Book review: Junkyard Planet, by Adam Minter
By the 1970s, the United States was a veritable scrapyard, with rusting cars and abandoned farming and factory equipment scattered all over the country. But then the Chinese came, Adam Minter writes in Junkyard Planet, his tour de force journey through the global scrap trade.
by Adam Minter
Bloomsbury
4 stars
By the 1970s, the United States was a veritable scrapyard, with rusting cars and abandoned farming and factory equipment scattered all over the country. But then the Chinese came, Adam Minter writes in , his tour de force journey through the global scrap trade.
Charting the movement of scrap around the world, and the role the industry plays in shaping the planet, Minter goes from hi-tech factories in the US, where automated machinery sorts different types of recyclable plastic bottles by blasting them with shots of air while they move past on a conveyor belt, to dirty factory floors in China and India where everything is sorted by hand by low-paid labourers.
In between Minter follows the flow of junk and the evolution of the industry from something that was dominated by mostly poor Jewish immigrants in America at the end of the 19th century - a group often unable, through discrimination, to find meaningful work in other professions - to an industry worth US$500 billion annually, and one that employs more people than any other on the planet, with the exception of agriculture.
It doesn't take long to realise the scrap industry provides a new look at the history of the world. In one of the more fascinating sections of the book, Minter writes about how scrap and scrap traders were instrumental in China's economic development, especially in the early 1990s.
As he explains it, at the beginning of the reform and opening-up period, only state-owned enterprises had access to raw materials, so even if entrepreneurs had a great idea, it was impossible to get the supplies needed to make their dream a reality. Small-scale scrap dealers plugged this hole, importing metal from overseas and selling it to anyone who had the money.
And, as China became the factory of the world, it became cheaper to send scrap metal or paper for recycling all the way to the mainland, further fuelling its economy: demand for Chinese goods in the US meant cargo companies offered cheap rates on ships leaving the US, ships that would otherwise depart from the ports of China full but return empty. As Minter puts it: "The majority of [used paper and cardboard] went to China in shipping containers that otherwise would have crossed the Pacific Ocean carrying … air."
