For some, recycling is a big business; for others a moralized way of engaging with the world. But, for many, this is a dangerous way of earning a living. With scrap now being the largest export category from the US to China, the sheer scale of this global trade has not yet been clearly identified or analyzed. Combining fine-grained ethnographic analysis with overviews of international material flows, Recycling Economies radically changes the way we understand global and local economies as well as the new social relations and identities created by recycling processes.
Following global...