The global trade in junk and trash

At the moment, the cost of sending a forty-foot shipping container of discarded plastics from the Port of Los Angeles to Port Klang, Malaysia (where many of California’s plastic exports are heading since China’s restrictions on imports), is roughly $1,200. DS: Your previous book, Junkyard Planet, was about the global industrial trade in scrap (or recyclables) and your upcoming book is about globalized trails of secondhand commodities – everything from clothes to collectables. What happened then was shocking: as global consumer demand crashed, Chinese factories stopped buying recyclables (and other raw materials), forcing some cities in developed countries to landfill their scrap paper.

Source: discardstudies.com