acid in its wake. As Minter says, after visiting a copper mine in Minnesota, why would anyone mine this metal when “there’s an endless supply of perfectly recyclable and reusable copper—worth billions!—available in the junkyards and recycling bins of America?” (The scrap may be here, but the means of transforming it aren’t: the last U.S. copper smelter shut down in 2000, and China is now home to the largest copper refining industry in the world. Why, you may be asking, is copper such a big deal? It’s essential in hybrid motors and wind turbines, and in transmitting information and energy, to name just a few of its uses.) Minter travels far and wide, traipsing through trash heaps in India, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Taiwan, and beyond. He describes piles in scrapyards, piles in warehouses, piles in the front yards of shacks. He watches, awestruck, as a million-dollar machine in Indiana pulverizes cars into streams of ferrous and nonferrous metals, plastics, and glass, and he marvels as thousands of low-wage laborers in Asia unwind copper wires from small electric motors and hack the aluminum from discarded water meters. At another workshop, he observes gloved hands sorting through “fingernail-sized flecks” of metal and tossing them into buckets. “Each piece, on its own, is nothing; each bucket is little more than nothing; but weeks and days of so much nothing can add up to millions of dollars,” Minter writes. The recycling of Christmas tree lights exemplifies the value of hand work and diverse markets: American scrappers gather the plastic- or rubber-coated wires, and when enough are accumulated, they are baled up and sold to Chinese importers, who in turn sell them to processors who pay workers to strip the strands and extract the copper. (Some companies even find a use for the discarded insulation: it goes into the
soles of slippers.) The margin on these goods is often pennies, but handle 10 million pounds a year and . . . you get the picture. Junkyard Planet is an affirmation of the transformative power of capitalism. As waste travels the world, economies grow, livelihoods improve, and stuff that looks like “borderline trash” morphs into crucial raw materials. After a decade on his beat, Minter has dozens of Chinese banquets’ worth of contacts to support this narrative. However, while he dines and travels with the captains of industry, he spends no time with the people wearing the work gloves after they leave their posts in factories and shops. To be sure,
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fumes and acids: food security and safety, for example. But aren’t all these things connected? Minter doesn’t linger on these issues. If Americans are worried about the well-being of plastics workers, he suggests they think twice about buying disposable plastics in the first place, then urge corporations that use recycled plastic in their packaging to seek less-polluting suppliers. Prohibiting the export of plastics to Wen’an or electronics to Guiyu, a town criticized by eco-activists for lax health and safety standards, won’t improve conditions for laborers, Minter says. But raising their standard of living will. Minter has great affection for
and mills hungry for more plastics, paper, metals, and electronic waste—may wish this activity happened closer to home, but Minter explains carefully why it does not. Of course there are downsides to the global scrap trade, beyond its carbon footprint and the outsourcing of jobs. It can be difficult to track where things end up, who is handling them, and how. This is especially important when considering plastics and electronic waste, which involve so many toxic materials and processes. Yes, oversight of environmental and human health impacts should be much tighter, but responsibly repurposing, refurbishing, and recycling these goods is, on the whole, far
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Oil and Honey By Bill McKibben, Times Books, 272 pp., $26 one day bill mcKIBBEN WILL GET THE BIOGRAPHY HE DESERVES. Precociously gifted, he arrived at the New Yorker magazine in 1982, straight from the Harvard Crimson. In 1989 he published The End of Nature, the first book to galvanize public awareness of the perils of climate change. Since then he has written about everything from religion and genetic engineering to the limitations of the growth economy. His work has graced many of the country’s finest magazines, including OnEarth, where he is a contributing editor. Along the way he has also become the country’s best-known environmental activist, most recently through his leadership of the campaign against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. His latest book, Oil and Honey, combines an account of his fight to end our addiction to fossil fuels with his enduring love of the small and the local—in this case the passion of a Vermont beekeeper.
Minter observes dangerous work- this much-maligned industry. And place conditions, but he doesn’t who can resist the archetypal apask laborers how those conditions peal of spinning mountains of affect them personally. There’s an gold from endless streams of assumption here that the workers, straw? Like an exploded-view many of whom labored on farms diagram, Junkyard Planet illufor subsistence wages before pro- minates how this system moves cessing facilities pushed them off massive amounts of material to the land, are better off today. As a manufacturers who will make use researcher with China’s Ministry of it, diminishes demand for minof Environmental Protection told ing and drilling, and lifts millions the author, Chinese workers have from poverty along the way. Proponents of relomore pressing calization—and problems Read more about China getting tough than illness on the recycling and scrap business at the owners of onearth.org/greenfence domestic plants triggered by
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better for the planet than the alternative: incinerating or burying them, and then extracting new materials in order to make more. Refurbishing used electronics, a significant part of the global trade in e-waste, also provides low-cost devices to millions who would otherwise go without. One might wish that recycling didn’t enable planned obsolescence, or spur the production and consumption of consumer goods bound, in short order, to be landfilled, or let producers off the hook for generating excessive and
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