The excerpt review below is by Jim Schulman, a catalyst in the reuse industry. He is founder of both Community Forklift and Sustainable Community Initiatives.

Minter takes the reader on tours of various scrapyards and material processing facilities from Minneapolis, Dearborn, and Indianapolis in the Midwest to Bangalore, Guangzhou, and Wen’an in the Far East, among a dozen or so other places. One of his stops is the family owned scrapyard where he grew up working elbow to elbow with his grandmother. These vignettes and the interesting characters who populate them, though geographically and chronologically scattered, slowly and logically reveal the tidal forces of supply and demand of factory production and material consumption that splash back and forth around the world over the course of decades, though sometimes within a few weeks.

via Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade | Washington Independent Review of Books.