Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

This isn’t the clean, crisp picture of waste dumping that exists in the West. Rather, it’s something more complicated: the emergence of a truly global market in old goods. Africa exports vast amounts of scrap to China; China exports scrap televisions to South America; South America sends scrap wire to China. All of this globalized scrap, every last hunk, moves according to who wants it most, and who can ship it most cheaply.

Meanwhile, up in Detroit, Henry Ford too saw commercial opportunities in abandoned cars. But rather than set up a large-scale burning operation, Ford tried to replicate the success he had with assembly lines by establishing a large-scale disassembly line. The idea was that economies of scale would take care of the profitability issue. So, for example, the seat stuffing from one Ford Model T might be a worthless nuisance, but the stuffing from hundreds might be something that could be sold, or reused in new Model Ts. Ford’s 1934 biographer, Robert Graves, referred to the operation as the “Reincarnation Department,” and during its short life it was apparently a sight to behold: hundreds of men deconstructed hundreds of automobiles per day into their components. There was only one problem: the Reincarnation Department lost lots and lots of money. The economies of scale were real, but so was the cost involved in paying hundreds of men to achieve them. And so, over the course of the 1930s, the Reincarnation Department was slowly laid to rest, piece by piece, line by line, as the business was reclaimed by the scrapyards.

I look at Christine, and she’s laughing with Dave. It’s funny, for sure. But it’s also astonishing, when you think about it: eighty years after the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, Americans finally managed to clean up a backlog of junked vehicles—and they did so in part because steel mills in Bangkok needed raw materials to make new cars and refrigerators for people in Southeast Asia.

According to research done by Willie Cade, an American electronics refurbisher who advises the UN’s Environmental Program, 25 percent of the hard drives sent for recycling and refurbishment in the United States have been used less than 500 hours. For all intents and purposes, those are new hard drives that can be used for hundreds of hours more.

Think about that the next time you come across a 1982 penny in your pocket: you might be holding the recycled remains of your grandfather’s chrome-plated hot rod.

It usually takes about a decade for a car to go from assembly line to scrapyard, and sure enough, in the mid-1980s—a decade after the oil shocks—Huron Valley started noticing a big change in the SNF running through its plants.