Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

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 grandmother, the second of Abe’s five children, liked to recall that her older brother Mort’s bar mitzvah was paid for by the labor that she and her siblings expended “cleaning” iron from scrap copper plumbing fixtures.