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…
Blog Archives
Making Everest Safe Makes it Unsafe.
A couple of days ago I published a Bloomberg View column on ways to reduce deaths – and crowds – on Mount Everest. The two are closely related: too many people on the summit means that climbers are spending too much time in a dangerous, low oxygen environment. Why the crowds? Nepal’s government earns needed…
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…
The More Things Change in China – Hershey’s Chocolate Edition
The other day I was scanning headlines and came across an interesting item: earnings are suffering at Hershey’s chocolate due to a disappointing China performance. That’s not how it was supposed to work out: back in 2013 Hershey, in an expansionist mood, acquired candy maker Shanghai Golden Money for $584 million, in hopes that it could become China’s…
Who Will Protest China’s Stock Market Plunge?
Last August several hundred protestors gathered outside the Shanghai sales office of China Greentown Holdings, a real estate developer, holding banners with slogans such as “300,000 yuan worth of assets evaporate within five days — years of work in vain!” That loss – around $48,000 – was the difference between what the protestor had paid…
What Does Hillary Clinton Think About My Blog?
Last night the State Department released around 3000 of Hillary Clinton’s private emails to its website. To my great surprise, one short email exchange was concerning this blog (thanks to James West at Mother Jones for bringing it to my attention). The topic was a blog post that I’d written on the diplomatic fiasco that…
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…