Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

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.