Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

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.

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.

Give or take a few percentage points, that 34 percent is roughly the same percentage achieved by New York, Minneapolis, and other U.S. cities with long-standing recycling programs. But Houston? As recently as 2008 Houston only managed to recycle 2.6 percent of its municipal solid waste. The other 97.4 percent? By and large, it was landfilled. Since 2008, the rate has been pushed up to “six or seven percent,” according to a sheepish Alan. That’s not good, by any definition. How to explain it? For people who live in places like San Francisco, where the recycling rate exceeds 70 percent, a popular explanation is that rednecks don’t like recycling. But that’s not only condescending, it demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how and why San Francisco’s trash is recycled at such a high rate. No doubt culture, education, and income play a role in how much actual waste a particular person or place recycles. But in my experience, no culture encourages a high recycling rate quite like the culture of poverty. In essence: if you can afford very little, you’ll tend to reuse a lot. So in San Francisco a glass jar of Trader Joe’s bruschetta is likely headed directly to the recycling bin; in the slums of Mumbai that same jar—if somebody could afford it—might very well become a kitchen implement. The slum dwellers of Mumbai have a far higher recycling rate than the suburbs of San Francisco because (a) they consume less—for example, no iPad boxes to recycle—and (b) daily survival requi...

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, and Indians, on average, consume an unimaginably paltry 18.7 pounds. Even accounting for the much larger populations of the two developing countries, and the resulting larger total volume of paper, it’s definitely the case that smaller per capita consumption means that households, and scrap peddlers in these countries, face a much easier task sorting recyclables.

There are no good statistics on how much of China’s household waste is recycled, and with much of China still rural and undeveloped, collecting such statistics would be prohibitively expensive, if not impossible. But one thing that everyone agrees upon—from government officials to midnight garbage scroungers—is that by the time a load of Chinese trash arrives at a landfill, very little that’s reusable or recyclable is left in it. Houston and San Francisco would be very glad to say the same. And yet: Shanghai doesn’t distribute recycling bins to its residents; it doesn’t have a local equivalent to the multimillion-dollar Houston Material Recovery Facility; it doesn’t have infrared sensors that machine-gun plastic bottles off speeding conveyors. Rather, it has hundreds of thousands of small businesspeople who make their livings by buying cardboard, paper, and cans from millions of people who would never give away perfectly reusable material for free. Whatever is left over is scrounged, completely.

Reuse and recycling, however, isn’t always easy. It requires ingenuity, and it requires entrepreneurship. These days, those qualities are most often seen in developing Asia, where consumption rates are increasing rapidly, along with all of the recyclable waste that entails. In my experience, a desire to save the earth isn’t high on the list of the Asians who are trying to figure out how to make money off the growing market for recycling. But that’s nothing new: in the United States, the entrepreneurs who invented the global recycling industry weren’t inspired by philanthropic motives, either. These days, the captains of American waste and recycling occupy boardrooms and BMWs. But the businesses over which they preside weren’t started in the boardrooms. Rather, they were started with backpacks, pickup trucks, and perhaps a discrete backyard or two. Only in time, after years of growth, were they big enough to acquire boardrooms—or be acquired by boardrooms. In every case, though, the spur to growth was the same: somebody was short a resource, and somebody else with some ingenuity and entrepreneurship had an idea for how to provide

What we now know as recycling, Leonard Fritz and his family knew as “grubbing.” It was what you did when you couldn’t do anything else. Thus it happened that nine-year-old Leonard, desperate for new school clothes, went to work in the summer of 1931, “grubbing” in the dumps on the outskirts of Detroit. They were not, he makes clear to me, “aristocratic” dumps, but rather dumps for poor people. “At the base of the dump they’d have like a hobo village,” he explains. “Old tar-paper shacks. Fifty-gallon drums for a heater, stuff like that. There weren’t any other kids out there …” The dump itself was located in a pit, beneath a ledge where the garbage trucks tipped their loads. As Leonard explains it, when the trucks arrived, everyone—hobos and nine-year-olds alike—gathered, ready to jump on anything that could be resold. Bottles were 3 cents per dozen, but the real prize was a Roman Cleanser bottle that, Leonard recalls clearly, was worth 5 cents. “That would cause a fight over there,” Leonard sighs. The hobos, as he describes them, showed up at the dump armed with mop handles minus the mop. The exposed hook where the mop itself would be affixed served as a weapon that could hook a hand. “They didn’t give a damn what age you were, who you were. It was like blood money.”

