
The global trade in junk and trash - wholeness
https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things-flow/
======
joe_the_user
_Of course, the discards weren’t always processed or used in a way that
conforms to health, safety, and environmental standards found in many
developed countries. But it’s difficult to argue that somebody is dumping
something on a poor country when a person in the poor country is paying for
the stuff._

If someone is engaging in environmentally destructive production in a third
world country using materials from the first world, one might say the
"externalities" of first world production are being imported to that third
world nation. This is similar to way rare earth production shifted to China
when other industrialized nations regulated it's environmental impact.

Which is to say the arguments here seem like a collection of double talk.
"Denying agency" is the sort of complaint that can justify all sort of claims.

Edit: just broadly, a big part of the article is about exploding the story
that the first world dumps its trash on the third world. He dramatizes the
view, denigrates the view, gives some details intended to debunk the view but
doesn't really say what happen instead. "It gets bought" doesn't seem like
enough detail, to say the least. Plastic scraps go to Malaysia - are burned,
actually recycled, what? If one is exploding other's myths, it seems like an
alternative story would be merited.

~~~
notahacker
This.

I mean, it's difficult to argue somebody _isn 't_ dumping something on a poor
country when that poor country legislates to ban it for health and safety
reasons (and some exports continue with falsified manifests...). And as highly
sophisticated as the operation might be to export car batteries to villages in
developing countries where they can set up cottage industries re-smelting them
for their lead, I'm not persuaded by the idea the organizations running the
exports deserve more agency than kids dying of lead poisoning, and I'm
entirely unconvinced by the author's argument that it's emotional attachment
to cars we've assumed are going to be dismantled for scrap domestically that
makes us queasy about the whole thing.

A lot of the time the waste is being exported in ships that would otherwise be
empty, and the exporters are evading expensive legal disposal costs and
massive taxes (a lot of organised unlawful dumping takes place closer to home
of course, but there are costs and risks of doing that at scale too). And
whilst I'm all in favour of taking a nuanced view of low income countries
trying to make money from recycling, I also refuse to believe that someone who
has written two books on the global waste trade over two decades of research
has never heard of any incidents which don't fit his narrative of waste
exports invarably being legitimately purchased by informed customers (really?
he hasn't heard of the _Khian Sea_?)

------
cossatot
I'm reading Minter's _Junkyard Planet_ right now, whic is primarily about the
global recycling trade. It's quite interesting, though a little too first-
person/anecdotal. nonetheless it's thorough enough to give a good idea of what
is happening in various parts of the trade network. Well recommended, if
you're curious to what happens when you recycle a can or junk a car.

~~~
jseliger
Agreed: [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/04/10/junkyard-planet-adam-
mint...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/04/10/junkyard-planet-adam-minter),
although I'd argue that the first-person perspective, especially given his
family's history, is what gives the book its charm and insight.

------
apo
> From that point, I slowly began to understand that people in consumption-
> based societies assemble their identities via stuff, and become very
> emotional when those identities – and that stuff- is discarded in ways that
> don’t match their values. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that
> consumers actually care more about how their stuff is discarded, than how it
> is manufactured.

Part of the problem is that so few bother to get rid of what they no longer
use. They pack it around with them, unable to part with utterly useless
things.

The interview mentions Japan. In this context, it's interesting to contrast
Marie Condo's _Tidying Up_. She talks at length about how emotions play into
our inability to toss things out.

Her system is simplicity itself. Begin by dumping all of your crap of a
particular category into one big pile.

She describes the shock most of her clients experience after doing so. If
you've never tried this yourself, I can highly recommend it. It's staggering
how much crap even tidy people accumulate because it's so often spread out in
various places.

It's not hard to understand how packing crap like this drives an insatiable
urge for ever bigger houses and cars. You need more room to accommodate your
every growing collection of crap.

The environmental consequences of this behavior are staggering. I'm not sure
whether this is is something new or not, but it's plain as day that houses,
cars, and yes people are getting bigger. Look inside those houses and cars,
and you're likely to find an accretion of crap whose contents even the owners
can't recall.

So there's a reluctance to toss things out, and there's a real lack of
understanding about how much crap we actually have. Sounds like a first world
problem to be sure, but one with bizarre emotional/psychological/environmental
angles I don't think have really been explored that much.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
> Marie Condo's Tidying Up. She talks at length about how emotions play into
> our inability to toss things out

Interestingly, that always has seemed to be to be about buying more stuff. You
throw away, you buy more.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I was surprised by that when reading her book. There wasn't anything about
curbing our tendency to acquire, it was all about making space for the next
cycle.

~~~
rvense
It also encourages throwing away things that might be useful to someone else,
or to yourself in the future.

Especially the emotional way it is presented, that it is cathartic to get rid
of possessions, without considering if there was another way to get rid of
them but throwing them in the bin.

We should have much more respect for our things, and be mindful of how much
waste and energy (and toil) is required to make something like a computer or a
set of clothes. We should buy things that last and make the effort to repair
them when they break... and spend more time on the toys we have instead of
getting new ones.

------
basetop
There was an interesting video on youtube about global recycling.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gNZtI7hbvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gNZtI7hbvI)

Since china exports so much and we export so little, rather than send empty
shipping containers back to china, we fill it with our garbage and send that
back to china to recycle.

China exports goods. We export garbage to china. And it's been going on for
decades.

~~~
reaperducer
_Since china exports so much and we export so little, rather than send empty
shipping containers back to china, we fill it with our garbage and send that
back to china to recycle._

At one time this was true of the trucking industry, too. Trucks would haul
goods to a city, then carry that city's trash back out. It was considered
better than running a truck empty.

Then they started doing it with food trucks, and the regulations came.

------
ars
Some takeaways: Trash is never dumped onto 3rd world countries. It's _sold_.
The people there pay money for that trash because they want it.

When people throw things out they have expectations for what they want to
happen with those items, and those expectations conflict with what really does
happen, and what is the ideal result.

~~~
baroffoos
I think people pay for it because they can make money on a small % of what
they buy so they pick out the easy money and dump the trash somewhere else. So
the result is pretty much the same. A bunch of trash from developed countries
gets dumped on the 3rd world only 2 people made money from it and we can all
feel good about it because no first world dumps trash in the ocean, they go
through extra steps before that.

------
myt6fore
Just a reminder: George Carlin’s great sequence about ‘your stuff’
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac)

