In fact, Wen’an was the perfect location for the scrap-plastics trade: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry—farming—was disappearing as the region’s once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region’s rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can’t help but wonder: How much of the plastic that
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