Nobody grubs in American trash dumps anymore (instead, they sort bottles into blue and green bins). But they did within Leonard Fritz’s lifetime, and they still do across the developing world. I’ve seen dumps like Leonard’s in India, Brazil, China, and Jordan, salted with impoverished people, often mothers and children, literally scraping at a living. The most famous is surely in Mumbai, movingly depicted in the film Slum-dog Millionaire, its orphans grubbing in search of just enough recyclable trash to exchange for food. I’ve seen the fights that Leonard describes, but only between children. Adults usually grub separately, and most everybody grubs for subsistence. In 1931 Leonard was grubbing for school clothes and a vaguely defined future. By that measure, he was better off than most anyone else at the dump where he worked, and by the end of the summer, he had $12.45, “which was a hell of a lot of money for the summer’s work back then for a kid.”

So how do people go from grubbing to running actual scrap businesses? People who have better options don’t generally choose to spend their time sorting through other people’s garbage. It’s a profession for outsiders, as pointed out by Carl Zimring, a historian of the American scrap trade, who describes the ease of joining the nineteenth-century scrap industry in a classic history, Cash for Your Trash. “Little investment capital was needed to enter the scrap trade. Since the work was dirty, dangerous, and low status, few natives with other prospects chose to perform it for any length of time. The low starting costs, combined with a lack of competition from established natives, made it possible for immigrants to gain footholds in the trade.” Accor...

Of those, the vast majority were Eastern European Jewish immigrants who, in addition to the facts that Zimring lists, found themselves barred from other trades due to anti-Semitism. Many settled in East Coast cities, including New York. In fact, according to one survey, by 1900 24.5 percent of New York’s Jews were active in some facet of the junk trade. My great-grandfather, Abe Leder, arrived in Galveston, Texas, via Russia in the early twentieth century, but his experiences didn’t differ from his late-nineteenth-century East Coast Jewish recycling forebears as described by Zimring. Barred by education and ethnicity from joining other professions in notoriously anti-Semitic Minneapolis, he started collecting the stuff that the more established locals didn’t want in their homes. It could be a very worthwhile endeavor: my grand...

Today, there are hundreds of individual scrap specifications. Some are specific to certain countries (Korea and Japan have their own specifications), but the most dominant and widely used ones are the North American ISRI specifications. They are not static: they evolve with the nature of what people throw away, and with the technologies used to process those throwaways. Notably, the committee that writes them has a sense of humor: in 2007, long after the demise of the Teletype, they decided that Tata, Toto, and Tutu could serve as handy shorthand for three types of aluminum scrap. These, along with the older, more widely traded specifications, are as much terms of the trade as dollar, ton, and freight. It’s a phenomenon that I was reminded of when, in 2010, I was in Jamnagar, a small city in northwest India whose economy is fueled by thousands of brassworks powered entirely by scrap metal. One afternoon, while walking through an industrial park with a large-scale scrap importer, we passed a scrawny scrap peddler with little more capital investment than a bicycle. At the sight of me, a rare foreigner in those parts and a likely source of imported scrap, he pointed at the load of mixed brass scrap in the trailer behind his bike, smiled, and said: “Honey.” I knew what he meant, and so did the person who exported that Honey to India. More important yet, the person who would buy it from him surely knew the definition as well.

Some scrap peddlers happily slip envelopes of cash to the dock manager at factories, with the understanding that he’ll look elsewhere when they drive away with the company’s barrels of valuable scrap metal; in China, lavish dinners, often concluded with prostitutes, are often just the base entry requirement if you want to even talk with certain factory bosses about their scrap.

I can’t recall, precisely, when the first Chinese scrap buyer appeared at the front window of my father’s scrapyard. It was probably around 1994, right around the time that China had begun to deregulate key industries, and private entrepreneurs had decided that scrap metal was the business where they’d strike it rich. It was a good bet: China was at the front end of a drive to become one of the world’s great economies. It had labor and government support; the only thing it needed was raw materials. Digging mines was one way to obtain those raw materials; the other was to go to the United States, the place that many scrap traders call the Saudi Arabia of Scrap, the land where there’s more scrap than the people can handle on their own.

