Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

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.” According to Zimring’s work with U.S. Census data, in 1880 over 70 percent of the workers in the American waste trades were European-born, with the majority coming from Ireland, Poland, and Germany.