Most Americans throw away their recyclables into their blue and green bins, not giving any second thought about where they go. I, admittedly, was a mindless recycler until I read Junkyard Planet. The impact that recycling has on my daily life was not something I thought about often until Adam Minter had …show more content…
The industry flourished so much that they developed a universal language for trading scrap metal pieces. Minter’s accounts of his father trading “honey” and “barley” were strange to my foreign ears, but it was impressive to me how they could with ease communicate so much information in single, seemingly random words. Minter also recounted Chinese scrap traders using the same terms as American scrap traders. The evolution of the language fascinated me because it’s prime example of how truly large and developed the recycling and scrap trade