In an interview, Adam Minter, who grew up working in a scrapyard, describes “a couple of messages that I really wanted to get across” in Junkyard Planet:
Number one, that the recycling business is not a niche, and not just responsible for “green products”. In the US you get greeting cards made from 50% recycled content, and I think those kinds of products tend to make people think it’s a niche, specialised industry. But it’s much bigger than that. Pretty much anything you can buy is affected in its pricing by scrap, and it quite likely has scrap in it. Every automobile, for example, is to some degree made from scrap materials, such as the engine block, if it’s made from aluminium, or the plastic of the bumpers. So I wanted people to realise that recycling is more than just a blue and green bin in their pantry.
The second message, and it’s a very personal message for me, is that there’s dignity in this kind of work. The images that we see of scrap workers, on television for instance, are often of exploited masses in China, Africa, India. There’s more to it than that. These are real, three dimensional people, and there is dignity and entrepreneurship in the work that they do. It’s often an opportunity to lift themselves up from a lower standing.
Previous Dish on Minter’s book here.
(Hat tip: The Browser)
The Dish 