Reduce,Reuse,Recycle … and Refuse

Junkyard Planet

Minter tells the story of his own life. In a way, Junkyard Planet is as much a travelogue (as suggested by the subtitle itself: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade) and a memoir (it is about his travels in the trash trade) as it is an account of the global recycling and reuse industry—what we properly call reverse channels of distribution. Minter also tells the life stories of many of the scrap dealers he knows in China and the Chinese scrap buyers with whom he traveled the highways and byways of the U.S. looking for scrap to buy. He tells how scrappers buy scrap and how these traveling buyers buy it from the scrap yards. The story is clear: the scrap industry is a large industry and one that works more or less backwards. Scrap is easy to sell because there is such a demand for it. It is hard to buy. In fact, Minter says, there is an axiom in the industry: “it’s hard to buy scrap, and easy to sell it” (p. 59). He also points out that scrappers make their money buying it rather than selling it. This reminded me of a 1973 Kotler and Levy article in the Journal of Marketing: “Buying is Marketing, Too!”

Junkyard Planet is a detailed account of an unseen marketing system, the kind of detailed study that the likes of Louis D.H. Weld and other early marketing scholars produced. As Tadajewski put it, early marketing scholars followed “products from their point of production and manufacture, all the way through to their distribution to the ultimate consumer” (2009, p. 17; see, also, Jones and Monieson 1990). In the present case, however, we are moving from the ultimate consumer backwards to the creation of raw materials. We need more studies like this, and not just of the scrap business, but of all businesses. As a discipline, we have become so focused on consumer behavior and selling/marketing to the ultimate consumer that we often lack a full understanding of the entire marketing system, including the reverse channels of distribution.

Minter focuses on scrap metal because he is the son and grandson of American scrap yard owners. The family scrap yard, which his grandfather began, still operates in Minneapolis. Both the family scrap yard, for which he holds fond childhood memories, and the industry inform his outlook on life “in fundamental ways” (p. 10). While he did not pursue the junk business, neither did he fall far from the tree. As a journalist he covers the Asian scrap trade for two important periodicals in the global scrap business, Scrap and Recycling International. (Junkyard Planet is Minter’s first book.) This and his decision a decade ago to move to China give him unprecedented access to what he admits, in several places, is a rather shadowy business.

Minter is open about his love for what his grandmother called “the junk business.” He tells the family history, a history of which he is proud. It is also a history that gives a great deal of insight as to how the scrap business is run. Is it all rosy? No, of course not. “Believe me,” he writes, “I’m aware of the industry’s faults…But for all of its problems—and they are rife—the world would be a dirtier and less interesting place without junkyards” (p. 11).

Since Junkyard Planet is largely a travelogue, understanding the structure of the book is difficult. Eventually I realized that he took, as he says, “the well-known pyramid that every American schoolchild learns: reduce, reuse, recycle” (p. 6) and treated each element in reverse order. He spends most of his time discussing the global recycling industry, and there primarily metal recycling although he does devote a chapter to plastics, a chapter to e-waste, and mentions paper. From recycling he moves on to reuse—the reuse of electric motors, circuit boards, computer chips, and peripherals like monitor and printers. He eventually touches on reduce; he says it is the only real solution to the problem of waste before dismissing it as a solution. “Alas,” he writes, “most people have very little interest in reducing their consumption or reusing their goods” (p. 6). That is why recycling is the “worst best solution” (p. 6).

Minter contextualizes his argument as part of the economic development process. He also contextualizes it as an alternative to dumping our trash in landfills. Hence, he presents the global trade in recyclables as a sustainable business, one driven by entrepreneurs who have “a talent for spotting value in what others throw away” (p. 5). As far as Minter is concerned, the global trade in recyclables will continue, even if it is, as he writes, “the third-best option” available (p. 6).