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.

Near the top, we reach a crumbling gray and red rock outcropping. It contains copper ore, he explains, as well as something called sulfides. When rain or snow comes into contact with sulfide ore like this, Ian explains, it produces caustic sulfuric acid. “That’s why the rock is so crumbly.”

According to Twin Metals, the mining company that controls the rights to the ore on this side of Spruce Road, Ian and I are standing atop 6.2 million tons of copper, 2 million tons of nickel (used to make stainless steel), and some of the world’s richest untapped precious metal reserves outside of South Africa. Twin Metals hasn’t received the permits to mine, yet, but if and when they do, each ton of copper will require the processing of as much as 100 tons of ore. Multiply 100 tons of sulfur-bearing ore by the 6.2 million tons of copper beneath my feet, and the scale of the problem becomes epic. What will happen to the ninety-nine tons of sulfite rock once the copper has been extracted from it? Some will go back into the ground, Twin Metals claims, but an unknown percentage of those billions of tons will need to remain on the surface, exposed to rain and snow.

While Twin Metals investigates northern Minnesota, the Chinese are already digging some of the biggest and most controversial copper mines in the world today. In Afghanistan, the Aynak mine threatens ancient Buddhist sculptures. In Burma, a copper mine run by the Chinese military is destroying ancient farmland and causing mass protests. Let me be clear: a doubling of U.S. copper scrap exports to China wouldn’t halt this destructive trend. But it might just reduce some of the demand for that virgin copper.

Think of it this way. If you were a Chinese engineer in 1980, and you had an idea for a new kind of brass ballpoint-pen ball, you had one choice: give the invention to your state-owned and -run employer. But say, just for argument’s sake, you wanted to develop, manufacture, and market that invention on your own—could you do it? Shenzhen had opened for business, and technically you were allowed to start a company. But even if you could obtain the financing to buy the simple machinery to make your new ballpoint-pen ball, where would you buy the brass? In 1980 raw materials—including metals—were a Chinese-government-owned and -run monopoly that primarily did business with other government businesses. They didn’t sell bucket quantities to nobody engineers with a dream; rather, they sold huge quantities to massive, inefficient factories at fixed prices.

Enter Joe Chen, scrap metal importer. Joe was big in those days, but that’s relative. Compared to a state-owned goliath, he was small-time and interested in one thing only: selling scrap to the highest bidder. So if you, a small-time engineer, wandered into his yard in search of a few buckets of brass with which you could make ballpoint pen balls, he was going to sell it to you—so long as you had the cash. And sell he did, all day long, to scrap buyers large and small, each in his own way building businesses, products, and buildings across Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta. Unlike the customers of China’s big state-owned metal companies, the buyers of imported scrap metal (from importers) were small, entrepreneurial, and new. They were also revolutionary: no longer would China’s entrepreneurs be denied the materials necessary to make their products. Scrap was eroding the key choke point of China’s centrally planned economy.

In the early nineteenth century, mechanized papermaking arrived in the United States. The market was wide: increasingly educated Americans were reading more newspapers, consuming more books, and writing more letters. To feed this demand, America’s papermakers relied upon old rags—mostly linen—for high-quality, low-cost pulp. Unfortunately for the papermakers, however, Americans simply couldn’t save enough rags to meet the demand for printed material. So America’s enterprising papermakers—and its entrepreneurial rag traders—made a very contemporary choice: they looked abroad to the more wasteful economies of Europe for their raw materials. According to data collected by the historian of American waste Susan Strasser, in 1850 Americans imported approximately 98 million pounds of scrap rags from Europe. Twenty-five years later the United States imported 123 million pounds of scrap rags, most of them from Victorian England. It bears repeating: scrap rags are not clean rags. Rather, they’re covered in filth of various types, including industrial, medical, and household. Nonetheless, as repulsive as one might find a barrel of used linen rags transported from England, nobody in nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century North America railed against the Victorians for “dumping” their “waste” on the still-developing economies of the former colonies. Rather, those Americans who bothered to pay attention to the trade viewed it as a necessary and economical (if occasionally distasteful) w...

