About this item
When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday’s newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don’t want and turn it into something you can’t wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter—veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner—travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, multibillion-dollar industry that’s transforming our economy and environment.Minter takes us from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to high-tech facilities capable of processing a jumbo jet’s worth of recyclable trash every day. Along the way, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters who've figured out how to build fortunes from what we throw away: Leonard Fritz, a young boy "grubbing" in Detroit's city dumps in the 1930s; Johnson Zeng, a former plastics engineer roaming America in search of scrap; and Homer Lai, an unassuming barber turned scrap titan in Qingyuan, China.
About the Author
Adam Minter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to a family of scrap dealers. His quiet Midwestern life changed in 2002, when he began a series of groundbreaking investigative pieces on China's emerging recycling industries for Scrap Magazine and, later, Recycling International that were recognized, in 2004, with the first Stephen Barr Award for individual excellence in business feature writing. Since then, he has been cited, quoted, and interviewed on recycling and waste by a range of international media, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Guardian, and National Public Radio. He regularly speaks to groups about the global waste and recycling trade including, in 2008, an invited address at the Royal Geographic Society, London.
Adam is currently the Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View. He and his wife divide their time between Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and the western suburbs of Minneapolis.