Minter takes on the issue of dumping. Ever since Packet and Smith (2003) there has been a general presumption that the West dumps its trash on less developed countries—mostly unsuspecting Asians and, today, mostly on the Chinese. They then work in horrid conditions at low wages to process it. Make no mistake, he is clear that the working conditions are horrid (but not as bad as the alternative), and the wages are low (but not as low as the alternative). For these reasons we are not dumping our waste on anybody. Instead, Minter argues, the Chinese see value in what we throw away and not only do they want it, but they need it (especially the metal). By the way, the alternative is always presented as one of returning to rural villages, and he does not present that as much of an alternative. He writes, “rather than spending days sorting scrap for wages, villagers spend days in fields, picking crops for subsistence” (p. 75), adding, in villages “the best economic opportunity remains a life stuffing seeds into the ground for little more than subsistence wages” (p. 137). He is forthright: “Is one better than the other? I’ve never lived in either circumstance, so I’m not about to guess” (p. 75). He will not guess, but he certainly has an opinion.

Minter argues that the global trade in recyclables is absolutely necessary; it is a fundamental part of the globalized world economy. It is, in fact, part of the process of economic development, itself. He makes his case by suggesting that trade in recyclables is not a new phenomenon, but a very old one. He illustrates his point by telling the story of how the U.S. developed by importing some of England’s waste.

Any country striving to develop economically, he writes, uses, to some degree, other peoples’ trash to do so. America did it and China does it. To make his point, Minter presents two short historical vignettes of the U.S. developmental path—one about rags and the other about rails. They are both interesting stories and, frankly, ones I never encountered before reading them here.

In the early 1800s, mechanized papermaking arrived in the U.S. There was a big market for paper, too. Americans were increasingly educated and were reading more newspapers and books, and writing more letters. At the time the primary raw material from which paper was made was old rags—mostly linen. They provided high-quality and low-cost pulp. But Americans could not save enough rags to meet the demand for printed material. So, as Minter puts it, “America’s enterprising papermakers—and entrepreneurial rag traders—made a very contemporary choice: they…looked abroad to the more wasteful economies of Europe for their raw materials” (p. 79). In 1850 Americans imported 98 million pounds of scrap rags from Europe. By 1875 we imported 123 million pounds, mostly from England. And sticking with one of his themes, “nobody in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century North America railed against the Victorians for ‘dumping’ their ‘waste’ on the still-developing economies of the former colonies” (p. 80).

We have all heard about the expansion of the railroad system and the opening of the West but have we ever stopped to think where all the steel for those rails came from? “The U.S. … looked abroad to Europe…for raw materials. … U.S. imports of scrap iron and steel grew from 38,580 tons in 1884 to 380,744 tons in 1887” (p. 80). That was a ten-fold increase! It was not until the years leading up to World War I that we began to export steel scrap, initially to Europe and now mostly to China.

China, today, has a voracious appetite for all sorts of metal. Throughout Junkyard Planet Minter draws our attention to how much of our trash China really wants and uses. Just under a half of China’s copper supply is imported as scrap metal (p. 67) and, he points out elsewhere, as of 2012 China accounted for 43 percent of total global demand for copper. All the manufacturing going on in China, “whether of cars or reinforced steel for new shopping malls—is fed to a considerable degree by imported scrap metal” (p. 110). Most of the buildings Minter sees rising in the cities he visits, one of his hosts reminds him, “were wired with metal imported as scrap, and processed locally” (p. 140). It is not just metal: “China needs recycled plastics to make everything from cell phones to coffee cups” (p. 155). If we want to buy Chinese manufactured goods (and we do), then we have to sell them what we produce, and we produce trash like no other country in the world.

So it seems one of Minter’s main objectives is to convince us that, contrary to common opinion, we are not dumping our trash on other countries. They want it; they demand it; they use it. And they buy it! We shouldn’t feel bad about it. If we stopped exporting the tons of recyclable material we do, we would have to send it to landfills. The Chinese would still go after the resources they need for their own development. They would mine the metals they need and cut down the world’s remaining forests to get it. Now they mine America’s trash for it. Hence, the global junk business is a sustainable business. As Minter states in the introduction, and repeats at every opportunity, the thousands of factories in China today “need copper [to cite but one example] to make things like wires, power cords, and smart phones” (p. 2). Chinese factories “have a choice; they can use copper mined in far off, environmentally sensitive places like the Brazilian Amazon” or they can use copper “mined from imported Christmas tree lights” (p. 2).

