Reduce and Reuse first. Recycling should be a distant third option.

All the precautions above are fine, but the author gets it bang on target in one case — Reducing your consumption and reusing your goods. Recycling, all things considered, is the worst best solution, even if it generates billions of dollars of GDP. There is an anecdote that illustrates the perils of ignoring this perfectly and this reviewer wants to leave you with it.

It is about an experiment that was conducted at a men’s room in a University:

For fifteen days, the researchers measured the daily number of paper hand towels tossed into the trash bins positioned next to the sinks. Then they repeated the experiment by adding a recycling bin and “signs indicating that certain campus restrooms were participating in a paper hand towel recycling program and that any used hand towels placed in the bin would be recycled.” After 15 days, the researchers ran the data and found that restroom visitors used approximately half a hand towel more when a recycling bin was present than when there was only a trash bin. That may not seem like much, but consider: on an average day, 100 people visited the restroom, meaning that—on average—the recycling bin (and associated signage) likely contributed to the use of an additional 50 paper hand towels per day. Extend that usage out to the 250 business days per year that the restroom is used, and in that one university restroom an additional 12,500 towels would, theoretically, be tossed into the recycling bin, annually!

Isn’t recycling supposed to promote conservation and preserve the environment? Why are people using more hand towels if a recycling bin is present? And does this have anything to do with my newfound willingness to buy an iPhone that I don’t need to replace my current one? The authors of the study offer a hypothesis: “The increase of consumption found in our study may be partially due to the fact that consumers are well informed that recycling is beneficial to the environment; however, the environmental costs of recycling (e.g., water, energy, etc. used in recycling facilities) are less salient. As such, consumers may focus only on the positive aspects of recycling and see it as a means to assuage negative emotions such as guilt that may be associated with wasting resources and/or as a way to justify increased consumption.”

Elsewhere in the paper, the authors add: “We believe that the recycling option is more likely to function as a ‘get out of jail free card,’ which may instead signal to consumers that it is acceptable to consume as long as they recycle the used product.”

It’s important to note that the authors aren’t opposed to recycling. They readily acknowledge the environmental benefits of recycling versus digging up or drilling for new resources. But neither do they believe “simply making recycling options as widespread as possible is the best course of action” for the environment. Rather, it’s the third best course of action, after reducing consumption and reusing what’s been bought already.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a wonderfully readable book about global recycling - concentrating mostly on the trade between America and China to explain the machinations of the industry. 'Wonderfully readable' in this instance is of special importance. No one is going to bother to read anything of length about this industry unless it is pretty gripping.... and amazingly - the author cracks it. Born into a family running a scrapyard in the States, and for six years a journalist for the periodicals "Scrap" and "Recycling International" the author is steeped in the world of recycling. He manages to convey his enthusiasm and concerns for the good and the bad and the ugly, of this dirty but money-making business.

The main messages I got from the book?

- Our planet is under enormous pressure from the amount of garbage we produce, and only a fraction of it is recycled.
The amount of trash generated in America in 1960 was 81.1 millions tons. Only 5.6 million tons of that was recycled.
The amount of trash generated in America in 2010 was 249.9 million tons. Only 81.1 million tons of that was recycled.

- Psychology tests have shown that the more we feel we can recycle, the more we waste. In reality the recycling life of products other than metals is limited. For instance in America plastic can only have one round of recycling, before having to be "down-cycled" into un-recyclable products like plastic lumber for backyard decks.

- There is another reason for recycling as little plastic as possible. It is a very polluting process and dangerous for the workers involved.

As a result of the above limitations.....

1) The best way to recycle? Don't recycle. Just keep on using things for as long as possible.
2) It is preferable to buy something recycled or refurbished rather than original, e.g., nearly all the main computer manufacturers sell refurbished computers.
3) We need to campaign to pressurise manufacturers to design goods that are easily refurbished and recycled. (I personally feel quite passionate about this. Working in a shop I see so many examples of packaging that make recycling time-consuming and difficult. Grrrrr!)

I thought this book was an excellent read for anyone wanting to know what happens to the stuff that we jettison every day. I'm sure it will influence some changes in my purchasing habits for the better.

And here are some notes for my own information....

* The manufacturing countries are the countries that are keen to do the recycling. China, with it's burgeoning infrastructure and massive factories for producing goods for the world, is a prime example. America still recycles two-thirds of its waste products, but one-third goes to China.

* China is a major exporter of goods going all round the world on ships in containers. The shipping companies do not want the containers returned empty. They therefore offer very cheap rates to people wanting to ship back to China (it costs one quarter as much to ship to China as it does to ship from China.) It is therefore comparatively cheap to ship our recycling to China.

* The global recycling industry turns over as much as $500 billion annually - roughly equal to the GDP of Norway. It employs more people than any other industry on the planet except agriculture.

*Recycling saves energy. A recycled beer can requires 97% less energy to manufacture than one made from virgin ore.

*Cars are the most recycled product in the world. Only 50 years ago they were impossible to recycle, and huge problems were created by people dumping their old cars. They cluttered and polluted America, causing serious environmental problems. Then due to innovations in scrapyard technology - particularly the invention of the car shredder which uses magnets to extract steel - the problem was solved.

*Simple is good. Some communities have taken away the 2-7 recycling bins that people are often asked to use, and replaced them with a single bin for recycling goods. In places where this has been tried recycling has increased by as much as 30%.

*In America recycling is done in vast sophisticated recycling plants with clever machinery. In poorer parts of the world it is all done by hand.

*India, where labour is a lot cheaper than it is in China, nevertheless just recycles for the Middle East, because that is where it exports its goods to, and that is where there are empty containers waiting to return to India.

*Egypt's "Twitter Revolution" in 2011 did not take place with people using new iPhones (which most Egyptians can't afford), but rather it took place on refurbished 5-10 year old desktop computers and monitors recycled from first world countries.

*Most low grade scrap (like Christmas lights, or any kind of cable packed with lots of insulation), would just end up in landfill if it wasn't exported to China. It's just too expensive to recycle without cheap labour to extract the metal.

*Wen'an in China, where plastic is recycled, was the most polluted place on earth that the author had ever seen. The scale of the pollution covered much of the country's 450 square miles. Two years after his visit in 2010, the whole industry was shut down by Wen'an's new Communist Party secretary. 100,000 people were immediately left jobless. But China needs recycled plastic, and shortly afterwards the families who recycled plastics started re-opening their businesses all over northern China. (America has higher standards concerning grades of recycled plastic than China.)

