Book: Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter

This was a fascinating book. Who would have known, right? that a book about what we throw away could be so  interesting...

So all of us who put our little recycling bins out are really only "harvesting" Adam reminds us. What then happens to our stuff? "Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place."

The author is seldom this confrontational and admits that, he too, wants the latest iPhone.

Much of it eventually ends up in China where things like Christmas tree lights and our "e-waste" and old cars (the average life of an American car is only 10 years!) are deconstructed (often by hand) in order to separate and salvage the components for re-use. Our discards arrive via container ships. That is one part of this story. Of course, as China and India become wealthier and their standard of living rises, they also produce more and more junk.

Each chapter is packed with information as Adam travels the world, riding with Chinese scrap buyers in the US, attending scrap dealer conventions, visiting the scrap factories in China and high tech plants in our country. He concentrates on China's role in this global market since he lives in Shanghai. His family owned a junkyard, a recycling plant in Minnesota, so he has street cred and is granted access where few westerners would be allowed.

His writing is engaging, informative and not boring in the least. After all, we are ones making the junkyard planet. We should be interested. The statistics are astounding.

"We arrive late…but the upper section of the street is still dominated by a long flatbed piled ten feet high with tightly packed automobile bumpers, laundry detergent bottles, plastic washing machine gears. plumbing, defective factory parts, television cases, and heavy-duty plastic bags stuffed with plastic factory rejects from somewhere far away. Workers climb atop it and unload the pieces by hand, dropping parts and bags to the ground, where they're inspected and weighed by two portly men with notepads…We walk the length of the street…The cobblestones bake in the sun, covered in trash, melted plastics, and burn marks where unrecyclable--that is, unsalable--materials were dispatched in the night. Here and there, small-scale buyers cart around old plastic detergent containers dripping of their former contents; the pungent aroma of melting plastic wafts through an open gate. At the end of the street is a drainage ditch--perhaps once a creek--choked with garbage, a plastic mannequin head, and the remains of a green plastic bin with three circling arrows and the word RECYCLING in a English."

"Soon, maybe later today, my old phones will be downstairs in that fisherman's cage, awaiting an acid bath that'll turn them into gold and the sweet stench that chokes this dusty town. But that won't be the end. Soon after, that gold and the other raw materials will be sold to a factory that transforms them into new things--smartphones, computers, and the other accessories of daily life…Still, environmentally secure electronics recycling is far from a priority in a place that lacks access to clean air, water, and--in many rural areas--proper childhood nutrition. Right or wrong, for many Chinese--especially in Guiyu--electronics recycling is a route to prosperity that might allow them to afford those bigger problems."

We wander outside and up a narrow dirt path that winds between the abandon homes that once constituted an old village. The doors are wooden and red, the walls thick cement. Down one lane I see laundry hanging from a line between building, and near another lane I smell old urine. There's no scent of burning electronics here, no stench of wealth…."

Lots of quotes here and these were selected by randomly opening the book here and there. Such is the quality of Minter's writing that every page is compelling…..