Q. & A.: Adam Minter on Why China's Scrap Trade Helps the Environment In his new book "Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" (Bloomsbury Press), Adam Minter paints a Dickensian portrait of China's massive garbage and recycling dumps. And then he tells us why they're so vital to the environmental movement. Desperate for resources to fuel its fast-growing economy, China has become the world's biggest importer of garbage: scrap paper, metals, wires, plastic and even America's old Christmas tree lights. At China's coastal scrap yards and recycling centers, laborers strip the plastic coating off wire to extract precious metals, hammer open electric motors and pull microchips off old computers and cellphones so they can be reused. American scrap paper is shipped to China and recycled to make the packaging materials for factories that then ship the boxes back to the United States, filled with the goods consumers want to buy. This is one of the little-known corridors of globalization. As ugly as it can be at times, Mr. Minter, the son of a Minnesota scrap yard owner who is now a Bloomberg World View columnist based in Shanghai, says this process is a lot better than clearing forests and digging mines, and that scrap yards in China provide a service that can no longer be found in the United States. Following is the first of two parts of edited excerpts from an interview: Why does so much of the world's garbage end up in China's scrap yards? And what types of things are being shipped to China? China is the world's largest consumer of raw materials - everything from oil to make the plastics that become an iPhone 5C's colorful back panel, to steel to make the I-beams that become Shanghai's high rises. Those raw materials can come from expensive big oil wells, mines and clear-cut forests, or they can come from recyclables imported from countries that throw away more stuff - especially recyclable stuff - than they can use. Because China lacks key raw materials, many of China's manufacturing entrepreneurs have no choice but to look to the latter. When they do, they look to the United States, a place that many in the global recycling industry refer to as "the Saudi Arabia of scrap." The United States, for better or worse, generates more recyclable waste than any other country on the planet, or around 130 million tons last year. Roughly 60 percent of that recycling remained in the U.S., where it is used by American manufacturers. But the other 40 percent is exported to more than 100 other countries, with China being the biggest customer by far. Isn't it expensive to ship scrap and garbage all the way to China? One of the least remarked upon but most striking consequences of the U.S.-China trade imbalance is the large number of empty shipping containers that you'll find at U.S. ports. Most of them arrive from China carrying goods, and yet for a variety of reasons the U.S. doesn't really have many goods to ship back in them. As a result, shipping companies heavily discount the cost of shipping those containers back to China. For example, the current cost of a container from Shenzhen, China, to Los Angeles is around $2,400; the return trip is around $300. This is a de facto subsidy for scrap exporters. An even less appreciated component of this shipping differential is how it fares in comparison to shipping within the United States. A container that might cost only $300 to ship to China from Los Angeles costs roughly eight times that amount if it were shipped by truck or rail to Chicago or other ports. Inland freight, in any country, tends to be far more expensive than ocean freight. As a result, a trader in China is in a position to pay a much better price for the contents of that shipping container than his or her competitor in Chicago. Most people in the West have a good idea of what a garbage dump looks like in their own country. But what do they look like in China? Is it any different? Anybody who has the impression that Chinese don't recycle as well or as much as Americans would be well advised to visit landfills in both countries. Chinese landfills, generally, are wet, mushy places filled with food waste, primarily, plastic bags, and the occasional bits of construction waste. They are not, however, filled with recyclables, most of which have been picked out of the trash stream before it reaches the landfill stage - by pickers, peddlers and other independent small-scale scrap traders. By contrast, American landfills are filled with what are often called "rigids" in trash industry terms: boxes, cans and bottles, along with the softer food wastes. It's a striking and unflattering contrast for the Americans. Likewise, American and Chinese recycling centers are very different places. In general, the largest recycling centers in the United States tend to be filled with conveyors that connect to various kinds of machines devoted to separating different kinds of materials from each other so that they can be sent for manufacture into new products like metal, plastic and paper. The engineering is often exquisite, and the price of such facilities runs into the many millions of dollars. By contrast, the largest Chinese recycling facilities are largely devoid of machinery and rely upon massive labor forces. I've visited Chinese recycling facilities devoted to the hand-sorting of shredded American automobiles that employ as many as 1,000 