"Think about that the next time you come across a 1982 penny in your pocket:
you might be holding the recycled remains
of your grandfather's chrome-plated hot rod."
—Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet
It's the holiday season and I should be thinking about making gingerbread houses, tree decorating, and wrapping gifts. Instead, I'm thinking about trash.
One thing you quickly learn if you run your own handmade retail business is how much trash you generate. If you sell your jewelry in little gift boxes as I do, for example, those tiny boxes come inside a much larger cardboard box. The same for envelopes, shipping boxes, tissue paper, ribbon, or bubble wrap. And that's just the packaging.
Yesterday I cut up a stack of large, empty cardboard boxes and stuffed them in my recycling bin to be picked up by the city. Until I read Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter, I never knew what happened next. Written by a man who grew up in a family-run scrapyard in the U.S., Junkyard Planet traces the international path of our trash. The good news is our old stuff is finding new life, often returning to the U.S. in new form rather than ending up in a landfill. But for workers in places like China who strip copper from Christmas tree lights or sort plastic bottles, the process can come at a high personal cost with long hours of repetitive tasks and sometimes unsafe, toxic working conditions.
The story's not entirely grim. I found the descriptions of the sophisticated salvage equipment in the U.S. so enticing that I'm thinking of asking Santa for my very own car crusher. Just for fun.
If you're ever wanted to know "the rest of the story" (as Paul Harvey would have said), Junkyard Planet is a must read. Listen to an interview with the author on Fresh Air to learn more about this fascinating topic.
On a similar note . . .
The same week I finished the book, I listened to the Planet Money podcast titled "The Afterlife of a T-Shirt." Imagine traveling from the U.S. to Africa and seeing a random person on the street wearing your exact T-shirt, the one you'd donated to Goodwill years ago, the shirt with your sports team number and other distinctive features. You'll never look at your old T-shirts in exactly the same way.
Quotation source: Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter.