Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
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Overview
How can garbage turn into gold? What does recycling have to do with globalization? Where does all that stuff we throw away go, anyway?
When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday’s newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don’t want and turn it into something you can’t wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter-veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner-travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, 500-billion-dollar industry that’s transforming our economy and environment.
Minter takes us from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to recycling factories capable of processing a jumbo jet’s worth of trash every day. Along the way, we meet an international cast of characters who have figured out how to squeeze Silicon Valley-scale fortunes from what we all throw away. Junkyard Planet reveals how “going green” usually means making money-and why that’s often the most sustainable choice, even when the recycling methods aren’t pretty.
With unmatched access to and insight on the waste industry, and the explanatory gifts and an eye for detail worthy of a John McPhee or William Langewiesche, Minter traces the export of America’s garbage and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of how the way we consume and discard stuff brings home the ascent of a developing world that recognizes value where Americans don’t. Junkyard Planet reveals that Americans might need to learn a smarter way to take out the trash.
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MEAN, GREEN: Recyling is big business. The reclamation and scrap trade posts billions in annual profits, mostly from recovering raw materials that America no longer has the industrial capacity to process. Wasted reveals a hidden trade deficit that’s leaking lots of money out of our economy.
SAVE THE PLANET: As climate concerns and economic woes multiply, the story of scrapping and reclamation points a way to a thriftier, cleaner future--although there is a lot of work left to do.
BIG EAST: More and more American firms do business in China, and Minter’s expertise in Chinese business culture is a fascinating--and valuable--introduction to the Wild East.
Minter successfully resists oversimplifying the issue China currently faces - with a growing middle class demanding more raw material for new construction, the options are living with the pollution caused by recycling or the environmental consequences of mining for raw materials...Minter concludes that the solution is in the first word in the phrase, ’Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.’
A detailed view of a mostly unknown business that touches the lives of everyone, whether or not they ever dragged a trash and/or recycle bin out to the curb.
Minter is here to tell you that there’s big money to be made in what American consumers and industries throw away. As he travels the world from Houston to Guangzhou, surveying the debris and discards that fill scrap yards and warehouses, Minter takes the reader into a world of commodities trading that is every bit as lucrative and cutthroat as anything on Wall Street. The son of a scrap man, Minter brings an insider’s knowledge and appreciation for an industry that no one thinks about, everyone contributes to, and a lucky few profit from.
A satisfying investigation-cum-travelogue.
Fascinating.
Lively and entertaining...Junkyard Planet is a book for anyone interested in the environment, the economics of recycling, or a thoughtful look at the consumption we take for granted.
Eye-opening… [Minter is] an excellent guide to this sprawling and bewildering trade.
Superbly researched.
- Title: Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
- Author: Adam Minter
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 288
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781608197927, 9781608197934, 160819793X, 1608197921
- Resource ID: LLS:9781608197927
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:20:34Z
Adam Minter grew up in a family of scrap dealers in Minneapolis. He became a professional journalist and now serves as the Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View, in addition to making regular contributions to the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and other publications. He now lives in Shanghai and blogs at shanghaiscrap.com. Junkyard Planet is his first book.