Though the practice was legal, it was at best morally tenuous: in 1939 Japan was two years into a brutal occupation of China—for which war crimes trials would be held—a fact not unknown in the United States, to be kind. Likewise, in 1938 U.S. exporters sent 230,903 tons of scrap iron and steel to Germany—long after its racial policies were well known.

The free-market-inclined U.S. scrap industry may not have been roused by these disreputable episodes, but the Chinese-American community was. In 1939 and 1940, they organized protests at docks where scrap metal was being loaded for Japan. The American scrap men weren’t moved to restrict their trade (or show up for the protests), however, and the exports continued until President Roosevelt used his administrative authority to prohibit U.S. scrap exports to Japan and Germany in July 1940. The Japanese, undeterred, turned to Central and South America to meet their military-driven demand. That stopped it for a while. But only for a while. After World War II, the exports started all over again, especially to Japan, and then—in equally stunning volumes—to Taiwan.

The staff tells me that $147 billion in goods moved through here in the last twelve months, dating back to September 2004, carried in the equivalent of more than 13 million of these containers. I can’t visualize those numbers; they’re just too big. But the next number they provide is easy to visualize: only 10 percent of the containers held imported goods. The remaining 90 percent carried exportable goods. The 90/10 split is the inevitable by-product of decades-old trade imbalances between China, a country that manufactures more and more, and places like the United States and Europe, which manufacture less and less. In 2005, the year I ascended the YITC control tower, China exported $243 billion worth of goods to the United States; in return, the United States exported $41 billion worth of stuff to China.

Shipping empty containers is one option, but not a very profitable one. So what’s a shipping company to do? Step one, from a shipping company’s point of view, is to hold a sale and discount shipping rates to attract companies that might otherwise avoid export due to the perceived or real high cost of shipping. Which is precisely what has happened: the shipping companies have been discounting so-called backhauls for decades. In early summer 2012, for example, the price of shipping a 40,000-pound container from Los Angeles to Yantian was a paltry $600. Going from Yantian to Los Angeles, however, could cost four times as much. Step two, if you’re a shipping company, is to find an industry that (a) generates millions of pounds of product per year, and (b) has customers in China. Agricultural products like soybeans and wheat meet both requirements (as China grows richer, it eats more). But they tend to be grown and collected in such large volumes that they’re sent loose, in the spacious hulls of giant so-called bulk ships. With that as an option, it doesn’t make much economic sense to incur the expense of packing soybeans into bags or boxes and then sending them in shipping containers. Which leaves, really, only one high-volume product to fill all of those empty containers waiting to go back to China: scrap. And if you’re looking for scrap that can fill up containers, then there’s nothing better than blocks of scrap paper the size of hay bales. Consider: in 2012, American recyc...

In 2012 Americans exported almost 22.3 million tons—or roughly 40.5 percent—of the used paper and cardboard they harvested. Of that, the majority went to China in shipping containers that otherwise would have crossed the Pacific Ocean carrying nothing more than air. It was joined by millions of tons of recycled metal and plastic, all of which went—like that paper—on what amounted to the unused portion of a round-trip ticket from China to the United States, paid for by American consumers eager for Chinese-made goods. One way or another, the boat is going back to China, and the fuel to send it there is going to be burned, whether or not the ticket is paid for. So anybody—or anything—hopping on that boat is getting what amounts to a carbon-neutral boat ride to China (the weight of the containers is irrelevant: boats need ballast to balance in the water, and containers full of paper fulfill the function very well). Of course, the same cannot be said of the weekend recycler who drives the recycling down to the local county dropoff, burning gas all the way.

U.S. demand for Chinese goods means that a paper mill in southern China can outcompete a Chicago-area paper mill for a shipping container of old newspapers in Los Angeles. That’s the power of the backhaul—and American demand for Chinese-manufactured goods.

Perhaps one day the trade imbalances between China and the United States will disappear, and recyclers will no longer have a cost incentive to ship to China. But until that happens, the suspicious environmentally-minded recycler (such as the junior high version of myself) can take solace in knowing that less pollution will be generated sending a recycling bin full of paper from Los Angeles to China than sending it up to Seattle in an electric car.

