Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

The global recycling industry turns over as much as $500 billion annually—roughly equal to the GDP of Norway—and employs more people than any other industry on the planet except agriculture.

if what you toss into your recycling bin can be used in some way, the international scrap recycling business will manage to deliver it to the person or company who can do so most profitably. Usually, but not always, that profitable option is going to be the most sustainable one.

Wow coming into this book i was totally expecting the exact opposite thesis

If your first priority is the environment, recycling is merely the third-best option in the well-known pyramid that every American schoolchild learns: reduce, reuse, recycle.

In fact, U.S. manufacturers (second only to China in total output) still use roughly two-thirds of the recycled materials that are generated within U.S. borders.

the world’s most recycled product (by weight) isn’t a newspaper, a notebook computer, or a plastic water bottle—it’s an American automobile, most of which is metal.

Today, the line is designed and tuned to receive a single stream that’s roughly 70 percent newsprint, magazines, and junk mail. But that’s changing: more and more Houstonians are reading their papers on e-readers. There are good statistics to back up the shift: according to Moore & Associates, an Atlanta paper recycling consultancy, in 2002 Americans recycled 10.492 million tons of newsprint. In 2011 they recycled 6.615 million tons. As a direct result, junk mail, as a percentage of the recyclable waste stream, is growing. For the purposes of a mechanical sorting line, that’s a big shift: junk mail weighs less, and is worth less, than newsprint.

Id like to see these stats for 2019 (2020 has been a weird year). Newspaper is proobably all the way down while cardboard is probably wayyyy up

In fact, according to one survey, by 1900 24.5 percent of New York’s Jews were active in some facet of the junk trade.

But one simple fact remains: cleaning up someone else’s garbage is an inherently dangerous business. The best solution—really, the only solution—is to stop throwing away so much stuff. Every old piece of plumbing, every used computer, is just another opportunity for someone to be injured.

Scrap was eroding the key choke point of China’s centrally planned economy.

The e-waste processors] will tell you, ‘I can’t worry about health effects twenty years from now,’” she explained. “‘If I don’t do this work, I’ll starve and die tomorrow.’” Later in the interview she concluded: “You can’t always be so idealistic.”

TCL, one of China’s largest consumer appliance manufacturers, and a company with deep roots in the People’s Liberation Army.

I have never heard of this link and cant find anything online...

Unbelievable how they know all of the chips just by looking at the phone model.” “The phones aren’t reusable?” “Of course not!” He laughs. “They’re five years old. Who wants them? Even in Africa, the market isn’t so good for these anymore.” Even in Africa, where the living standards are often lower than the poor villages that supply labor to Guiyu, they want to upgrade to something better. It’s the modern mindset, the source of Guiyu’s scrap.

When I speak to groups about recycling, the first question is usually: What can we do to improve our recycling rates? I have two answers, the first of which is this: If the goal is conservation, then boosting recycling rates is far less important than reducing the overall volume of waste generated—recyclable or otherwise. Recycling, as I noted earlier in this book, is often just a means of fighting off the garbage man for a little while longer.