* Cell Phones. Each ton of cell phones contains 10 ounces of gold - but this is far more gold than you will find in a ton of high grade ore. It is very expensive to extract with machinery, so instead it is often done by people in developing countries, using fire, chemicals, corrosive acids and hand stripping. They rarely wear safety gear. Children living in places where this work is done often have things like lead poisoning. Newborns have elevated levels of cadmium, a toxic substance that can cause kidney damage, reduction of bone density, and other debilitating effects.
This process also causes high levels of soil and water contamination. In Guiyu, China, where e-waste processing is most intense, the government trucks in drinking water to the most contaminated places.

*Scrap is a great indicator of the state of the global economy. If manufacturers aren't manufacturing the scrap dealers are amongst the first to feel it, likewise if an economy is starting to grow, scrap prices tend to be among the first rising indicators. (when Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, scrap prices were among his favourite economic indicators.)

[Tanja Berg · Rating 3 out of 5]

An important book, but it deals mostly with the commercial side of garbage than the environmental aspects. The author grew up in the business himself and this is his way of processing that. Interesting in its way, but not quite what I was expecting.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I once encountered a pair of supermarket clerks unloading cases of bottled water from their pallet jack to the shelves where the water awaits the public, and I commented to the pair that they must have to put out new cases fairly often, like once a week or so. The pair gave me a look and said they bring out new cases three to four times a day. Astonishingly, so it is with that unsightly pile of scrap facing the reader of Junkyard Planet. Adam Minter is not out to convince you that there’s a problem to be solved, one that needs your attention. Far from it, in fact: that seemingly problematic pile of scrap is as transient as Wal-Mart’s cases of water; here today and gone next week, broken up and distributed across the globe, where various classes of materials are put to use by an astonishing array of specialists and spur further development in less industrial countries.

Adam Minter is uniquely qualified for a book of this sort; he grew up in a scrapyard family, but left the family trade to pursue a career in journalism – and followed that calling to China, where he lived for several years. He opens with a history of scrapyard recycling in the United States, one that long predates the environmental movement of the 1970s. Early Americans had a far better motivator for recycling than idealism: they had need. Prior to the maturation of industrial capitalism, manufactured goods were preciously expensive; they were diligently preserved, repaired, or put to some other use once they were beyond mending. (For a full popular history of how Americans went from reusing everything to throwing everything away, see Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want). Sorting these goods and reducing them into re-usable elements was labor-intensive work, though, and as the cost of labor grew in the developed world, the chief advantage of producing with recycled materials over new ones — cost – disappeared. Scrapping thus became more of an export business, with China as the main buyer.

Those who don’t know scrap may view the export of recyclables to Asia and elsewhere as one of privilege — the western world using China as its dump. But the Chinese are buying scrap, not being paid a fee to take it away. They want it — in fact, members of Chinese firms travel constantly from scrapyard to scrapyard, looking for specific categories of materials to send back home. There, what the average American consumer views as rubbish is transformed into infrastructure and skyscrapers, or even better – into new consumer goods. There’s an entire global trade in this stuff: the oil-rich gulf states have a similar relationship with India, where it’s cheaper for them to ship rather than China. (The United States sends some scrap to India, but it’s generally cheaper to send it China’s way given the constant cargo traffic; ships are able to incorporate scrap deliveries into their backhauls.) South America and Africa, too, participate.

What makes China special for this is not just its cheap labor, but the fact that it has a rapacious hunger for scrap to fuel its own growth. China’s people have not yet lost the use-it-up, wear-it-out mentality that was chucked into the US’s landfills somewhere around the 1950s: in cities, people actively bargain for and repurpose refuse, so that whatever goes in China’s own landfills or incinerators is truly trash. There are also burgeoning markets for simply reusing goods which arrive from the United States: an old CRT monitor is far more valuable when resold as part of a used computer setup to a farmer just trying to learn one, than as scrap. While some materials are melted down into their constituent parts, electronics are more likely to be mined for their processors and such.

Though a scrap man, Minter doesn’t shy away from the downsides of China’s headlong embrace of recycling everything it can find a use for, especially plastics recycling. The poor city which does the bulk of China’s plastic processing can boast of lung and circulatory diseases afflicting 80% of the population. Over the years China’s ruling power has gotten more picky about the kinds of scrap it will accept, however, and Minter is optimistic that the future of recycling in China will grow cleaner.

Junkyard Planet is a fascinating look at a market which I suspect few are aware of it, and while it wears a little repetitive, ultimately it left me feeling….well, a little delighted. Despite my hostility toward consumerism in general, I genuinely love and admire trade’s way of bringing people together, and Junkyard Planet demonstrates superbly how even what we throw away conjoins the prosperity of each nation on its neighbor. The reader isn’t quite off the hook, however: if you want your goods to participate in this glorious global scrap trade, you have to at least make an effort to recycle or get them to the scrapmen to begin with.

[Book Shark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Junkyard Planet: Travels In the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade by Adam Minter


“Junkyard Planet" is a behind-the-scenes look into the trash business. Adam Minter, a journalist who was brought up in the scrap dealing business, takes the reader on a ride that shows how recycling occurs at a global level. Taking advantage of access given to him, Minter travels interviews and explores this surprising business. This insightful 304 page book includes the following fifteen chapters: 1. Making Soup, 2. Grubbing, 3. Honey, Barley, 4. The Intercontinental, 5. The Backhaul, 6. The Grimy Boomtown Heat, 7. Big Waste Country, 8. Homer, 9. Plastic Land, 10. The Reincarnation Department, 11. The Golden Ingot, 12. The Coin Tower, 13. Hot Metal Flows, 14. Canton, and 15. Ashes to Ashes, Junk to Junk.


