Category : Engineering

Junkyard Planet

Price: USD25.99

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How can garbage turn into gold? What does recycling have to do with globalization? Where does all that stuff we throw away go, anyway? When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterdayâs newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you donât want and turn it into something you canât wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minterâveteran journalist and son of an American junkyard ownerâtravels deeply into a vast, often hidden, 500-billion-dollar industry thatâs transforming our economy and environment.Minter takes us from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to recycling factories capable of processing a jumbo jetâs worth of trash every day. Along the way, we meet an international cast of characters who have figured out how to squeeze Silicon Valley-scale fortunes from what we all throw away. Junkyard Planet reveals how âgoing greenâ? usually means making moneyâand why thatâs often the most sustainable choice, even when the recycling methods arenât pretty.With unmatched access to and insight on the waste industry, and the explanatory gifts and an eye for detail worthy of a John McPhee or William Langewiesche, Minter traces the export of Americaâs garbage and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of how the way we consume and discard stuff brings home the ascent of a developing world that recognizes value where Americans donât. Junkyard Planet reveals that Americans might need to learn a smarter way to take out the trash.

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