Adam Minter, in an excerpt from his book Junkyard Planet, covers China’s hunger for American scrap metal:
No surprise, China leads the world in the consumption of steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, platinum, rare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else labeled “metal.” But China is desperately short of metal resources of its own. For example, in 2012 China produced 5.6 million tons of copper, of which 2.75 million tons was made from scrap. Of that scrap copper, 70 percent was imported, with most coming from the United States. In other words, just under half of China’s copper supply is imported as scrap metal. That’s not a trivial matter: Copper, more than any other metal, is essential to modern life. It is the means by which we transmit power and information.
So what would happen if that supply of copper were cut off ? What if Europe and the United States decided to embargo all recycling to China, India, and other developing countries? What if, instead of importing scrap paper, plastic, and metal, China had to find it somewhere else? Some Chinese industries would substitute other metals for the ones that it couldn’t obtain via recycling—that’s technically doable in many cases—but for some applications (like the copper used in sensitive electronics) substitutions are not possible. That leaves mining. To make up the loss of imported scrap metal, there’d need to be a lot of holes in the ground: even the best copper ore deposits require one hundred tons of ore to obtain one ton of the red metal. What would the environmental cost of all that digging be? Would it exceed the environmental cost of recycling the developed world’s throwaways? What’s worse?
The Dish 