How America’s Trash Becomes China’s Treasure
Bloomberg Businessweek has published a lengthy excerpt from contributor Adam Minter’s...
Aug 30, 2013
Bloomberg Businessweek has published a lengthy excerpt from contributor Adam Minter’s...
Nov 18, 2007
From AP: Most Americans think they’re helping the earth when they recycle their old computers, televisions and cell phones. But chances are they’re contributing to a global trade in electronic trash that endangers workers and pollutes the environment overseas. While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 […]
Sep 21, 2007
From the Wall Street Journal: When people talk about the “dirtier” side of China’s economic development they usually mean air and water pollution. But there’s more to it than that, as a gallery show currently on in Shanghai demonstrates. Liu Jianhua is a sculptor who first caught the art world’s attention in the mid 1990s […]
Sep 9, 2007
With the focus on exports arriving in the U.S. from China, Slate Magazine looks at what exactly the U.S. is exporting to China: Economists make a big deal out of all the junk we import from China: tainted pet food, lead-laced toys, and enough cheap plastic tchotchkes to load up a landfill the size of […]
Jun 11, 2007
Today Reuters reports on Guiyu, a Chinese e-wasteland: Guiyu is a modern day gold rush town. But instead of panning for gold in babbling streams, workers shift through piles of broken old computer parts in acrid smelling shacks, smelting down parts with crude equipment to extract valuable metals like gold and copper. [Full text] For […]
Jun 11, 2007
As part of a series on the growing influence of China in Japan, Asahi Shimbun reports on the export of trash to China: China’s red-hot economy is jacking up demand for steel, plastics, paper and many other industrial materials, creating a booming industry for scrap exporters like Katsura. In 2006, Japan exported about 1.19 million […]