workers, mostly women. In the Chinese scrap industry, it's widely believed that women make for more precise metal sorters. Many Western media outlets have highlighted the problems associated with shipping electronic waste - old computers, printers, laptops, hard drives - to China, where they contribute to toxic dump sites. How serious is the health and safety problem around those sites, and has much changed in the past five years? The damage done by the recycling of e-waste in China is indisputable. For example, a 2010 study conducted in Guiyu, China's most notorious e-waste recycling zone, revealed that among a cohort of village children under the age of 6, 81.8 percent suffered from lead poisoning. The likely source was dust generated by the breaking of circuit boards and the melting of lead solder. Nonetheless, despite serious lingering problems, these zones are improving step by step. In my travels, the most obvious improvement has been the near total cessation of burning wire, circuit boards and other copper-bearing materials. Five years ago these zones were notorious for the black clouds of smoke that hung above them. Today they are relatively free of this pollution. Government regulation and enforcement, as well as the rising price of wire insulation in China's marketplaces, has been responsible for the shift. What's the incentive to do such work? The primary business of these towns has never been the recycling of metals associated with electronics. Most of the revenue comes from repairing and refurbishing the computers and mobile phones transported into them. Occasionally repairs might be done on whole units. More often than not, though, the reuse work requires extracting chips, memory and other soldered components from products, often in a dangerous manner, so that they can be sold for reuse in other products. From an environmental standpoint, reuse accomplishes an important goal: It extends product life span while reducing the need for new metals extracted from mines or other, more dangerous recycling processes. Does this reuse industry ultimately incur less of a human toll than digging mines and wells to supply raw materials to the consumer electronics industry? I'd argue that it does. Is it true that recycling rates in China are better than they are in the United States or many parts of Europe? Wealthy countries tend to have lower recycling rates than poorer countries, in large part because they're home to labor forces that have more attractive means of making livings than digging for treasure in other people's trash. In China, for example, recycling entrepreneurs and laborers alike are generally drawn from the ranks of migrant laborers with few other opportunities. They go into the business to profit, not to improve the earth, and - with margins as their guiding principle and low-cost labor as their means - they've shown the ability to collect and recycle objects with an efficiency that empties trash dumpsters of recyclables across China. If an object is worth money - and most recyclable objects are - it'll be found, collected and sold to somebody who wants it for recycling. That is most assuredly not the case in the developed West, home to a mature environmental movement and recycling rates that rarely top 60 percent of the waste stream. Many high-tech companies want to be seen as "green" by promoting recycling or promising to buy back or exchange some of the goods so that they can be properly recycled. You're skeptical about their efforts. A 2011 study by the United Nations Environmental Program showed that 91 percent of the used electronics flowing from the developed world into Nigeria was used for repairs and refurbishment; only 9 percent was used for recycling. Other studies have shown similar ratios in other African countries and - anecdotally, at least - it seems that something similar is happening in Asia. For consumer electronics companies, which are after all in the business of selling new products, this reuse market is an unwelcome source of competition and it should come as no surprise that many in the consumer electronics industry have been supportive of efforts to stem the tide of used electronics exports from the developed to the developing world. One way to do this, of course, is to encourage recycling - and to take control of the recycling stream. Recycling is, of course, a good thing. But from an environmental standpoint it's less of a good thing if the recycling destroys the reuse value of a phone or some type of other gadget that might have useful life outside of its original market. Unfortunately, the processes used by recyclers contracted by companies like Apple - shredding, followed by mechanical separation of the scrap - often destroy that reuse value and produce a much poorer outcome for the environment than what might occur if a robust repair and reuse market were allowed to exist. Very few if any consumer electronics companies are keen to advertise that they're incapable of recycling gadgetry 100 percent. There are always parts - sometimes the majority of parts - of our phones and computers that can't be recycled. For example, the rare earth metals used in the production of iPhone components simply can't be recovered in the recycling process, no matter how sophisticated. Likewise, even if a phone is "recycled" in the U.S., the raw materials produced from that recycling are often exported overseas.