Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

Give or take a few percentage points, that 34 percent is roughly the same percentage achieved by New York, Minneapolis, and other U.S. cities with long-standing recycling programs. But Houston? As recently as 2008 Houston only managed to recycle 2.6 percent of its municipal solid waste. The other 97.4 percent? By and large, it was landfilled. Since 2008, the rate has been pushed up to “six or seven percent,” according to a sheepish Alan. That’s not good, by any definition. How to explain it? For people who live in places like San Francisco, where the recycling rate exceeds 70 percent, a popular explanation is that rednecks don’t like recycling. But that’s not only condescending, it demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how and why San Francisco’s trash is recycled at such a high rate. No doubt culture, education, and income play a role in how much actual waste a particular person or place recycles. But in my experience, no culture encourages a high recycling rate quite like the culture of poverty. In essence: if you can afford very little, you’ll tend to reuse a lot. So in San Francisco a glass jar of Trader Joe’s bruschetta is likely headed directly to the recycling bin; in the slums of Mumbai that same jar—if somebody could afford it—might very well become a kitchen implement. The slum dwellers of Mumbai have a far higher recycling rate than the suburbs of San Francisco because (a) they consume less—for example, no iPad boxes to recycle—and (b) daily survival requi...