Positives:
1. A well written book. Accessible to the masses.
2. Takes an often overlooked subject like recycling and does well with it. “This book aims to explain why the hidden world of globalized recycling and reclamation is the most logical (and greenest) endpoint in a long chain that begins with the harvest in your home recycling bin, or down at the local junkyard.”
3. At the heart of the book is how the reuse of an object evolved into a huge international business. “The global recycling industry turns over as much as $500 billion annually—roughly equal to the GDP of Norway—and employs more people than any other industry on the planet except agriculture.”
4. The impact to the environment. “If your first priority is the environment, recycling is merely the third-best option in the well-known pyramid that every American schoolchild learns: reduce, reuse, recycle.”
5. A great job of explaining why China plays a prominent global role in recycling. “The story told here explains how China became America’s recycling export destination of choice, and why that’s mostly a good thing for the environment. After all, China and other developing countries are willing and able to recycle what the American recycling industry won’t—or can’t—recycle on its own.”
6. The book touches on many sectors but focuses on metal. “Unlike newspapers, Coke cans, and computers, automobiles rarely end up in landfills. Instead, they almost always end up in recycling facilities, giving automobiles a nearly 100 percent recycling rate—something that no other product approaches.”
7. Basic physics on how to separate recyclables. “The glass, meanwhile, is removed by several processes that take advantage of the obvious fact that glass is heavier than paper.”
8. Goes over some of the value of recyclables.
9. Many facts and numbers. “In fact, as of 2008 or so, China generates more trash than the exceedingly wasteful United States—roughly 300 million tons per year, compared to around 250 million tons in the United States. Still, on a per capita basis the Americans have the Chinese beat four to five times over (Americans are richer). For example, Americans consume 653.62 pounds of paper per capita per year, while Chinese consume 98.34 pounds…”
10. Goes over some common terms, jargon and practices in the industry. “The job of the scrap man, as Leonard saw it, was to extract the value out of what everybody else saw as worthless, or couldn’t be bothered to extract on their own.”
11. Interesting stories of success. “Starting July 2, 1938, it was determined by how much money the steel mills could save by using it in their steelmaking process; it had gone from borderline trash to a crucial raw material. Leonard Fritz not only knew where to get it, he was experienced in how to get it. Those two words—how and where—are what thrust men like Leonard out of the ranks of peddlers and into the rarer company of men who accumulate large volumes of recyclable material, and considerable fortunes.”
12. Axioms of the trade. “Thus, in the scrap industry, there’s an axiom: it’s hard to buy scrap, and easy to sell it.”
13. Basic history of the trade. “Expanding trade meant bigger problems, including disputes with local trading partners, foreign trading partners, and—most significantly—governments. So in 1914 the first U.S. trade association for the scrap industry, the National Association of Waste Material Dealers (NAWMD) was formed, and three years later—in the midst of World War I—the membership established an Export Committee (later renamed the Foreign Trade Committee).”
14. Financial reality of the trade. “Scrap is gonna go to the place where the labor is cheap. That is correct. But if the labor’s really cheap in India, and its seven cents per pound to ship it to India, and its two cents per pound to ship it to China—you know, unless the price is a whole lot better in India, it’s going to China.”
15. How the scrap business in America differs from China. “The American scrap recycling industry is mostly about recycling, not reuse.” “This hunger for scrap is, in part, a hunger for the chance to develop into middle-class consumers.”
16. The plastic recycling business.
17. Facts about steel. “In 2012 the U.S. scrap industry processed 75.19 million tons of iron and steel, roughly half of which was shredded. And that shredded scrap metal, when remelted, accounted for roughly 30 percent of the new steel manufactured in the United States. “
18. The global reuse of electronics. “Nobody knows the scale of it, or the revenue, but this I know for sure: there isn’t a town, village, or city in China that doesn’t have at least one used electronics market. In bigger cities, entire malls, like the one on Shanghai’s north side, are devoted to the reuse—rather than the recycling—of electronics.”
19. Health hazards of the trade. “The damage done by low-tech developing world electronics recycling is measurable. A 2010 study in Guiyu, China’s biggest and most notorious e-waste recycling zone, revealed that among a cohort of village children under the age of six, 81.8 percent were suffering from lead poisoning.”
20. Much more…

Negatives:
1. Let’s face it, recycling is not the most exciting topic.
2. Probably could have reduced this book by 50-75 pages without losing its essence. A bit repetitive.
3. A little uneven. Minter jumps around a bit and may lose the reader from time to time.
4. Lack of charts and diagrams to complement narrative. This book was screaming for fun facts summarized in a table. I was hoping for a table of most common recycled materials by cost and region. Missed opportunities.
5. Most of the book is limited to the U.S. and China.
6. No formal bibliography or notes.

In summary, this is a pretty solid book about the global scrap metal trade. Minter makes good use of his first-hand knowledge of the business, combined that with his journalism background makes him the perfect person to right such a book. The book however is repetitive and misses some golden opportunities. A book like this screams out for charts and diagrams yet there is none to be found. Negatives aside this is a book worth reading.

Further recommendations: “Garbage Land” by Elizabeth Royte,”Garbology” by Edward Humes, “Waste and Want” by Susan Strasser, “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” by Marc Levinson, “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage” by Heather Rogers, “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story” by Susan Freinkel, and the “Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard.

[Melody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir, part investigation, this was a fascinating look at the global scrap trade. Where does your recycling go? Read this book and be amazed. Interesting lesson in economics here as well, and why it's sometimes more sensible to ship things overseas than to recycle them closer to home. Market theory and lots of pictures all added up to a very interesting book. But my favorite parts remain Minter's warm memories and stories of his grandmother.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

So are we good citizens when we sort our trash and out some into the recycled bin? Well we have only just outsourced our problem.

Thus book details how waste is recycled; not through the altruistic instincts of environmentalists, but by scrap traders, sorters and recycling yards.

First, all those recycled trash is sorted and sold to scrapyards. Then those scrapyards sell to whoever wants them (mostly from America to China, Middle East to India). There are Chinese scrap buyers constantly on the road in America hunting for scraps. There are scrap importers in China and factories. There, migrant workers manually remove valuable parts, mostly in conditions deemed unacceptable in the West. After copper has been stripped from Christmas tree lights, it is collects and processed into new copper. It is still environmentally great as only it uses only 8% of the energy of extracting copper from a mine. And China has a huge appetite for copper, steel, paper. A scrapped car will be shipped to China for its metal. In America it will involve advanced technology: using water with different salts to ‘float’ different materials from the mixed junk, and AI image recognition to shoot coins off mixed junk, and Eddy currents to pick metal from mixed scrap.

Many Chinese entrepreneurs have become rich after joining the recycling trade. Towns got rich, converting subsistence farm land into dirty recycling factories, often dumping toxic waste into the environment.

Other factories take perfectly functional IC and touch screens to be used in new products. Old phone chips can be used for Ad board display; old pacinko touchscreen can be made into a new GPS screen.

It is important to know that nothing is perfectly recyclable; of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, it is best to reduce. Next best is reuse; recycle is the least good. Unfortunately studies have shown that people use more when they are told that the stuff they use will be recycled. That is why Apple advertises that it will recycle old phones responsibility, probably sending them to developing countries. This encourages the consumer to always buy its latest iPhone.

Why China? Well China ships lots of manufactured goods to America; rather than return empty, they pick up trash on the way back. So freight rates are far lower on the way back, making trash import profitable.

What will happen now that China is going to stop accepting solid waste import? https://english.cctv.com/2020/12/06/A...

Well more waste will go to the landfill. It’s sad but true.

[Barb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter is readable and informative. His book will educate you on nearly everything you ever wanted to know about the destination of your curbside recyclables and much much more. You will be astounded at how consumer waste has created an interdependence between developing nations and the richest nations. You will learn how strands of Christmas tree lights find other Christmas tree lights, are bound together, bid for, and end up on the other side of the globe where they are broken down into component parts by hand and then recycled. You will learn the best lifestyle choices you can make for a sustainable earth.

[Grumpus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reduce. Reuse. If the first two are not an option, then recycle. Interesting story of where everything goes--back to China for the most part. I don't why but recycling fascinates me.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first-ever time I had a look at a scrapyard was when I watched the James Bond film ‘Goldfinger’ a long while ago in Chennai, India. In the movie, Oddjob, who was Goldfinger’s henchman, kills a guy, throws the body in the luggage trunk of his brand new car, drives it to a scrapyard for dumping. I watched with utter fascination as a giant crane lifted the car, put it in a car crushing compactor, and reduced it to a small cubic lump of iron. Then, a giant magnet attached itself to the chunk and hauled it away. No human hands were involved ever. I wondered what they would do with the lump of metal because the concept of recycling was unknown to me in lower-middle-class Chennai of those days, where consumption was quite low. Whatever we bought, we reused ad nauseam. We threw away things only when they were utterly unreusable. When a coconut is purchased, the fiber on top was removed and used as a scrubber for washing utensils. We used charcoal as cooking fuel. It left fine, soft ash when entirely burned. We would collect the ash, add salt, and use it as tooth powder. Trousers and shirts would travel down the line of younger siblings and be finally cut and stitched into washcloths or kitchen towels.
Had I read this book on recycling then, I would have had problems seeing sense in junking perfectly reusable stuff. Not anymore, though. I migrated to Australia in 1980 and, for the first time, realized that there are societies so affluent that it made better financial sense to buy new stuff instead of repairing old ones! In a world of vast disparities in wealth, it is then not a surprise that consumption, reuse, recycling, scrapping, and final disposal take place in different continents, in countries of varying levels of wealth. Depending on the product, the whole process can take years in its life-cycle. Author Adam Minter brings this out in this book, among many other less-known facts on the life cycle of scrap in a gripping and enjoyable sketch.

In the past fifty years, environmental consciousness has grown dramatically in the affluent nations. In Western countries, the rivers have become clean, and the forests, the cities, and the mountains are mostly devoid of garbage. However, more than any other reason, it is Globalization, which has contributed to this change. Polluting industries like mining and manufacturing, have been moved to developing countries, mainly China. This move has helped in the rivers, cities, and the air becoming cleaner. Besides, a majority of the waste generated by the West is exported to the developing world, particularly China, which helps to keep the environment at the source of waste cleaner.
Most people think that developing countries take the garbage from the West for free because there are so many poor people who make a living out of it. The truth is that all the scrap is sold for money to the developing nations. Developing countries like China and India need a lot of raw materials for their growth, and they often cannot get the resources by mining. When Westerners get tired of a product and throw things away by putting them in a blue recycle bin, there is still so much material and reusable value left in them. Scrap dealers from Asia stalk the scrapyards of the West and buy up the scrap and ship them to China. Unlike in the West, where they would be just shredded and thrown on landfills, in the developing world, often up to 90% is refurbished and reused. What cannot be reused is then taken apart and recycled into making new consumer goods which are then shipped back to the West, often in packages, made from the same scrap. Minter says that this process is a lot better than clearing forests and digging mines, and that scrap yards in China provide a service that can no longer be found in the United States or Europe. The author sums it up by saying that Globalization of waste is now a permanent feature of the world economy, no different - and no less important - than the Globalization of smartphone manufacture. So long as goods are made in one place, and consumed and thrown away in another, there will be companies that specialize in moving that waste to where it is most valued as a raw material.

Adam Minter has vast experience in the recycling business at an international level. He brings his knowledge and thinking to environmental concerns with refreshing insights. In the process, he blows up many pet myths of urban liberals in most parts of the world. Data shows that increasing the rate of recycling does not impact the volume of waste generated. From 1960 to 2010, the recyclables in the US rose from 5.6 million tons to 65 million tons. That feels great before you find that the trash in the US rose from 81 million to 250 million tons in the same period. So, if the goal is conservation, then reducing all kinds of waste is more important than recycling. It sounds almost a cliche when Minter says that, ideally, we must all reduce consumption and try and repair and reuse them when products develop problems. However, he understands that our capitalist economy relies on consumer culture. Our high living standards make it impossible to pay for the repair because buying a new product is always the cheaper option. So, we recycle as the last option.
Yet Minter wants us to realize that many things we throw in the recycle bin aren’t recyclable for various reasons. Cardboard and paper can be recycled, perhaps up to seven times. Many plastics can survive only one run through recycling before becoming plastic lumber. Metals are different. Copper wire can be recycled infinitely. Extracting copper from a power cable is painless while doing so from an iPod is quite tricky. Some other things look recyclable but aren’t. For example, on the iPhone screen, the glass is easily recyclable, but sand is so cheap that there is no incentive to melt used glass to get the sand. The touch screen contains Indium, a rare element that costs about $200 per pound. But, there are no commercially viable means to extract it, and so we keep mining this valuable mineral, use it and throw it away. So, what is the answer? Minter says that environmentalists must demand that companies design products for repair, reuse, and recycling.
Minter feels that in Western societies, the media focuses on e-waste disproportionately. They write about it as ‘hazardous e-waste and e-waste-crisis.’ But only 1.4% of all waste generated in US homes and offices is e-waste. In comparison, food waste, plastic waste, and paper waste are forty times more.

