November/December 2013
A new book from journalist and frequent Scrap contributor Adam Minter brings the international scrap recycling industry’s story to a mainstream audience.
By Kent Kiser
The next time you’re in a bookstore or airport newsstand, a new title might catch your eye: Junkyard Planet, which is almost certainly the first mass-market nonfiction book on the international scrap recycling trade. Regular Scrap readers also will recognize the author, Adam Minter, as the Shanghai-based American journalist who has written many award-winning feature articles for this magazine since 2002. The book—his first—bears the subtitle Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade, and it lives up to that promise, taking readers to more than 18 recycling destinations in the United States, China, Malaysia, and India.
His goal for this whirlwind international scrap tour? To give general-interest readers an inside look at the history, development, and workings of the global recycling trade. In the book’s 304 pages, he offers a crash course on wire chopping and automobile shredding, delves into the esoteric world of scrap specifications, describes the economic sense of backhaul shipping, introduces a few senior statesmen and current movers and shakers in the business, provides a tour of a municipal materials recovery facility, and even takes readers on a U.S. road trip with a Chinese scrap buyer. He also gives readers a rare glimpse into the informal processing sector in several developing countries. Along the way, he makes points about how recycling can’t erase the long-term environmental consequences of a consumerist society and the ongoing need to design products for easier repair, reuse, and recycling.
Minter is uniquely qualified to write about the global recycling trade. A self-proclaimed “proud junkyard kid,” he grew up in his family’s scrap business in Minneapolis, learning the trade alongside his father, Mickey, and grandmother, Betty Zeman. Instead of joining the family business, he moved to Shanghai in 2002 to work as a freelance journalist, a move that gave him both a front-row view of the exponential growth of China’s recycling industry and unparalleled access to Chinese scrap operations. From his base in Shanghai, he also traveled the globe on assignment, writing about scrap companies, markets, and trends in Vietnam, United Arab Emirates, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil, and other countries. Junkyard Planet, which Bloomsbury Press released Nov. 12, is the product of his 11 years in the international scrap trenches and the culmination of an almost three-year reporting and writing quest to capture the industry’s character and convey it to the general reading public. The book is very much Minter’s personal outlook on the global scrap industry, an outlook he readily concedes others might not share. “It’s a big business with a lot of different ways to view it,” he says. “My outlook is that of a journalist who has traveled widely in it, but I recognize that others have different experiences and perspectives. I’m OK with that and welcome the discussion.” Scrap caught up with Minter at an industry conference in Orlando, Fla., in September to talk about the book.
How and when did you decide to write the book? I always knew I wanted to write a book about the scrap industry; it was just a question of when. I made the decision to write it in 2010. I had enough content, and I felt it was the right time in my career to write a book—plus I had found an agent, Wendy Sherman. I met her in New York to brainstorm book ideas. “What do you have in mind?” she asked. When I said, “I want to write a book about recycling,” her face just dropped. I said, “No, no, no, let me show you something.” So I pulled out my laptop and showed her dramatic pictures of Chinese women hand-sorting metal at an aluminum smelter in Shanghai, and her face changed. “This could be a book,” she said. The challenge was how to present the scrap business to people who don’t know or care about it. The book proposal went on the market in January 2011, and Bloomsbury Press was the winning bidder.
Why write a book about the scrap industry? The scrap industry gets depicted in so many ways, and 99 percent of the time they’re wrong. I wanted to show how the industry really is, and I felt I had a unique perspective from growing up in a family scrap business, living in China, and traveling on recycling writing assignments around the world. I felt I could offer a more nuanced version of what’s going on. The book, after all, isn’t just about the industry; it’s also about globalization. I wanted to explain to people that recycling isn’t something that just happens in their recycling bins; it’s tightly connected with how the world has changed in the past 30 years.
Who is the target audience for this book? Not scrap dealers; we’re targeting a general-interest reader. I’d like the book to connect with people who aren’t interested in books about recycling. I worked hard to work a compelling personal thread into the book, so there’s more there than just a book about recycling.
Would a scrap recycler still benefit from reading the book? Yes, I think a lot of professional recyclers are pretty ignorant about what goes on in China, even if they do business there. I talk with a lot of scrap dealers, and I’m shocked at how few truly understand what drives the demand for their scrap and what’s done with it. I hope my book gives them a deeper appreciation for what their industry actually is and what it means. Also, I think the Chinese scrap industry is evolving into something that looks like the American and European scrap industries, and I don’t think they fully appreciate that.
How did the book evolve as you worked on it? Originally I thought the book would follow a car through the recycling process. When I started writing it, I realized that approach wasn’t going to work. So there were a lot of different first chapters, and I finally realized I needed to start with what people know—municipal recycling. That’s why the first chapter is about visiting Waste Management and showing people what happens in one of its MRFs. I wanted to show that municipal recycling is related to what happens in a scrapyard. We were still shuffling chapters around until the very end. It was a very organic process. The good part is, it forced me to think deeply about the industry. In writing this book, I realized what I thought about scrap and consumerism. Everyone in the scrap business knows that the price of recyclables is largely dictated by demand for raw materials and the goods that are manufactured from them. What I hadn’t considered was how consumer-product companies use the recyclability of their products to spur more consumption of those products. In effect, they give consumers a green light to buy and consume more by saying, “It’s OK, we’ll recycle your product,” without explaining that recycling, too, requires energy and resources. For some consumer-product companies, recycling has become a get-out-of-jail-free card for our consumerism. Now, I have no problem with consumerism—I like upgrading my iPhone, too—but I wanted to explore how the sustainable act of recycling has started to be used to rationalize unsustainable behavior. I think that’s fascinating.
