Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

Perhaps, in his stubbornness, he believed that the price would eventually rebound, that all of the recently abandoned construction sites in Beijing—the ones kicking up all of the dust—would resume, need window frames, and drive up the price of cans again. In November 2008, though, it didn’t look like a very good bet. Aluminum cans weren’t the only recyclable items trending into worthlessness on that brisk November day. On a nearby corner, piles of cardboard—once a highly sought commodity among Beijing’s cagey scrap peddlers—sat in the early winter sun, awaiting a taker. But nobody was taking: the economic crisis had sapped the will of Americans to buy anything, and since most anything that Americans purchase is packaged in cardboard, the price of used cardboard, too, had plummeted. By day’s end, the China World’s cardboard, once worth a day’s wage to a scrap peddler, would be on its way to a landfill or an incinerator, and nobody—not a scrap peddler, an environmentalist, or a dock manager hoping for some cash on the side—could do a thing about it.