Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

That wasn’t always the case. As I’ll document in this book’s later chapters, only fifty years ago, automobiles were almost impossible to recycle, and as a result millions of abandoned car bodies cluttered and polluted American cities and the U.S. countryside. Collectively, they formed one of the most serious environmental crises in the United States—and then, due to a scrapyard innovation, the problem was solved. Today, the methods and means by which the United States solved its abandoned car problem are being adopted by China and other developing countries with eager car buyers.

Recycled Automotive

Here’s something true in all places and times: the richer you are, and the more educated you are, the more stuff you will throw away. In the United States, wealthy people not only buy more stuff but they buy more recyclable stuff, like the recyclable cans, bottles, and boxes that contain the goods they covet. That’s why, if you take a drive through a high-income, highly educated neighborhood on recycling day, you’ll see green and blue bins overflowing with neatly sorted newspapers, iPad boxes, wine bottles, and Diet Coke cans. Meanwhile, take a drive through a poor neighborhood, and you’ll invariably see fewer bins, and fewer recyclables. The people in the wealthier neighborhoods who did that sorting, that harvesting, were good stewards of their trash. But they wouldn’t have had the chance to be good stewards if they weren’t also very good consumers of stuff (just as poor people don’t harvest as much recycling in part because they don’t buy as much).