When we talk about poor standards in handling e-waste in India or China, we have to see it from their standpoint. The author admits that hundreds of thousands of recycling plants in India, China, and elsewhere in the developing world have poor safety and unhealthy work environments. Simple steps like work boots, respirators, and municipal wastewater treatment systems would make a big difference, but these countries do not invest in these. Nevertheless, he wants us to see it in the context of China as a nation where people do not have safe food to eat, clean water to drink, kids not having safe milk to drink and clean air to breathe. Similarly, in India, when he asked about the same problem, the officials said that their first problem was to handle the non-recyclable food waste. Sewage is next, then industrial pollution, dust particulates from construction, biological waste from medical facilities, plastics disposal/recycling, and then managing chemical waste. E-waste comes only after! So, it is too much to expect them to be concerned about greenhouse gases and similar first-world environmental concerns.

The book provides some mind-boggling data on the size and nature of the scrap and recycling part of global trade. It is worth recounting here some of the fascinating facts about this business.
The global recycling industry turns over about $500 billion annually, equivalent to Norway’s GDP. It is the second biggest employer on the planet after agriculture.
Americans throw away 130 million cell phones per year, with each ton of cell phones containing ten ounces of gold. It is far more than one will find in even high-grade ore!
An average junked US automobile contains $1.65 worth of coins (on the floor or the glove box) when it comes to the shredder. In a good year of automobile recycling, Americans scrap some 14 million cars. So, there is $20 million in cash to be recovered. Scrapyards like Huron Valley have the technology to separate this bonanza of coins automatically. They collect them and return them to the US Treasury for a percentage of its value!
Even the best copper ore deposits require 100 tons of ore to obtain one ton of the red metal. In 2012, China extracted 2.75 million tons of copper from scrap, 70% of which came from the US. Imagine the amount of ore that would have to be mined for that much of copper each year if there is no scrap trade!
In 1965, out of a total of 9.6 million automobiles in the US, only 1 million were recycled. As this practice continued, by 1970, 20 million cars were abandoned all over the US, alongside freeways, in creeks, in the countryside…
People made Silicon Valley scale fortunes by figuring out how to move scrap newspapers in your recycling bin to the country where they are most in-demand.
If an economy is starting to grow, scrap prices tend to be among the first rising indicators.
Chinese businesses buy display monitors in the US and Europe for less than $10 and refurbish and resell in China for $100!

The author writes with a delightful personal touch all through. His family, going back to his grandmother, has long been in the scrap business. Every time he mentions his grandmother in the narrative, his love for her is so palpable. I found the book highly educational on the subject and felt a kindred spirit with the author as I have always lived by the maxim of ‘reduce consumption.’ Anyone interested in the environment, recycling and global trade would benefit enormously by reading this book. I cannot recommend it enough.

[Nadirah]

If you've ever wondered what happened to all that excess junk we throw away in the course of our lives, then this book will be illuminating. The author is a journalist who is intimately connected to junkyard recycling practices as his family used to own a scrapyard, and he has also lived in and traveled throughout China to expose the ways in which the first world countries' junks and trashes are recycled and reused for the citizens of the developing countries.

Minter exposes the extent of the accumulated junk & the cost of recycling them (materially and environmentally), and it doesn't paint a pretty portrait of sustainability. Still, in the many instances of Minter's self-interest coupled with environmental awareness that we can glimpse throughout the book, he insists that the good of recycling the junk outweighs the bad, even if it ultimately proves detrimental to the environment and exploited workers' health. For example, this entire paragraph is just mind-boggling to me:

It's amazing to me that anybody could last more than eight minutes at this kind of work [sorting usable scrap item from trash], much less eight hours, and do it for $100 per month, plus room and board. But spread out before me are 150 women who seem to think it is worth it. Nobody's forced them to come here; they could've stayed home, wherever that might be.

Yikes. Due to his proximity to the scrapyard business, Minter tends to have a more rose-tinted view of the industry, and so his objectivity seems to be compromised because there are other examples of the above paragraph that makes me feel like he's trying to justify the bad industry practices just because it's a better alternative for these underpaid workers to work under awful safety & health conditions compared to them making less money working in agriculture.

To be fair, the book is informative, even if it's biased in the scrapyard business's favor. Plus, Minter stresses that the whole business wouldn't have come about if it wasn't for our increasing trend of excessive consumption without reflection. This quote is particularly apt:

Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. [...] Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place.

(Of course, he then unintentionally backtracked the above point by saying that "oh, my wife and I don't recycle at home, instead we give your recyclable junk to our beloved housekeeper for her to recycle and get some bonus money that way", like dude you are literally outsourcing your problem too like do you not see the problem here...? Ngl, I had very conflicted feelings when I was reading this book, and sometimes the back-and-forth was enough to give me whiplash.)

But despite my qualms and the whiplash I've experienced, the main takeaway from this book was worth it, and can be succinctly concluded as follows:

(a) Reduce by avoiding buying things you don't need. This is the most important step; if we reduce our consumption, there'd be less junk in the world when there's less demand for the junks in the first place
(b) Reuse the things you do have rather than buying new things just because it's the "in" thing
(c) Recycle last when you can't reduce and reuse

Rating: 3.5 (Very informative but also pretty biased, also a bit too lengthy and could've been cut down by like 80 pages)

[Dan Connors · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where do the millions of tons of recycled goods end up and what is made from them? Where do old cars end up once they no longer can be fixed? How do we keep our landfills from bursting at the seams while recovering valuable materials from our junk?

This fascinating book, by a man who grew up in the scrap metal business, shows an insider's perspective in the amazingly lucrative world of recycling, where a few millionaires gain fortunes while others sift through other people's junk to make a bare, subsistence living.

The United States has been called the Saudi Arabia of scrap, where more junk is generated per capita than almost anywhere else in the world. As nations become more prosperous, they toss out more things sooner, to make room for more and more purchases yet to come. In poorer nations, there is much less waste, and some have found ways to make lemonade out of other nations' lemons.

Mining things like copper, aluminum, and petroleum products is very destructive to the environment as well as expensive, dangerous, and wasteful. Aluminum, one of the most popular metals because of its strength and lightness, is notoriously hard to make from raw materials, so much so that up to 65% of aluminum is now recycled into other aluminum. But petroleum products like plastics are much harder to recycle. Less than 25% of plastic water bottles end up recycled, and unlike metal, the uses for recycled plastic are more limited.

Junkyard Planet takes you behind the scenes of the scrap industry, where things like Christmas tree lights, car engines, and electronic waste are bought and sold in an international market unlike any other. Much of the action in this book takes place in China, where the author has lived for years and what was up until recently the hub of the global recycling industry. Minter follows Chinese scrap dealers as they travel the United States looking for the next big purchase of piles of scrap metal, plastic and paper.

