China's Trash Junkies
It was through junk that Raymond Li, a low-level Chinese paint factory worker, made his fortune. In the 1990s, he turned his incremental profits from recycling rubbish into a thriving scrap import business and now receives around $1.2 million shipping containers-worth of discarded goods a month that he disassembles into precious raw materials such as copper, glass, and wood. But today, this scrappy way of life is under threat, at least in Beijing. The city has undertaken a heavy-handed effort to curb rural to urban migration. And in the process, it has blocked these green-collar laborers, most of them migrants, from accessing dump sites even though Beijing produces the most waste of any Chinese city and has no official recycling program. Its trash has overwhelmed its official landfills, leading some to refer to the city as a land not where one thousand flowers bloom, but where (over) one thousand unregulated landfills do.