During the run-up to the November 12 release of my first book, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion Dollar Trash Trade, every weekday I’m posting a new photo taken during my decade of reporting on the global waste, recycling, refurbishment, and repair trade. Today’s image takes you inside of a recycling business that specializes in creating new life for the wood scraps that come out of demolitions such as the one featured in yesterday’s scene. As always, click for an enlargement:
This 2007 image was taken at a wood recycling business in Wuxi, roughly 80 miles west of Shanghai. In the background are a small handful of the 700 million wood pallets that are manufactured, annually, to help in the shipping of goods around the world; in front of them are stacks of plywood, beams, and other random wood waste purchased from demolition sites in the Wuxi area by independent scrap peddlers; in the foreground, is a mat covered in nails removed from this wood. In the developed world, and especially the United States, the plywood and other demolition waste would never make it to a recycling site; it’d be landfilled with the rest of the demolished building. The pallets, however, are another matter: mechanical pallet recycling equipment is common throughout the developed world, saving millions of trees per year from being transformed into packing materials (they’re also occasionally re-used in some remarkably creative ways). In China and other developing countries, labor is cheap enough that the pallet recycling process can be done by hand – as we’ll see tomorrow.
Previous ‘Scenes from a Junkyard Planet’ can be found here.