There are many interesting histories spread throughout Junkyard Planet. Take the automobile as another example. In the U.S., junked automobiles were a big problem in the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s. The problem was with those that we wrecked but especially, with those that we abandoned on the streets. You can drive the countryside today and look behind most any shed or barn and frequently find abandoned cars, trucks, and tractors. Why did we abandon them? Because most people did not know of any other way to get rid of them once they stopped running.

“In 1969,” Minter writes, “seventy thousand automobiles and trucks were abandoned by their owners on the streets of New York City. Some of them leaked gas and oil; some of them provided habitat for rats and mosquitoes; most were unsightly” (p. 162). The problem was not exclusive to New York City. It was a problem, he suggests, because “the American automobile industry (much less its customers) had never taken much responsibility for the afterlife of the products that it placed on the road” (p. 162). That comment, of course, could be said of virtually every industry and product category, a point Minter does not make but we should appreciate. Perhaps business leaders do not give much thought to the afterlife of the products they manufacture and distribute because we, as marketing educators, shamefully ignore it, too.

I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I remember that the urban landscape was full of wrecking yards (see Figure 2). They were everywhere. I also remember, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that people were protesting and demanding these wrecking yards build huge fences around them so the wrecks could not be seen from the roadways. On February 10, 1970, according to Minter, President Nixon declared before Congress, “Few of America’s eyesores are so unsightly as its millions of junked automobiles” (p. 164). They were, indeed, an urban blight!

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Figure 2.

Pile of wrecked autos at Klean Steel Co., May 1972.

I have not thought about these automobile junkyards for a long time, mainly, I suppose, because I do not see them anymore. Where did they go? Those cars now provide the structural support for shopping malls and apartment houses—mostly in China. Somewhere around 2007 or 2008 the backlog had been cleared out. That is when, Minter writes, the “last scrap cars came out of the woods” (p. 176).

In the context of discussing junked automobiles, Minter tells the story of the invention of the metal shredder. Today, there are 300 of these beasts in North America (and from his description they are beasts) and another five hundred in the rest of the world. “The shredder,” he writes, “is…the best and really only solution to managing the biggest source of consumer waste in the world today: the roughly 14 million American automobiles that are junked annually” (p. 161). It was the crusher and the shredder, and the backhaul to China, that quietly and stealthily eliminated the auto junkyards.

Here is something Minter does not discuss and few of us have probably thought much. What do we do with retired, no longer serviceable airplanes? Several online videos describe the process (see, for example, National Geographic n.d.). What we do with old airplanes is not unlike what we do with old cars and lots of other metal (Science Discovery 2013).

The recycling industry is a sustainable industry, even if it is not about sustainability. Minter writes, “not every recycler is an environmentalist, and not every recycling facility is the sort of place you’d want to take kindergartners for a field trip” (p. 5). Recyclers are in the business because they want to make money, and they have a knack for spotting value in what others throw away. Minter has some reservations about it. It is a dirty industry, one full of health and safety issues for those working in it. This is especially the case in plastics recycling. Recycling businesses process the worst of what they import out of sight and mind of regulators. “Qingyuan,” a center for scrap recycling established in the mid-1980s, “was remote enough to avoid scrutiny from environmental authorities” (p. 133). He says that in Wen’an, a center for plastics recycling, he frequently saw “black spots” on the ground where, he was told, “unrecyclable plastics were burned in the night” (p. 145). Of Wen’an he notes the most striking feature is that “there is nothing green. It’s a dead zone” (p. 145). Twenty-five years ago it was “bucolic—an agricultural region renowned for its streams, peach trees, and simple, rolling landscape” (p. 146). So much for sustainability.

He discusses how environmental and safety equipment “is neither required nor available at the local equipment and chemical dealers (we checked)” (p. 148), and how the quality of some of the plastic made from some recycled trash is inferior and does not meet U.S. and European quality standards. “Only the Chinese, often manufacturers of last resort, will use that stuff,” he writes, which, when used to make plastic bags and the like, “are then passed off as safe for food packaging” (p. 149). After describing a processing facility that bathed shredded plastic in caustic cleaning fluid before rinsing and drying it, Minter notes:

the excess trash and cleaning fluid is gathered up, and is either resold or tossed into a waste pit on the edge of town. Unless I’m missing something, or visiting on the wrong day, there is no safety equipment, no respirators, hard hats, or steel-toed boots, here; in fact, most of the workers—including Mr. Hu—wear sandals…this is bad (p. 150).

