Excerpt from Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By recycling the West's waste instead of using virgin equivalent, China prevented the emissions of untold millions of metric tons of CO₂, and the extraction of billions of tons of ore. Trash flooded into regions like Guangdong, "the Scrapyard to the World," as Minter describes it, "a place where wealthy countries sent the stuff that they couldn't or wouldn't recycle themselves; a place where former farmers took that stuff, made it into new stuff, and resold it to the same countries that had exported it in the first place." Countless polan wang, or "junk kings," got rich off this new industry, among them Zhang Yin of the paper recycling giant Nine Dragons, who became China's first female billionaire.

Everything had a market: plastics and scrap electronics could be sold to Chenghai, the so called "Toy City," where millions of plastic playthings are made, often from allegedly toxic materials; or Yiwu, nicknamed "Christmas village" for turning out more than 60 percent of the world's festive tchotchkes. In the south, a thriving electronics recycling industry imported millions of metric tons of discarded electronics in what was known as chengshi kuanchan, or "urban mining"—wreaking pollution and, over time, helping to transform China into an electronics manufacturing powerhouse.

The scale of Chinese recycling by the early 2000s is hard to even picture. In Wen'an, a formerly rural region south of Beijing, as many as 20,000 plastics processors—and an estimated 100,000 workers—set up shop in just a handful of villages, sorting, shredding, and melting plastic down to feed the country's voracious manufacturing base. These recyclers lacked even basic safety equipment or environmental controls. Polluted wastewater filled the nearby streams, killing off the fish; the pollution was so severe that locals started to drink only bottled water.

By 2011, Wen'an's Xiaobai river was so toxic that when used to irrigate farmland, it wiped out the crops. Locals told of lung problems and of men so sick that they failed military entrance exams. The problem was not just associated with plastics. In Guiyu, where scrapped electronics were recycled, the ground and water was blighted with heavy metals, dioxins, and polychlorinated biphenyls. According to one study, a quarter of newborns in Guiyu had elevated levels of cadmium in their bloodstreams, which can lead to cancer, osteoporosis, and kidney damage, among other harmful effects. In another, 81 percent of children tested suffered from lead poisoning.

Crackdowns have since cleared much of the informal recycling in We'nan and other areas of China, and concentrated it into more tightly regulated "economic zones." But similar conditions have been reported wherever informal recycling takes hold. I have seen it myself.

Excerpted from Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.