Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

On a hot August day, First America Metal in Joliet, Illinois, looks like any American machine shop. It’s located at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a green lawn, and accented by a tall flagpole that flies the American Stars and Stripes. Nothing about the place suggests it’s one of the most successful Chinese American–owned and –run scrapyards in the United States. In fact, most people don’t realize that scrap men with deep personal connection to China—and they’re almost all men—are quietly buying up and running scrapyards across the United States. The motivation isn’t hard to discern: they want to cut out the middleman—in this case, the American scrapyard standing between China’s raw materials importers and the Americans who toss all that metal and paper into their recycling bins. It’s harder than it sounds, as many Chinese scrap companies have already found out,