Below, a pic I took a few weeks ago in Hauqiangbei, a commercial district in Shenzhen, China. It’s the beating heart of the global electronics industry, the world’s most important marketplace for everything electronic – phones, computers, playable piano keyboards that roll up like a crepe (~$15, I bought one), you name it. But what makes…
All posts in Scrap
Recycling is dead. Long live recycling.
How do you illustrate a commodity collapse? If you’re my colleagues at Bloomberg, you take 33 different materials – metals to crops – and you create an index. Lately, it’s a downward plot. But as much as I like graphs, I’ve been searching for another way. One copper trading friend told me that business is…
The Junkman is Your Green Future
Most of the talks I give touch on some aspect of my family background. But for plenty of reasons, I’ve skirted opportunities to go deeper (except in Junkyard Planet). But back in June, when I was invited to participate in TEDxBeijing, I decided to dig a little deeper. In part I did so because I’ve…
Here’s what John Tierney left out of his anti-recycling screed.
Over the weekend the New York Times’ John Tierney published “The Reign of Recycling,” his attempt to show that recycling is more sentiment than it is good environmental stewardship, much less, good business. I’ll have much more to say about the meat of his work soon, but for now I’d like to make one small point…
Junkyard Planet Goes to China
I’m pleased – as in thrilled – to announce that the Chinese edition of Junkyard Planet has just been published. When I started writing the book four years ago, I always had a Chinese audience in mind. Nonetheless, for all kinds of reasons, there was never any guarantee that I’d reach that audience. So the fact that…
Anatomy of a Myth: the World’s Biggest E-Waste Dump Isn’t.
Let’s start with two photographs. The first was shot by me in China’s Hunan Province. It shows a warehouse that contains roughly 5,000 old locally-collected televisions awaiting recycling. This photo only captures a portion of what is a big inventory, and a big operation. Every day more arrive. Most people outside of China have never…
The actual reason nobody’s interested in stealing your scrap metal, anymore.
On Monday the New York Times ran a very good portrait of a Detroit metal scrapper going about his business, scrounging for metal and seeking places to sell it. Business isn’t what it used to be, the Times tells us, mostly thanks to a spate of law enforcement measures that make it harder to fence…
American Dockworkers Are Savaging Your Recycling Bin.
Last year, roughly one-third of the recycling generated in the United States was exported to more than 160 countries and territories. That’s 42.8 million tons – enough weight to fill over 2 million standard-sized shipping containers – worth $23.7 billion. China was the top destination for those exports (Canada was number two), while South Korea,…
What Does San Diego Have Against Recycling, Free Enterprise, and the American Way?
For more than a decade, Gary Ries of Mission Hills, California, has spent his spare time earning money by picking recyclable cans and bottles from trash cans owned by the city of San Diego. Under most definitions, this is laudable entrepreneurship and everyone wins: Ries makes a few extra bucks, San Diego trucks a few…
What Really Happens to Your Christmas Tree Lights After You Recycle Them?
As readers of Junkyard Planet know, that’s a question that I’ve been asking since 2011, and my first visit to Shijiao, a small-town in south China that I call the ‘Christmas Tree Light Recycling Capitol of the World.’ The story of Shijiao is about more than just the recycling of Christmas tree lights. In many…