Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade - Tapa dura

Minter successfully resists oversimplifying the issue China currently faces - with a growing middle class demanding more raw material for new construction, the options are living with the pollution caused by recycling or the environmental consequences of mining for raw materials...Minter concludes that the solution is in the first word in the phrase, 'Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.' (Publishers Weekly)

A detailed view of a mostly unknown business that touches the lives of everyone, whether or not they ever dragged a trash and/or recycle bin out to the curb. (Kirkus Reviews)

Minter is here to tell you that there's big money to be made in what American consumers and industries throw away. As he travels the world from Houston to Guangzhou, surveying the debris and discards that fill scrap yards and warehouses, Minter takes the reader into a world of commodities trading that is every bit as lucrative and cutthroat as anything on Wall Street. The son of a scrap man, Minter brings an insider's knowledge and appreciation for an industry that no one thinks about, everyone contributes to, and a lucky few profit from. (Booklist)

A satisfying investigation-cum-travelogue. (Mother Jones)

Lively and entertaining...Junkyard Planet is a book for anyone interested in the environment, the economics of recycling, or a thoughtful look at the consumption we take for granted. (Brooklyn Bugle)

Eye-opening. [Minter is] an excellent guide to this sprawling and bewildering trade. (Wall Street Journal)

Superbly researched. (Financial Times)

Fascinating. (Atlantic Cities)

A fascinating and entertaining account of a global industry that few people acknowledge and even fewer comprehend . . . the author's personalized account is fast-paced and often amusing, if not hilarious. But he also conveys sobering reminders of humankind at the brink. (Urban Land Magazine)

The afterlives of discarded digital devices are just a tiny - if shiny - piece of the much larger story of global recycling. Minter reports that story so masterfully that by the book's end, I was convinced that the best vantage point from which to view the forces of globalization might well be atop a pile of trash. (LA Review of Books)