Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

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...