The recycling of plastics is a shadowy business. Unlike the multibillion-dollar trade in recyclable metals, plastics are traded in small lots. The American, European, and Japanese scrap-plastics exporters have no idea who recycles the material they export.

[They] sell to brokers and other middlemen who sell to Chinese importers, often near ports, who then resell the scrap plastics to small traders of the sort that transport the plastics to Wen’an. Once they arrive at Wen’an, they’re sold again [to family enterprises] that will actually separate and recycle it (Minter 2013, p. 147 ).

Minter celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the junk business. “If my travels in global recycling have taught me anything,” he writes, “its that somebody in the developing world can usually find a use for what Americans can’t recycle profitably” (pp. 144-145). The business, itself, is “a profession for outsiders” such as immigrants (pp. 31-32). The immigrants can be from other countries (as was the case in the U.S.) or immigrants from rural areas (as is the case for China). Minter’s comment that his outlook on life reflects the family business and the industry is certainly tied up with the entrepreneurialism he sees in the junk business—an entrepreneurialism, as he discusses it, that is as much a product of circumstances as it is of opportunity—and the fact that his grandfather was an immigrant to the U.S. Minter would make Milton Friedman proud by the way he waxes over how the undirected market coordinates the global movement of trash, moving it from those that produce it (and see no value in it) to those that consume it (because they do see the value in it).

But most of all, Junkyard Planet is a book about how the scrap industry functions, told from an insiders point of view, from scavenging to buying, shipping, disassembling, refurbishing, reselling, and recycling. It is about channels of distribution; more precisely, it is about reverse channels of distribution, the most neglected—indeed, ignored—of all channels. Scrap is a $500 billion industry that employs more people than any industry in the world except agriculture. It is time we paid attention to it.

Garbology

If we add refuse to the well-known pyramid of reduce, reuse, and recycle we have Humes’ book. Humes, also a journalist, writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and Sierra. He has written several books on a variety of topics, all having something to do with social issues. Two of his most recent books touch on environmental topics: Eco Barons: The New Heroes of Environmental Activism (2010) and Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (2011). To these add Garbology (2012).

Garbology’s theme is clear from its subtitle: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash. His focus is on the amount of junk and trash we generate and on how much of it is not recycled. Each week we dutifully put our trash out for collection (see Figure 3). The trash truck then picks it up and takes it away. Actually, the trash truck comes by after the scavengers, who look for—and take—large pieces of metal. To most of us that is the end of the issue. The problem is solved—the trash went away. Humes suggests, as did Kirkpartrick Sale (1980, p. 243) so many years ago, “There’s one fundamental thing wrong with [a ‘throwaway’ society],…There is no ‘away’.” Our trash goes somewhere; most of us just don’t know where. “Away” is someplace and that someplace is the concern of Garbology.

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Figure 3.

Trash bins lined up for collection.

Humes does mention recycling. “Somehow,” he writes, “without ballot or poll or any explicit decision by presidents or legislators or voters to do so, America, a country that once built things for the rest of the world, has transformed itself into China’s trash compactor” (p. 11). And he provides corroborating data to Minter’s. However, the vast bulk of what we throw away does not go into recycling and, therefore, recycling is not his primary concern. His concern is refuse, not recycling.

Humes contextualizes his presentation differently than does Minter. Rather than discussing our waste in terms of economic development or trade and markets, he casts his discussion in terms of hoarders and hoarding. He opens with the story of Jesse and Thelma Gaston, a chemist and a retired teacher. Living on the south side of Chicago, they became a news sensation because they were “trapped by trash” inside their own home. They were hoarders. “They hoarded until goods and trash consumed their home and almost their lives” (p. 2). Extreme hoarding like this is often viewed as an aberration, but it is surprisingly common. Somewhere between 3 to 6 million Americans are thought to be compulsive hoarders. Two popular television programs follow them: A&E’s Hoarders and TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive.

