A review by pmhandley
Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade by Adam Minter

3.0

I read one of Minter's other books, and while this was still interesting, I didn't find it as insightful. It had a lot of history I was unaware of, like the fact America had an abandoned car problem! I think Minter's personal ties to the scrap industry are good and bad here. He obviously has the inside look at everything, and his personal connections are invaluable and the only reason we can have this book in the first place. But I think it slightly gets in the way of objectivity at parts, particularly around discussing the environmental and health effects of stripping and repurposing our used electronics and plastics. I felt like the overarching problem was oversimplified a bit with a laissez-faire attitude, that well, these people would be worse off as farmers and our old stuff would be more harmful in a landfill. That's definitely true, but I thought it wasn't very deep in examining that there are things we could be doing to improve things even slightly. The overarching point, though, I agreed with. Minter's point that you need to be less concerned about where your recyclables are ending up and more concerned about how much you added is spot on. We like to consume, and we don't like to think about it or accept that the best thing is to consume less.