China became the home of recycling for three huge reasons. One, they have a huge population of people who are willing and able to do the hard work of salvaging the valuable materials from the piles of junk that are shipped there. They have cheap, skilled labor. Two, because China manufactures so much of the world's stuff now, all sent out on huge ships in huge metal boxes, there are all these empty boxes that need to come back to China after dropping off their loads. These empty shipping containers are perfect for carrying trash from the nations that just bought the consumer goods, at a cheaper rate than it would cost to ship on land from one city to another. And three, China has had one of the fastest growing economies in the world, which makes them hungry for raw materials with which to build infrastructure, buildings, and cars. It makes more sense for the Chinese to utilize their cheap labor to get the raw materials needed for growth.

(Unfortunately, this book was written in 2013, before China changed their minds and stopped accepting plastic and paper trash in 2018, which has thrown the entire recycling industry into chaos.)

The author goes into some disturbing details of how plastic and e-waste are treated by Chinese peasants, showing how the dangerous chemicals have polluted entire towns and poisoned populations who are just trying to get by and survive. The Chinese government has apparently looked away from many of these problems given that cities like Shanghai have notoriously polluted air. The changes in Chinese policies since the book was published may have stemmed from stories such as this. From what I can tell, some of the problems have since migrated to other third world countries like Bangladesh, India, and Sudan, where eager cheap labor can still be found.

One of the most fascinating chapters of the book details the giant car shredders in Michigan, which convert entire automobiles into giant piles of metal, upholstery, and even a few spare coins that get salvaged every time. They use magnets to drag out the iron content, and then sell the rest, known as shredded non-ferrous (SNF) to others that will process shredded car innards for what they can find. Some are hand-sorted in poor countries, or machine sorted by sophisticated computers.

Each American generates approximately 6 pounds of trash per day. Of that, about 25% is recycled and 75% is either burned or sent to a landfill. Having always been a big recycler, I was expecting to hear about how great it is for the planet. It's not that simple. According to the author, the best answer for the planet might be to reduce consumption first. Recycling is messy, energy-wasting, and sometimes hazardous to health. If you can't reduce, then you need to look for ways to re-use items until they can't be used anymore. Much of the electronics that end up in China end up being cleaned up and sent out again for third world citizens who need inexpensive phones and computers. Taking computers or phones apart and salvaging their precious metals is next to impossible. Only the computer chips are valuable enough to be recycled.

According to the author, in some ways recycling can actually be BAD for the planet. The mere act of throwing a plastic bottle in a recycling bin makes us feel so good about ourselves that we are more likely to consumer MORE things than we otherwise would have. Minter describes psychological tests where people used up more materials when they knew recycling was an option, and it makes sense. We feel guilty wasting things, and recycling bins give us a "get out of jail free" card.

This book is an eye-opening look into the ways we use, waste, and reuse stuff. It made me realize that recycling is valuable but not the solution to our environmental woes by itself. Manufacturers especially need to focus on making their products more reusable and recyclable, and consumers need to demand more of it. At some point in the not-too-distant-future we may start running out of natural resources and be swimming in rivers of trash. The need to close the circle- here and with climate change- is the ultimate challenge of the 21st century.

[Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first real job was working for IBM and refurbishing computers - I did that up to 2001. Even then, I struggled with how we could make money refurbishing computers in high wage countries. I found this book fascinating. Not only was it a good overview of the industry, it also showed how an industry and commodity markets work in global trade better than anything I have read previously. It also has the vignette and story style of Rose George book, but in an area that I really wanted to know more.

Globalization – scrapping and recycling follow the local labor wages. In the early 1900s, recyling was big business in the USA. America imported scrap from Europe to feed our industrial growth – old railroad stock sent to America. Scrap rags for our paper mills. Initially this was Eastern European immigrants and Jews. The author's family ran a scrap yard in the Midwest. Now, it is too expensive in WE, NA, and Japan to sort most waste and it is sold in bulk to Asia. In the late 1990s, Tiawan plants move to China and then to the interior areas. Malasia plants relocate to Indonesia.

Why is China leading in import of waste and not India? Because, there all the empty shipping containers returning to China and China needs materials. If India had a stronger export market and demand for raw materials, the scrap would flow there. The scrap for India comes from the middle east – in the empty shipping containers of Mangoes and other food from India. While wages are a big driver, demand, and shipping cost are also key drivers of this industry.

Breaking motors – Motors are filled with copper wire. Back breaking labor to break it apart, but in China, middle-age women do it. Hammers, chisels, pliers. High skilled job. At one time, Henry Ford set up a reverse assembly line to take apart his cars. Never could do it profitably (even in the 1920s) – too much labor involved.

Reduce, reuse, recycle – Main point of the book is if you hate the environmental issues of waste, just ”buy less crap”. Because economics is going to do the rest. As people become richer, re-use becomes less possible (people want new - even lower middle-class in Africa won’t buy a mobile phone that does not have 3G!). After product re-use, is component re-use. No one wants that old mobile phone, but if you get enough processors together, you can sell to a toy manufacturer. Then there is the recycle – metal, plastic, paper.

Commodity Markets – Overlaying the whole industry is the global commodity markets. It moves dramatically. The rise of Asia is just one example. But the global recession in 2008, had markets drop 40%+. Huge swings. But commodity markets are not all demand side - changes in technology (either for mining of new materials or recycling can radically change the market). One example, an American in 1930s was sorting mill scrap (the fillings off iron production) for re-use. It was awful work - $1.25 per ton sorted. Then a metallurgist found a new use for that scrap and could make a fortune selling his product. The price of mill scrap went up 100 fold. And people started mining landfills for the material.

American Cars – Outside of Henry Fords dissembly line, cars were recycled profitably in the USA until the early 1960s – Labor costs went up and American’s did want to break motors for a living. The only way to remove all the non-metal parts was to burn the car – which then caused too much air pollution. Even bigger was that steel mills needed higher quality control – 1% of copper significantly weakens steel. So, it was no longer profitable to recycle cars and no one would take them. In 1969, 70,000 cars were abandon in NYC. Over 20 million across the country.

