Adam Minter > Quotes

“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. (269)”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

“In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

“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.”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

“Danshari.” It’s a three-character Japanese word that means, in order of the characters,1 severing a relationship with unnecessary things (dan), purging clutter that overwhelms the home (sha), and achieving a sense of peace by separating the self from things (ri). Cleaning your home of clutter, the idea goes, also cleanses your heart and mind—regardless of where the stuff ends up.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Encouraging consumers to think more seriously about the financial, environmental, and personal costs of their consumption would be a major step in addressing the crisis of quality and the environmental and social impacts of too much stuff. Better yet, it would spur businesses to seek economic incentives to design and market better products. Today's secondhand economy, faltering in search of quality, should have more than it can handle.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“No surprise, China leads the world in the consumption of steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, platinum, rare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else labeled “metal.” But China is desperately short of metal resources of its own. For example, in 2012 China produced 5.6 million tons of copper, of which 2.75 million tons was made from scrap. Of that scrap copper, 70 percent was imported, with most coming from the United States. In other words, just under half of China’s copper supply is imported as scrap metal. That’s not a trivial matter: copper, more than any other metal, is essential to modern life. It is the means by which we transmit power and information.”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

“...[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.”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

“Nothing that an affluent American minimalist can say about consumerism and stuff is likely to change the mind of a developing-world teenager whose only experience of minimalism has been involuntary.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Between 1967 and 2017, the money that Americans spent annually on stuff—from sofas to cell phones—increased almost twentyfold.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“most consumers have no answer if someone asks, “Who will be last to use your hoodie?” The end of clothes has become nearly as mysterious as the end of life itself.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“I sometimes get mad at people. They buy things for no other reason than it’s cheap.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“2017,”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Target recycled those more than 500,000 seats over the years. They would’ve sold, and many children south of the border would be safer because their parents had access to a secondhand market.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“I’d like to stroll, but I’m riding in”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Almost 90 percent of the goods will go unsold.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“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.”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

“mostly in the United States—that have added textiles to their curbside recycling programs have found that residents generally give their shirts away as easily as they give away their beer cans.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“As a realtor, you can tell people to declutter. But to do it yourself …” She shakes her head.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“These looming, multicolored cubes are packed with items donated with the best of intentions. But the best of intentions, alone, can’t sell clothes, and more than half the apparel that arrives at Goodwill is unsold.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“The things that I value, I quickly realized, generally aren’t valuable to anyone but me. Once I had that understanding, I started letting go and curtailing what I was buying in the first place.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Walmart and Ralph Lauren, alike, bet that price—more than quality—moves product.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“take your unwanted used item to this innovative, sustainable solution at no cost to yourself, and it will be reused indefinitely”—almost never exists.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“In my experience, nobody in the secondhand-clothing industry likes to talk about the end of clothes. But there is an end. The only question is when.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“In recent years, the industry’s annual profits are triple those of Hollywood.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Exercise equipment has no value,” she says, then clicks through to an image of bookshelves stacked with magazines, many with yellow spines.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“(cybersexual addiction was number one).”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“But that’s not a problem when everybody’s making enough money to buy more in a few weeks.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Consumers don’t want to pay more, but they will when they see the value”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“Rather, they were likely made in South Asia, exported to the United States, and worn until they were donated to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or some other thrift-based exporter. When they didn’t sell there, they were exported again, to Kandla most likely (or perhaps Mississauga, en route to Kandla), cut up, and exported again—this time to Star Wipers in Newark, Ohio. Each step of that journey makes perfect economic sense, even if the totality of it sounds ridiculous.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“the richer you are, and the more educated you are, the more stuff you will throw away.”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade