Finished 2/8/20 at 7:45 AM

I am fascinated and interested in what it means to 'recycle', how that information drives my decisions and how I can therefore make decisions to maxmize impact (and decrease negative impact) with my 'stuff'.

Adam Minter's 'Junkyard Planet' is one of the most detailed books that I can find on exactly what it means to 'recycle'. Minter, who lived in Shanghai but was born and raised in Minnesota, offers a unique (and very detailed) perspective of the scrap metal and plastic trades, and what that means for the world. This includes wild adventures with car shredders (yes, please google those -- it's insane), travels in China (which at the point of writing the book, imported vast amounts of American scrap to fuel the building of their middle class infrastructure) and travels across the USA with Chinese and Taiwanese scrap buyers, searching for overlooked items that could be 'harvested' for metals.

It's a quality read, and though exhaustive at some points, I think worthwhile for anyone who is interested in getting a better understand of what happens to our stuff.

The big message for me, is fundamentally, to consume less. Consumption drives this crazy machine -- if we focus more on 'reduce' and 'reuse', we wouldn't be creating billion dollar industries just figuring out to get rotting cars off the road by shredding them and sending their parts to other countries, to build new cars, to ship right back, over and over.