The condition, some argue, should be a distinct mental illness. One proposed name for it is disposophobia. At the time Humes was writing it was just one of the many forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. To Humes the thing to notice about it is our tone-deaf response to the phenomenon (other than freak show fascination). Those that do pay attention to it—therapists, organization coaches, family, friends and TV show hosts—always focus on persuading disposophobics to do what “normal” people do, which is to take the trash to the curb so it can be hauled away. “Little if any thought is given to the refuse itself, or to the rather scarier question of how any person, hoarder or not, can possibly generate so much trash so quickly” (pp. 3-4).

Humes begins with these hoarding stories (there is another one) to make a point: “the amount of junk, trash and waste that hoarders generate is perfectly, horrifyingly normal” (p. 4). It’s just that most of us hoard it in landfills, he says, rather than in our living rooms. Consequently we never see the truly epic quantities of stuff we discard. Humes could have added, though he did not, that we also hoard it in the many self-storage units that dot the country (Mooallem 2009). That, I presume, is a chapter he will write for the second edition of Garbology.

Humes’ book is a play in three-acts: identify the problem, investigate the causes, and wrestle with the solutions. Part I ascertains the quantity of refuse we produce, but more importantly what we do with it. It includes an interesting history of what we have done with our waste since the days when, as he writes, sailors six miles out at sea would have smelled New York City. ³ Part II, the analysis, consists of two chapters. One accounts for the fact that we really do not know a lot about where the trash that does not find its way to landfills goes (and there is a lot of it, too) and gives an account of how some are trying to find out. The other chapter wrestles with the fact that we know far too little about what is really in the trash that does find its way to landfills. Both themes are ripe for participation by macromarketing researchers. Part III is devoted to the reduce piece of the familiar triumvirate. Humes takes it more seriously than does Minter, but it is probably, even at that, the weakest part of the book.

Part I concentrates on New York City and Los Angeles. It is a history of what we have done with our waste from the time that we simply dumped it in the streets and in the East River. All cities built on rivers, did the same thing—they used their rivers as open sewers. We then dumped it at sea, used it to fill in swamps and mudflats, took organic waste to piggeries, and burned the inedible organic. We even attempted, believe it or not, recycling programs (which involved attempts to get the citizenry to sort their trash, much as we do today, and building of the prototype of a mechanical sorting facility when they would not). We rendered it, put it in open dumps (a vast improvement, he notes, to river dumping even if they leaked the toxic soup that is leachate), and eventually deposited it in modern hermetically sealed “sanitary” landfills. In his description and discussion of this last stage, Hume focuses on Los Angeles’ Puente Hills and its history. In short, it is a story of how we got to where we are.

Like Minter’s Junkyard Planet, Garbology is also a story of the individuals who work in the industry, from Big Mike, who drives one of the huge machines that shape and form the trash into garbage mountains, to David Steiner, CEO of Waste Management, Inc. Mike’s story is interesting because he, too, is proud of what he does. While a lot of weird and strange things show up in the landfills, like human bodies, Big Mike talks about the common “everyday stuff” that fills the place,

items that are not really trash at all: the boxes of perfectly new plastic bags, still on the roll, tossed because the logo on them was out-dated. Or the cases of food that turn up from time to time, perfectly usable and brand-new, yet discarded as if they had no use. Cloths of all types, some worn and torn but others seemingly pristine, are common. There are whole cans of paint (a forbidden, toxic item in landfills, though they arrive mixed in the household trash, difficult to detect), trashed because someone didn’t like the custom color that, once mixed, could not be returned to the paint store. And there is the furniture—tons of it, much of it ratty and too far gone, but a surprising amount of it perfectly serviceable, at least until those chairs and couches and coffee tables meet Big Mike’s BOMAG, the great democratizer of trash (p. 56). (see Figure 4)

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Figure 4.

Shaping a trash mountain in Perth, Australia.

