Adam Minter - Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

Copyright 2013 by Adam Minter
Map copyright Gary Antonetti

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information, write to Bloomsbury Press, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York, 10018.

Portions of the preface and chapter 13 were originally published in different form in the Atlantic as The Chinese Town That Turns Your Old Christmas Tree Lights into Slippers and Scrapped.

Portions of chapters 5, 9, and 10 were originally published in different form in Scrap as The Future of Brass City, Chinas Plastics Frontier, and The Industrial Revolution.

A section of chapter 14 was originally published in different form in Recycling International as A Happy Marriage of Processor and Machine Maker.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Minter, Adam, 1970
Junkyard planet: travels in the billion-dollar trash trade / Adam Minter. First U.S. edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
eISBN 978-1-60819-792-7
1. Refuse disposal industry. 2. Refuse and refuse disposal. 3. Scrap materials. 4. Recycling (Waste, etc.) I. Title.
HD9975.A2M495 2013
338.47363728dc23
2013011750

First U.S. Edition 2013
This electronic edition published in November 2013

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For my grandmother, Betty Zeman.
She scrapped.

Rusted brandy in a diamond glass
Everything is made from dreams

TOM WAITS, TEMPTATION

Bales of Christmas tree lights at L. Gordon Iron & Metal in Statesville, North Carolina.
All photos by the author except where otherwise stated.

Bales of imported U.S. Christmas tree lights, ready to be recycled at Raymond Lis Christmas tree light recycling factory in Shijiao, China.

Lis recycling system uses flowing water and a tilted, vibrating table to separate heavier copper from lightweight insulation. Similar systems exist across China. This one runs in Ningbo.

Raymond Li (far left) and family.

Cousin Yao (left), designer of Lis Christmas tree light recycling system, opens a several-thousand-pound sack of copper recycled in the factory.

Workers pull plastic from almost-sorted paper at Waste Managements Houston Material Recovery Facility. In the background, bales of sorted paper are stacked for shipment.

A bale of sorted paper in front of cages that hold sorted tin cans, juice boxes, and plastic bottles after theyve been shot from the sorting line.

Bales of sorted, recyclable plastics at the Houston Material Recovery Facility. The bales in the center of the image are packed with curbside recycling bins that fell into trucks while being emptied.

Household recyclables in China are collected and sorted by peddlers, then sold to recycling centers. At this Beijing plastics recycling center, entrepreneurs rent space and hand-sort bottles into different plastic types.

The family-owned scrap warehouse where I learned the business.

My grandmother was the daughter of a Russian-Jewish immigrant junk peddler. Here shes seated next to the cash register and truck scale monitor at my fathers scrapyard, doing what she liked best: buying scrap.

Inside the scrap warehouse. Rarely did a box of junkas my grandmother called itremain more than a week.

A worker at the Rama Paper Mills outside of Delhi, India, separates cardboard from white paper in textbooks and notebooks imported from the United Arab Emirates.

The result is higher-quality recycled cardboard and higher-quality white paper.

The sample wall at OmniSources Fort Wayne wire chopping plant may be the worlds most complete collection of the means by which Americans have transmitted power and information over the last half-century.

Pieces of 99.5-percent-pure copper, recovered from wire recycled at OmniSources wire chopping factory.