Innovation – Long article on the development of the car shredder. Based the number of cars that could no longer be recycled profitably lead to this innovation. Recyclers were already shredding tin cans to help remove the linings. So, just a bigger shredder for cars? The first unit in 1958 was 1200’ long and used surplus motors from navy ships. Once it was know in the industry, others perfected it. Now, those that copied that original concept are trying to keep the Chinese from stealing their designs. But the car shredder solved the issue of 40 million abandoned cars dumped in the USA. And the Asia demand for steel in the late 1990s, finally had the USA caught up with that 30 year backlog. The Author toured one USA company, Omnisource. They have a car shredder. Car shredding really only recycles the steel content. But what do to with the rest? There is still valuable cooper and zinc and tin in the remainder. They are able to sort this. It even can reclaim the loose change in the car - $1.67 per car - $20 million for the 14 million cars scrapped every year.

China – There is one city in China that is the e-waste capital, Guiyu. And there is another that is the plastic recycling capital, Wen’an. Both are dirty, polluted places. China is working to clean up but also realizes it needs these places to feed their industries. One very interesting item in the book is how the author comes back to places to see improvement. As Chinese cities get richer, they improve their most polluting industries or the industries move to the poorer areas of China. As Western environmental groups push on the Chinese and other developing countries, the locals really don't care about ewaste. Their bigger issues are with getting food and putting their kids through school - ewaste is a first world concern.

It is an incredible dance between wages, commodity demand, technologies, and environmental concerns that drive this industry. But it really is just economics - supply and demand - that the author brings to together in stories of his many friends in the global scrap market.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who would have thought?? I signed up for this Goodreads giveaway because my county is embroiled in a controversy about a landfill trying to go in just 3 miles from our county seat. Bake sales, garage sales and other money raising events are going on to try to stop it. The lawsuits and accusations (some of them criminal) are flying.

The big issue is just when the local commissioners and judges knew the landfill giants were trying to buy land in our county. And the suspicious accusations that the two richest officials involved steered the land search from near their farm/investment lands on the other side of the county to a place that is within 3 miles from town and about 5 miles from a university. AND it over an aquifer.

At first I was disappointed the book was not about landfills in particular but about recycling and all the global controversy surrounding that issue.

But by the time I finished the 3rd chapter I was hooked. Of course, it didn't hurt that a whole chapter described the Waste Managements new plant in nearby Houston. I had read a little about that but certainly didn't understand the extent of it's complex operation.

My eyes were opened up by this book. The back cover explained it perfectly. You will never look at all the packaging, and products surrounding your daily life in exactly the same way again. It has prompted me to call our local county operated recycling operation to find out how I can drop off all my "stuff". I already recycle paper because that is easy. There are paper recycle bins behind most of our schools and at church. However, other things like plastic and cans are a little trouble to dispose of. and I don't know of anyone anywhere near here who buys those items. I just want to get them in the recycling arena and out of the landfills. After reading your book I'm gung-ho about doing that.

Thanks, Mr Minter and Christine for donating this book so I could read it. I am going to pass it along to good friends whose property is directly across the farm-to-market road from where the landfill has bought land. They are very involved in the fight and I am sure will get a lot out of the book also.

Anyone who cares about our planet should read this.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Minter presents a fascinating look into the junk business, primarily scrap metal, and how all the waste in the US has made millions for people in China. I loved the personal story he tells throughout the book. His family was in the scrap metal business in Minnesota for several generations, and while he could have followed in his father's and grandmother's footsteps, Minter chose to write about the subject. His scrap metal assignments in China led to a decade-long sojourn in Shanghai. My other favorite part of the book was when he followed two Chinese men who are instrumental in the scrap metal business in southern China. One is based in Vancouver, but travels across the US in search of scrap metal. His business associate back in China receives e-mails in the middle of the night with photos of the scrap from the US. It was amazing to learn how many Chinese entrepreneurs do the same thing, and how much money it brings in! I like Minter's philosophy. Recycling is not the answer; buying few pieces of crap is.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected this one to be a little dry, but it absolutely wasn't - Minter is a great storyteller. The included photographs were definitely a bonus, but almost unnecessary with the careful way everything (and everyone!) is described. He also does a really good job of gently proving over and over that "reduce" is the best option if you're truly trying to be green. I was already very stressed out by the state of our landfills, and the unregulated recycling practices overseas...this book didn't alleviate those feelings, but there were pockets of optimism. I would be very curious for an updated book now that China has banned some waste imports; I suspect the outlook might be more bleak for American recycling.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started reading this after reading on of this book's chapters as a standalone article in a magazine. The chapter was really interesting as was 1 or 2 other chapters in this book. Individually, those chapters were great. Unfortunately there were several hundred other pages of junk that added very little.

Just a fraction of the book was spent on plastic and almost none on paper or other types of scrap/waste. His experience is clearly in scrap metal in China, but I would have appreciated either a more holistic view or a much shorter book.

[Paige · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read one of Minter's other books, and while this was still interesting, I didn't find it as insightful. It had a lot of history I was unaware of, like the fact America had an abandoned car problem! I think Minter's personal ties to the scrap industry are good and bad here. He obviously has the inside look at everything, and his personal connections are invaluable and the only reason we can have this book in the first place. But I think it slightly gets in the way of objectivity at parts, particularly around discussing the environmental and health effects of stripping and repurposing our used electronics and plastics. I felt like the overarching problem was oversimplified a bit with a laissez-faire attitude, that well, these people would be worse off as farmers and our old stuff would be more harmful in a landfill. That's definitely true, but I thought it wasn't very deep in examining that there are things we could be doing to improve things even slightly. The overarching point, though, I agreed with. Minter's point that you need to be less concerned about where your recyclables are ending up and more concerned about how much you added is spot on. We like to consume, and we don't like to think about it or accept that the best thing is to consume less.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

CHINA !
What I learned:
* CHINA will recycle or reuse just about anything the west world dumps upon them
* Lacking any government regulation regarding recycling & safety will make whole cities a recycling "heaven's".
* What happens to the old Iphone and the poor bastard that will try to extract every bit from it (parts, gold other metals) and the how-to.
* Working in flip-fops in hazardous industry is the norm.
* Some materials are not worth recycling because of economical factors.
* Don't recycle just try to reuse it, that's because psychology will kick in and you will be more inclined to trow something that you know can be recycled.

off-course this is just the scarps, but a well written book about overlooked subject.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was eye opening and compelling and well written. The author is honest about his biases, clear in his sources. Overall the mix of history, statistics, memoir/anecdotes and analysis is really great.

Bottom line: recycling is driven by economics, not environmental concerns. The industry has problems but for the most part the alternatives are worse. There's lots of wealth to be had. End of the day recycling is the third best choice after reduce and reuse.

