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 scene shows a typical, small-scale wire recycling operation in South China. As always, click for an enlargement.
Today’s image was taken in 2007, not far from where yesterday’s “head cutting” image was snapped in Qingyuan, China. As it happens, Qingyuan might very well be the wire recycling capital of China – which means, based on China’s appetite for recycling, it’s likely one of the world’s wire recycling capitals. That may sound like a dubious, possibly small-time label – until you consider that roughly half of the copper used in China comes from recycled resources like cable. Here, two sisters liberate copper from insulation by running individual strands through a stripping machine, which produces an incision, and then tearing away the plastic. South China is home to thousands of these kinds of workshops, many of which are family-owned. Where families aren’t involved in ownership, invariably the employees are family members accustomed to working together in farms and other traditional enterprises. Wire stripping, however, pays much better. At the time this photo was taken, workers would have made in the range of $300 – $400 per month.
Previous ‘Scenes from a Junkyard Planet’ can be found here.
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