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 answers a simple question: how the hell do you collect all the loose nails in a pile of scrap wood (like those we’ve seen in this week’s Scenes from a Junkyard Planet? Shanghai Scrap is here to answer – click for an enlargement:
A magnetic mace. This one, photographed in 2007 at the same Wuxi, China recycling yard as the previous two photos, is the first that I’d ever seen, and I must admit: I was impressed. The woman carrying it was a fierce, no nonsense character who took her job seriously. That job, best as I could tell, was to wave that thing over piles of plywood and pallets, as well as ground where plywood and pallets had been cleaned of nails,in hope of attracting whatever was loose (those that weren’t loose were pulled by hand and pliers). Later, when the magnetic mace was full, she stripped the nails into a bucket. An employee, I’m told, would later be assigned to pull out the re-usable nails; the unusable nails would be sold to a peddler who would later sell it to a steel recycler.
Previous ‘Scenes from a Junkyard Planet’ can be found here.