
Junkyard Planet: Travels in a Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
by Adam Minter [Bloomsbury Press, Nov. 2013]
Most Americans’ concept of recycling begins and ends at the curb. “Junkyard Planet”picks up the story from there.
The new book takes us on an eye-opening international journey of junk with a first-class guide.
The author, Adam Minter, is both a child of the scrap industry – his parents ran a small junkyard in Minnesota – and a scrappy journalist who has covered the trade globally for more than a decade.
Those credentials have provided Minter special access to the elite traders of scrap (discarded metal, paper and plastic)– a market he describes as generating as much as $500 billion annually and employing more people than any other industry except agriculture.