Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

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.