[I am on the road – with the flu – for the next couple of days. So posting will be light. Cough, cough.]
Below, a few photos of a cable stripping operation in Qingyuan, about 1.5 hours north of Guangzhou. The process in the first photo reduces imported North American (in this case) communication cable to its constituent parts, ie, copper, insulation, etc. Everything is then recycled. I don’t know the salary base of the workers in this particular workshop, but my somewhat educated guess is US$75 – US$100.
Readers of Shanghai Scrap not familiar with the particulars of the Asian recycling trade (most of my readers) might be surprised to learn that this process is actually a great boon to the environment. Indeed, even five years ago, cables such as these most likely would have been stripped of their metal casing and then burned. Today, burning is uncommon in China and, as a result, the rubber and plastic that used to be incinerated and emitted into the air, is now fed into China’s thriving secondary plastics trade. Below, workers rip, pull, and twist off the cable casing.
The individual wires are fed into a stripping machine, spit out, and a worker then separates the insulation from the copper. Note the barely visible blue bucket of copper wires behind her.
Eventually the copper (and everything else) is sent for recycling. Below, a nearby state-owned copper smelter fed by recovered, imported copper scrap.
