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

3.5

If you've ever wondered what happened to all that excess junk we throw away in the course of our lives, then this book will be illuminating. The author is a journalist who is intimately connected to junkyard recycling practices as his family used to own a scrapyard, and he has also lived in and traveled throughout China to expose the ways in which the first world countries' junks and trashes are recycled and reused for the citizens of the developing countries.

Minter exposes the extent of the items being thrown out and recycled as well as the cost (materially and environmentally), and it doesn't paint a pretty portrait of sustainability. Still, in the many instances of Minter's self-interest coupled with environmental awareness that we can glimpse throughout the book, he insists that the good of recycling the junk outweighs the bad, even if it ultimately proves detrimental to the environment and exploited workers' health. For example, this entire paragraph is just mind-boggling to me:

 It's amazing to me that anybody could last more than eight minutes at this kind of work [sorting usable scrap item from trash], much less eight hours, and do it for $100 per month, plus room and board. But spread out before me are 150 women who seem to think it is worth it. Nobody's forced them to come here; they could've stayed home, wherever that might be. 

Yikes. Due to his proximity to the scrapyard business, Minter tends to have a more rose-tinted view of the industry, and so his objectivity seems to be compromised because there are other examples of the above paragraph that makes me feel like he's trying to justify the bad industry practices just because it's a better alternative for these underpaid workers to work under awful safety & health conditions compared to them making less money working in agriculture.

To be fair, the book is informative, even if it's biased in the scrapyard business's favor. Plus, Minter stresses that the whole business wouldn't have come about if it wasn't for our increasing trend of excessive consumption without reflection. This quote is particularly apt:

 Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. [...] Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. 

(Of course, he then unintentionally backtracked the above point by saying that "oh, my wife and I don't recycle at home, instead we give your recyclable junk to our beloved housekeeper for her to recycle and get some bonus money that way", like dude you are literally outsourcing your problem too like...? Ngl, I had very conflicted feelings when I was reading this book, and sometimes the back-and-forth was enough to give me whiplash.)

But despite my qualms and the whiplash I've experienced, the main takeaway from this book was worth it, and can be succinctly concluded as the following:

(a) Reduce by avoiding buying things you don't need. This is the most important step; if we reduce our consumption, there'd be less junk in the world when there's less demand for the junks in the first place
(b) Reuse the things you do have rather than buying new things just because it's the "in" thing
(c) Recycle last when you can't reduce and reuse

Rating: 3.5 (Very informative but also pretty biased, also a bit too lengthy and could've been cut down by like 80 pages)