Within a few years China was the biggest market by far for Alpert’s metals. But Alpert & Alpert wasn’t the only company to benefit: by 2000 China was the world’s biggest importer of scrap metal and paper. Low-cost labor and lax regulation played an important role in that shift, but they weren’t decisive factors by any means. After all, then as now there were places where labor is cheaper than in China, and environmental standards even lower. Indeed, if labor prices and environmental standards were 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. But what about India? Why isn’t it, and not China, the leading importer of scrap metal from the United States? On the high end, India’s scrap laborers make perhaps $80 per month compared to the $250 per month that the cheapest of Chinese scrap laborers make. Equally important, India is home to a growing array of manufacturers in need of metal...

the price to ship from Los Angeles to Yantian is significantly cheaper than the price to ship to India’s main scrap-receiving ports from the U.S. West Coast. The reason for this latter disparity is simple: India simply doesn’t export many products to the West Coast of the United States. Until it does, the shipping companies aren’t going to have much incentive to offer discount shipping rates for containers moving from Los Angeles to Mumbai.

However, India does export huge volumes of food and other goods to wealthy countries across the Middle East. Even more than their wealthy American, European, and Japanese counterparts, these Middle Eastern countries lack much of anything with which to fill those empty containers for the backhauls (oil, after all, moves in tankers, not containers). But, being rich, they do generate a lot of waste—in fact, per capita, they’re much more wasteful than Americans, even. So, no surprise, the top export, by volume, from Dubai to India is scrap paper and metal. ...

This isn’t the clean, crisp picture of waste dumping that exists in the West. Rather, it’s something more complicated: the emergence of a truly global market in old goods. Africa exports vast amounts of scrap to China; China exports scrap televisions to South America; South America sends scrap wire to China. All of this globalized scrap, every last hunk, moves according to who

In China, in India, and across Asia and Africa, the first thing that many an importer does when opening a container of freshly delivered scrap is seek out the bits that can be fixed up and resold rather than immediately remelted. After all, a hammer is worth more as a hammer than as a hunk of steel. But in countries where waste is divided into one of two categories—one that’s dropped into the recycling bin, and one that’s dropped into the trash bin—that distinction is mostly lost. So where’s the reuse bin? There is no reuse bin in your kitchen, of course, in societies where obsolescence is an obsession and many people simply can’t imagine owning an iPhone 4 in an iPhone 5 world. But that doesn’t mean the reuse bin doesn’t exist. Rather, it just happens to be located in the developing world, where old things that once belonged to Americans, Europeans, and Japanese are refurbished and pressed into new duty on a daily basis. Poverty may inspire the practice, but pragmatism has turned it into an industry.

Then they’d ship them to China, refurbish and reuse what the Americans didn’t repair, and pay workers $50 per month to break apart the ones that couldn’t be fixed. The remaining copper was sold for prices that, in those days, started around $1. Think about that: in the 1980s you could obtain, for free, something potentially worth over $10,000 the moment it hit Chinese shores. How many things are worth fifty times more in 2012 than they were in 1988? Internet and tech stocks aside, I can’t think of any. Yet I guarantee you there isn’t a single analyst on Wall Street with a chart tracking the Chinese price of electric motors over the last year, much less two decades.

Today, like most days, Johnson and Homer are interested in copper, and for very good reason: in 2012, China accounted for 43.1 percent of all global copper demand, or more than five times the amount demanded by the United States that same year. Why? One reason is that China is growing fast, and a modern economy can’t grow fast without copper. But the other major reason is that the last of the American factories devoted to refining copper from scrap metals shut down in 2000 due to the high cost of complying with environmental regulations (and in part due to enforcement actions against those who wouldn’t—or didn’t—comply). Partly as a result, China, which barely had a copper refining business in 1980, now has the world’s biggest. Not only that, it has some of the best, most technologically advanced (and environmentally secure) copper refineries in the world. So when Johnson goes out on the road to buy copper, he’s buying copper that might have once stayed in the United States, but now has nowhere else to go but China.

In fact, Wen’an was the perfect location for the scrap-plastics trade: 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?

As we bounce down the road, one of the company representatives tells us that most of Wen’an’s plastics businesses are located in forty to fifty villages that spill across the rural, unconnected county. The small scrapyard behind us belongs to a village, one of the company men tells us; it’s rumored to manufacture plastic bags from an ugly mix, including industrial-use plastics, which are then passed off as safe for food packaging. As the company men laugh at this, Josh looks at me—and then joins in, ruefully.

I look to my right, at the burial mounds, and notice that one of them has been severed in half and is slowly crumbling—bones and all—into the pit. The excavator that dug this pit cut cleanly through that grave as if it meant nothing to anyone, as if it were just dirt. It’s shocking: in China, where reverence for the dead is among the deepest of cultural imperatives, that pit, literally etched into a cemetery, is a cultural transgression of the first order.

Almost two years to the day after Josh and I visited Wen’an, I received an e-mail from him with some surprising news: Wen’an’s new Communist Party secretary had ordered the total shutdown of the county’s plastics recycling industry. Later press accounts claimed that 100,000 people were immediately left jobless, and countless thousands of small family businesses were rendered effectively bankrupt (both figures are believable). My initial response was a rush of jubilation: if anything needed to be shut down, it was Wen’an. I really should have known better. I flew up to Beijing a few weeks later and learned that—in the wake of the shutdown—the price of scrap plastics in the city had fallen by half. Peddlers who spent their days collecting plastic scrap suddenly had much less of a reason to do it. Warehouses where plastics used to be sold before being transferred to Wen’an started overflowing; plastics that used to be pulled from the trash, and people’s homes, now stayed in the trash. But the more serious problem was the long-term one. China needs recycled plastics to make everything from cell phones to coffee cups, and shutting down Wen’an won’t make that demand go away, any more than plugging an oil well will make people stop wanting gasoline.

Two very significant blows fundamentally altered the American auto-junking business in the mid-1950s. First, the price of American labor began to rise, making it increasingly difficult for U.S. scrapyards to pay teams of workers to tear down cars into their various components. Meanwhile, American steel mills began to upgrade their technologies, and by the early 1950s many were no longer interested in melting down old automobile bodies procured from scrapyards. The problem was copper: even a small amount—1 percent or so—when melted in a steel furnace will weaken the properties of steel. Scrapyard teams might have been good at stripping cars of their various metals, but extracting the last bit of copper was difficult—and expensive. By the mid-1950s, with many American steel mills no longer interested in buying cars from scrapyards, those same scrapyards stopped buying cars from Americans. The resulting cascade was predictable: Americans began abandoning their cars by the millions. By 1960 the abandoned automobile problem was a massive environmental crisis. Across America, streams, creeks, and fields were polluted by cars and their leaking oil, gas, and other fluids; junkyards with stacks of old automobiles destroyed views of America’s once-pristine countryside.

glance around the capacious room, its grays and browns uninterrupted, and it occurs to me that this is, in a sense, Green Heaven, where recycling equipment is recycled into new recycling equipment, shredded cars transformed into the means by which other cars will be shredded. It’s a solution to a problem that most Americans don’t even realize is a problem: how to get rid of their cars in a manner that reuses as much of the car as possible.

Henry Ford too saw commercial opportunities in abandoned cars. But rather than set up a large-scale burning operation, Ford tried to replicate the success he had with assembly lines by establishing a large-scale disassembly line. The idea was that economies of scale would take care of the profitability issue. So, for example, the seat stuffing from one Ford Model T might be a worthless nuisance, but the stuffing from hundreds might be something that could be sold, or reused in new Model Ts. Ford’s 1934 biographer, Robert Graves, referred to the operation as the “Reincarnation Department,” and during its short life it was apparently a sight to behold: hundreds of men deconstructed hundreds of automobiles per day into their components. There was only one problem: the Reincarnation Department lost lots and lots of money. The economies of scale were real, but so was the cost involved in paying hundreds of men to achieve them. And so, over the course of the 1930s, the Reincarnation Department was slowly laid to rest, piece by piece, line by line, as the business was reclaimed by the scrapyards.

“We had two, three cops on the corner. A guy set up a sandwich stand. We’d call up Subway, Pizza Hut, and order a hundred and twenty pan pizzas. Truck drivers were setting up barbecue grills in the yard.” I look at Christine, and she’s laughing with Dave. It’s funny, for sure. But it’s also astonishing, when you think about it: eighty years after the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, Americans finally managed to clean up a backlog of junked vehicles—and they did so in part because steel mills in Bangkok needed raw materials to make new cars and refrigerators for people in Southeast Asia.

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. The likely source of the poison was lead dust generated by the breaking of circuit boards and the melting of lead solder. A 2011 study staged in Guiyu showed that 25 percent of newborns had elevated levels of cadmium, a toxic substance that can cause kidney damage, reduction of bone density, and other debilitating effects.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Like most Americans, I don’t like the first verb, so I do my best to practice the second one. It’s better than the third, especially when the unwanted objects are electronics.

“In China, most people don’t even have safe food to eat, clean water to drink, and clean air to breathe,” he told me. “We are perhaps ten or twenty years from solving those problems. But the foreign environmental groups want us to worry about old computers and greenhouse gases. How can you worry about greenhouse gases and old computers if your kids don’t have safe milk to drink?”

So why, then, does e-waste command so much attention when we talk about recycling? Why do news organizations like the BBC regularly refer to the so-called e-waste crisis, when there is clearly a far bigger American food-waste crisis that receives almost no attention? Activists and others will argue—correctly—that e-waste contains hazardous substances that need to be handled properly when recycled. When they aren’t handled properly, they can cause environmental and safety problems. I agree—but only to a point. After all, plenty of other recyclable products have similar problems when it comes time to recycle—paper to plastics to copper—and yet they’re rarely the focus of activists. We don’t have a “waste-paper crisis” (and China has been struggling for two decades to clean up polluting paper mills) or a “plastic-bottle crisis.” Instead, we have an “e-waste crisis.” Why? In my opinion the answer is simple: any industry connected to IT in the twenty-first century will automatically receive an outsize portion of the media’s attention (scrap iPhones are sexy to reporters; rotting, unfinished piles of food are not). It helps, too, that the global IT industry has been among the strongest supporters—financially and otherwise—of efforts to prevent old and used electronics from being shipped to the developing world (Samsung and LG have been particularly active in this arena).

what was once a perfectly repairable old computer (which competes against the purchase of new computers) has over the last decade been rebranded as “hazardous e-waste.” That’s not good for consumers in the developing world, or for the environment.

I heard something similar a few days later in Bangalore, India’s Silicon City, home to one of the world’s most vibrant IT industries, and a thriving, informal, unsafe, and polluting e-waste reuse, repair, and recycling industry. There I sat down with Dr. Vaman Acharya, chairman of the Pollution Control Board in the state of Karnataka (home to Bangalore), to discuss e-waste. Thinking about the scale of poverty evident across this growing city, I asked him whether e-waste was his most pressing issue. He smiled. “No!” “Then what is?” “Garbage,” he answered, and went on to explain that he’s struggling to figure out how to handle all the nonrecyclable waste—mostly food waste—that households generate in his jurisdiction. His second concern was sewage, followed by industrial pollution, dust particulates generated by construction, biological wastes from medical facilities, plastics disposal and recycling, and the management of chemical wastes. E-waste was listed only at the end, after he couldn’t remember any other priorities. “I have much bigger issues!” he exclaimed. It was a clarifying lesson in what matters to the developing world.

But I know because it’s a 1999, I know that it has a certain kind of chip that I can sell for a certain price. Maybe I know that the screen has a different value. And maybe I know there’s memory in it, too, that has a value. So I can see more value in it than you can.” “Who buys it?” He laughs. “Somebody who wants to use the chip again! Many companies that make scrolling digital signs, they like these older chips. They can run that application for a long time.” In other words, the chip in my old Samsung might be extracted and then transplanted into a scrolling digital sign purchased by a Kansas diner to advertise the daily lunch specials. It’s a downgrade from running spreadsheets, Web browsers, and games, but it sure beats digging up gold, copper, and silicon for a chip.

“How long can a reusable chip run a sign?” I ask. “Hard to say,” Henry answers. “Maybe fifteen years.” That’s better than shredding and recycling, it seems to me. For Guiyu’s traders, according to Henry, it’s the reuse value, and not the scrap metal and plastic value, that really drive profitability. Think of it this way: Guiyu’s processors buy old phones by the ton, and prices might range as low as a penny or two for a device that contains perhaps a few pennies’ worth of gold, copper, and plastic. But if, as Henry implies, an old phone contains a chip that can be resold to a manufacturer of signs for $10? That’s a profitable business. “The reuse is maybe eighty percent of the profits in Guiyu,”