Scenes from a Junkyard Planet: Hunks of Scrap Day 2

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. This week, at the strong suggestion of my wife, I’m running a series…

Scenes from a Junkyard Planet: Hunks of Scrap, Day 1

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 was suggested by wife who expressed concern that last week’s images…

Stop the Baseless Panicking Over E-Waste

What happens to your old phones, computers, televisions and other devices when you drop them into the recycling bin? For more than a decade, the standard answer to that question has been some variation of: they’re “dumped” in China. The examples are rife: from a Peabody-award winning story by Sixty Minutes, to beautifully laid-out, two-page…

Junkyard Planet

This just in: I’ve turned in the manuscript to my first book, Junkyard Planet, to Bloomsbury Press. It’s a first-person account of the globalizing waste and recycling industry, from the wilds of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to the grimy scrap boomtowns of south China. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll visit the machine that recovers most of…

Offline until JULY 8

For the next month, give or take, I’ll be in a secure, undisclosed location finishing a book for Bloomsbury Press about the globalization of the recycling and waste trade. By design, I’ll have sporadic access to email, so if you contact me please understand if I don’t get back to you right away. But I will…