My main question is how this has changed in the past 8 years.

[C.G.Koens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether you recycle or not, you'll learn something from this book

I actually read Minter's second book first, and so enjoyed his writing style and subject matter that I went in search of his first book, Junkyard Planet, on Kindle. It's a fascinating read about where the recycling goes - the good, the bad, and the ugly...or perhaps it's the confusing, because sometimes it's a mixture of good and bad, and the reality is just...reality. Enjoyed this book enough that I ordered a (used) copy for a family member for Christmas.

[Joe Slowik · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is a bit rambling and repetitive, knocking off that fifth star. But this book offers an unprecedented view into a world few see or realize exists. The truth behind where your trash goes and why will be eye opening for some but transformative for others. On the surface it's a book about our junk, but it is truly a book about incentives.

I highly recommend this book to anyone, but especially those of us who do business with China and who make or develop products.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strangely, I've always liked going to scrapyards and junkyards and have always been curious as to where all that junk ends up. This book definitely answered that question and described how the recycling process works. The author, who is the son of scrapyard owner, is certainly an authoritative source on all things scrap and uses immersive journalism to tell a interesting, informative story.

[Anusha Datar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work of journalism and memoir provides a snapshot of the current state of and some insight into the history of the trade of recyclable material across the world. Minter primarily focuses on work happening in the midwestern Untied States and in China, and he chronicles his own investigation work into the current state of (and potential future of) scrap recycling and the types of people who are involved in it. I learned a lot from this book and I appreciated Minter's extremely lucid writing style.

Some places where this book shines are really personal - I loved Minter's descriptions of days working at the family scrapyard with his grandmother or of naively thinking someone in the developing world might want to re-use his outdated Nokia phone. I appreciated how he could blend elements of his own story into this broader global narrative.

Unfortunately, the personal aspect of this book was also the most difficult for me - it often felt like Minter's personal convictions and biases around the trade and its future took precedence over his own ability to be a reporter and observer.

Regardless, I learned a lot from this book, and I would still recommend it!

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible book for anyone interested in how and why things happen the way they do, behind the scenes.

One downside is that the author reminds us too frequently of his own industry experience - I could have been reminded less frequently that scrapyards all around the world have the same smell.

[Marwa]

#عَبْدُ_اللهِ_الخالِق_الخَلَّاق
#connection to a higher entityرَبِّي الأعلي Allah The Creator 💛 ⚖️
⚙️ طريقاً _إلي_الجَنَّة
⚙️وسيلة=غاية

صناعة
ما بين التصدير و الفرز ♻️
Data

في الصناعة تفتح الأفاق وتبدع
تصدير يزهو
#haikuchallenge

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some interesting pieces of information in this book, but it was pretty repetitive and dry in parts.

[Bree Pearc · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting read on the recycling industry. Some very good insights and thought provoking material. Well written.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not like the comment that only a man could have thought of a car shredder, but the assessment that to recycle less we need to buy less was spot on.

[Dеnnis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the book immeasurably useful for better understanding of contemporary world, its real inner workings, its shortcomings and threats to it as well as some future perspectives.

I like familiarizing with various industries serving our needs, but whose proceedings are largely under our conscious radar. Now it’s easier to do, since a number of interesting titles were released on, say, funeral business and global floral trade, - huge and complicated and very responsive – businesses, of whose mechanisms we either unaware or don’t want to be aware. Still they are important. And surely the business of getting rid of our waste is of paramount importance. Especially, when it’s something more than dumping everything in landfills or seas.

Already several curious books were published on the matter, but I started my research with this title. Make no mistake – this is not an immediate page-turner, yet time and again you’d be rewarded for your perseverance. Moreover, you maybe will find passages that slowed me down far more exciting than I did. They mostly concern author’s own reminiscences about his own experience with the business of scrap recycling – his family had a scrap yard. At this stage I think I learned more than necessary about intimate relations of his family. Yet later in the book his background will help him to get better interviewees and go farther in his investigation, just because people learned he used to get his hand dirty and was essentially one of them.

Another good thing that makes the author most suited for the job is his later sufficiently long career as a journalist for two leading global scrap industry magazines. Hence he has tons of relevant data at his fingertips (and book is thoroughly equipped with stats and prices, current and historical) and a personal acquaintance with a big number of key people worldwide, which makes the book very informative and truly worldwide in its scope (my country Russia is not touched, but I forget him this :) - it may be statistically insignificant in this matter).

The book tackles 'afterlife' of major types of our waste - metals, plastics, paper, cars, and electronics&mobiles - in general everything that could be recycled profitably, which is probably the reason why food leftovers and the like are not covered. Then again, they are probably biodegradable by themselves anyway or a materials for a separate investigation.

What I also liked is that his book is not just a mere travel guide to this “underworld”, but also an invitation to think over how we got here, what are the good and bad parts of it, what future scenarios are possible. You may not agree with his musings here and there, but at least they are very pertinent to the narrative, helping it to become more than just an industry snapshot and sequences of scripted interviews with insiders.

Lastly, here's a little yet important quote from the last pages of the book, which argues for a paradigm shift:

"Jesse Catlin and Yitong Wang, authors of an article in the January 2013 issue of Journal of Consumer Psychology, say in the very last sentence of their paper: “Therefore, an important issue would be to identify ways to nudge consumers toward recycling while also making them aware that recycling is not a perfect solution and that reducing overall consumption is desirable as well.”

"...[I]f the goal is a realistic sustainable future, then it’s necessary to take a look at what we can do to lengthen the lives of the products we’re going to buy anyway. So my ... answer to the question of how we can boost recycling rates is this: Demand that companies start designing products for repair, reuse, and recycling.

Take, for example, the super-thin MacBook Air, a wonder of modern design packed into an aluminum case that’s barely bigger than a handful of documents in a manila envelope. At first glance, it would seem to be a sustainable wonder that uses fewer raw materials to do more. But that’s just the gloss; the reality is that the MacBook Air’s thin profile means that its components—memory chips, solid state drive, and processor—are packed so tightly in the case that there’s no room for upgrades (a point driven home by the unusual screws used to hold the case together, thus making home repair even more difficult). Even worse, from the perspective of recycling, the thin profile (and the tightly packed innards) means that the computer is exceptionally difficult to break down into individual components when it comes time to recycle it. In effect, the MacBook Air is a machine built to be shredded, not repaired, upgraded, and reused."