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1-Page Summary of Junkyard Planet

“Third-Best Option”

The United States throws away a lot of Christmas tree lights every year. The copper wire in these lights is not worth much, but the Chinese are willing to buy it from American recyclers. They shred the wires and recover the gold for resale. Most of the rest of it ends up as slipper soles or other items that can’t be sold easily because they’re made out of plastic insulation. In some cases, people burn this material in open fires, which creates smoke that pollutes the air around them. If we don’t recycle these materials here, however, then miners have to extract more gold from mines elsewhere on Earth at an even higher cost to our environment than recycling would be otherwise

The recycling industry is a big business, and it’s growing. The global economy benefits from people who recycle because of their desire to be environmentally conscious. However, this industry relies on the consumerism that drives our society. It will continue to grow as long as there are consumers who buy products made from recycled materials.

Enlightenment and Waste

In the past, many small companies used to buy up America’s recyclable waste. Now a few big corporations do that job. These businesses truck the recycled products to their plants, where workers sort and process them for reuse or sale. Only around 35% of US household waste is recovered at recycling centers; only a small percentage of that can be reused or sold again.

Recycling seems like a smart thing to do, but it’s not. It’s something educated people do, and they use the most resources. The US generates a lot of waste, and its recycling rate is low compared to other countries. People in developing countries recycle more because they’re poor and need to save money by reusing things that wealthier people throw away. In developed countries only large companies can afford to spend money on recycling programs since it costs so much for them; smaller companies usually don’t have enough money for recycling programs unless they rely on hand sorting done by poor workers who get paid very little for their work.

“Grubbing” for Scrap

In the 1930s, people in America were desperate for money. They collected metal from factories and used it to make things they could sell. When World War II started, there was an increase in demand for scrap metal. People who collected that metal became more ambitious and started buying large quantities of it from factories and machines shops. One of those people is Leonard Fritz, a former grubber who now runs Huron Valley Steel Company, which recycles hundreds of millions of pounds of scrap metal every year.

Scrap dealers use code words to refer to different types of metal. Brass is called “honey,” and copper is called “barley.” They gather plumbing parts and wire, which they can sell quickly. Scrap dealers get their pricing information from organizations such as the London Metal Exchange, then judge a metal’s grade and how easy it will be to recover that metal before paying the seller a percentage of the price.

Scrap dealers in the US sell their scrap to brokers in China and India. Some international buyers call America the “Saudi Arabia of Scrap.” Western recycling firms like OmniSource invest in machines that separate different types of scrap metal, such as wire, insulation, copper, aluminum, and heavy metals.

Big Demand, Short Supply

China is the world’s largest metals consumer. However, it had to rely on metal from other countries until recently. China still relies heavily on imports because of its lack of available metals and also because of its poor recycling rate. Burning wire was a major source of pollution in cities like Foshan, but newer antipollution measures have made things better for workers’ health and wages.