In fact, Humes notes, the sanitary landfill (as with all the previous attempts to deal with our waste) contributes to the huge volume of waste that we generate because it empowers even more wasting: “The landfill solution to garbage took away the slimy stench of the old throw-it-in-the-streets disposal, the smoking pall of the old incinerators, the noisome piggeries, the noxious reduction plants spewing out garbage grease, the ugly, seeping open dumps” (p. 57). It took away, in short, “the obvious consequences of waste and eliminated the best incentives to be less wasteful” (p. 57). In a similar way, the black plastic trash bag on the curb (which was originally green when introduced in New York) made it all but impossible for scavengers to go through peoples’ trash and pick out things that, to the scavenger, had value. In short, the sort of gleaning that Guillard and Roux (2014) write about largely came to an end. The net result was more stuff going to the landfill.

That is not, in itself, sufficient to push the whole country away from earlier eras’ acceptance of hard work, diligent saving, and the conservation of resources as the road to the good life. We went from thrifty, frugal, conservation and unwasteful attitudes to one that held that “the highest expression and measure of the American Dream lay in…the acquisition of stuff” (Humes, p. 59). How did it happen?

It is a complex story, one that has been told many times (Jones 1965; Horowitz 1979; McKendrick 1982; Marchand 1985; Sulkunen, Holmwood, Radner and Schulze 1997; Blaszczyk 2008; Berger and Goldberg 2011). One thing is for sure: it involved overcoming the forces of custom and tradition that were in the way of a mass consumption society (Witkowski 2010). The current textbook approach, in as much as it relies on the fabled concept of the production era, “presupposes…people…to have been engines of aggressive consumption whose demand rose automatically with the supply of affordable products” (Fullerton 1988, p. 112). But as Fullerton points out, “Making more products available would have had no effect on people who did not want them” (p. 112). What we fail to adequately appreciate today is something, to quote Fullerton again, “American marketing teachers in the early 1900s” understood, namely, that ‘demand creation’ was one of the fundamental business tasks” (p. 112). That is, business had the responsibility, and has the responsibility, of not only making the products but of making the demand for them as well.

Humes draws attention to the role of mid-century marketers such as J. Gordon Lippincott. Humes (p. 59) quotes Lippincott as having said, in 1947:

Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history…It is soundly based on our economy of abundance. It must be further nurtured even though it runs contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity, the law of thrift.

Part II of Garbology consists of two chapters. The first discusses what happens to the trash, mainly plastics, that go into the oceans. ⁴ This is a subject more thoroughly discussed by Tadajewski and Hamilton (2014) in their recent discussion of waste, art and social change. Humes’ treatment of it begins with the story of MIT’s trash trackers, a program in which “smart trash” is created by attaching electronic sensors to pieces of trash. These are then set free, as if released into the wild. The object is to see where they actually go. The creators of smart trash “wanted to expose how waste gets where its going—the meandering, mysterious and, it turns out, occasionally disturbing path it takes after it is thrown away” (pp. 132-133). One thing they are learning is that “our waste doesn’t go where we think it goes” and the idea that there is a waste-management “system” “is more illusion than reality.” At best there is a hodgepodge of potential trash destinations that eludes both control and detection” (p. 140).

The second chapter in Part II considers what, actually, is in the trash that ends up in our landfills. It is the story of Bill Rathje, the archaeologist at the University of Arizona that founded the Garbage Project and has spent decades exploring the inner space of landfills. Rathje’s story has been told many times (Rathje and Murphy 2001; Zimring and Rathje 2012). This is a nice introduction to the Garbage Project for those not already familiar with it.

One of the key insights from the Garbage Project has been that “people had no idea what was really in their garbage (or, for that matter, in their closets, refrigerators, cupboards and shopping carts)” (p. 155). Rathje exposed our trash mythology: “what we know versus what we think we know about garbage” (p. 155), and in the process he began tackling a problem that stands in the way of our ability to ever shrink “the 102-ton legacy” that is our trash. Namely, “why we are…so…clueless about the true size and nature of our waste” (p. 155). This discussion will be familiar territory to any marketer, especially consumer researchers, because it deals with what we already know: there is a huge gap between what people say they do and what they, in fact, do—from how much healthy food we say we eat and how much we actually eat to how much we say we throw away and how much we actually throw away.