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 we get personal, with the archetype of the guy you’ll likely meet…
All posts in Scrap
Scenes from a Junkyard Planet: Your American Recycling Bin, at Home.
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 is mean to contrast with yesterday’s. As always, click for an enlargement.…
Scenes from a Junkyard Planet: Your American Recycling Bin, Transported.
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. Click for an enlargement. A humid day in 2004, almost 250 miles inland from…
Scenes from a Junkyard Planet: Carnival Cans
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. Click to enlarge: Workers at a Rio-area scrap yard knee-deep in (mostly) beer…
Scenes from a Junkyard Planet: A First Scrapyard
Starting today, through the November 12 release date of my first book, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion Dollar Trash Trade, I’m posting a new photo taken during my decade of reporting on the global waste, recycling, refurbishment, and repair trade. At the end of the three months, I hope you’ll have a better visualization of…
When Child Labor Isn’t Child Labor, and ‘Underage Labor’ is Just Something You Say.
What motivates an activist to exaggerate and even lie about the conditions in which Chinese laborers live and work? Like many, I first pondered this question after hearing Mike Daisey’s infamous This American Life episode. And, like many, I never thought that others would dare follow in his dishonest footsteps. Then I came across China Labor Watch (or…
Coming Soon: Scenes from a Junkyard Planet
For the last couple of years, China has been the world’s largest automobile market, supplanting the United States. So, for the last month or so, I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what on earth China plans to do with all of those cars once they’re no longer road-worthy. More on my conclusions, soon.…
The Exxon Valdez’s Eco-Friendly Afterlife
The ship once-known as the Exxon Valdez is about to become a bunch of structural steel in West India’ s Gujarat state. It a fascinating story about how the ship responsible for the second largest oil spill in US waters (since surpassed by the Deepwater Horizon debacle/disaster) is now going to end its life in a scrap…
The Land of a Million Scrapped Televisions
Below, a photo I recently took in a warehouse roughly 80 km from an inland Chinese city with a population around 8 million people. If it’s not clear in the image, those are televisions. Tens of thousands of scrapped, no-longer-wanted televisions. So let me ask a question of you, dear reader: based upon the information…
Why are new Samsung and HP computer parts being dumped in Guiyu? Follow the bar codes …
Several months ago I had the opportunity to travel to the notorious southern Chinese e-waste recycling hub of Guiyu. It was an interesting visit during which it became apparent that many assumptions currently held about e-waste processing in China are no longer current. Of these, perhaps the most important is the blanket assumption that foreign…