What was the hardest part of writing the book? The shredder chapter [Chapter 10—The Reincarnation Department]. That was the first time I struggled with how to take an interesting scrap industry story and translate it into something that’s interesting to a general reader. When I showed the first draft of that chapter to my wife, Christine, she said, “Don’t worry, every book has chapters people skip over.” So I rewrote the chapter, and that experience taught me how to popularize the industry. It was painful. That chapter alone was a one-month project. After I cracked that nut, I could write the rest of the book.
What was the most rewarding aspect of writing the book? One reward is knowing I can actually complete a book. Another reward was the road trip with Johnson Zeng [of Sunrise Metal Recycling]. It’s very rare for expats like me and Chinese men to become friends because there are a lot of cultural differences. Yet I was on the road with Johnson for a week, and we had many personal conversations. In some senses, it was one of the deepest China experiences I’ve ever had, and it happened in the United States.
What was the thinking behind the book’s title, Junkyard Planet? We threw around a lot of titles. Ultimately the feeling was that if this book is for a general-interest reader, we need the title to include a term that will draw them in. Scrap and secondary commodities aren’t familiar terms to most people. We rejected recycling early on because it’s boring and overused, and we thought people would say, “Oh, this is an environmental book.” We kept coming back to the words junk and trash. Now, I’m a child of the scrap industry, so I’m thinking, “Scrap dealers will kill me for this title!” But everybody knows what a junkyard is, and people are fascinated by them. For scrap dealers who don’t like the title Junkyard Planet, let me tell you, it could have been much worse.
The book presents the highs and lows of the global scrap trade. Did you think twice about showing the grittier aspects? I did, absolutely, because I’m from the business and have the natural inclination of a scrap dealer to never show what’s behind the fence. But I’m also a journalist, and I’ve learned that the truth always is better. I had to give the reader more credit to understand that the international recycling situation is complicated. If you show the gritty side of the industry and explain why it’s that way, then I think it’s OK.
What would you say to those who use your depictions of the industry’s harsher aspects to criticize recycling? The gritty side of the industry I show is largely in China and India, and that is reality. If you want to understand where your recyclables go and why, you have to understand those places. One major point I make in the book is that the worst recycling is still better than the best mining. Also, there’s very little I’ve seen in China that we weren’t doing in the United States at some point. That’s not to excuse what’s going on in China, but I think there’s a tendency to almost racialize these issues, and I’m uncomfortable with that. Too often, I think, there’s a tendency in the mainstream media to equate unsafe recycling with images of Chinese, Africans, and Indians, and safe recycling with largely white operations in developed countries such as the United States. But I can tell you from personal experience, the world of safe versus unsafe recycling is far more complicated. You need only spend a few minutes on YouTube to find white Americans refining CPUs at home, and you need only visit China’s Sichuan province to find some of the largest and most advanced CRT recycling facilities on the planet.
Why did you dedicate the book to your late grandmother, Betty Zeman? My grandmother was my biggest influence. She was the rock in my life until she died a couple of years ago. Everything I did and continue to do, I feel I need to uphold what she expects of me. I learned a lot of the scrap industry from her. Without her, I wouldn’t look at the world in the same way, and I wouldn’t have the same profound respect for the Chinese and Indian laborers I see in scrapyards. She grew up doing so much of what they do—breaking metal, cleaning plumbing scrap, only in her case it was to pay for her brother’s bar mitzvah.
Near the end of the book, you state, “Recycling is a morally complicated act.” Explain. I mean that anytime you recycle or discard something, you’re outsourcing your obligations to somebody else—and whatever dangers or opportunities are involved with it. Your hands aren’t clean just because you put something in the blue bin, and I think Americans tend to think that putting their bin on the curb suddenly absolves them of their consumerist sin. It doesn’t. There’s a responsibility there that they impose on somebody else.
What will readers find most interesting in the book? The Johnson Zeng chapter. The personal story always gets people, and people who have already read the book really seem to like his character. They feel for him. I also knew that writing about my crazy family scrap business issues would be appealing because people like personal stories and gossip.
What do you want readers to take away from the book? I want them to accept the scrap industry. People think there’s recycling, and then there’s scrap recycling. There’s what they put out on the curb, and then there’s what happens at the junkyard. Over the centuries, people generally have had a hard time accepting the scrap industry. That’s a challenging mindset to overcome. I want people to accept the industry, warts and all, and understand they’re part of the chain. They’re the raw material providers.
Kent Kiser is publisher of Scrap.