Have you ever wondered what happens to your clothes after you drop them off at Goodwill? Or where your electronics go once you’ve left them at the recycling center? Yes, some of our excess is exported to emerging markets around the world and either resold or harvested for parts. Is that cool? And what can we do to shop in a way that reduces our environmental impact?
Adam Minter is a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion and the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade and Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale. Today, Adam joins Ross to explain how being born into a family of junk dealers informed his career as a journalist. He introduces us to what happens when we donate clothing to Goodwill, describing how items are sorted and resold or exported to other markets around the world.
Adam weighs in on why it’s not unethical to send our e-waste to West Africa or resell used car seats in Mexico, challenging us to worry more about the quality of the products we buy and less about where they’re exported when we’re done with them. Listen in for Adam’s insight around the value of mass market collectibles and learn how to shift your consumer thinking from immediate cost to total cost of ownership.
Resources
Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade by Adam Minter
Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale by Adam Minter
Unbundled Airlines on Planet Money EP517
Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter by Margareta Magnusson
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon at the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Hey, Adam, thanks for being here. Hey, this is cool. Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure. This is Adam Minter on the line, scrap journalist and author of Junkyard Planet, Travels in the Billion Dollar Trash Trade, and Secondhand Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, and also a writer at Bloomberg Opinion. I read both of these books at the recommendation of a mutual friend, acquaintance of ours, and I’m so glad I did because I never knew I would be so interested in trash, junk, scrap, whatever you want to call it.
Thanks for revealing this whole world to me, Adam. Well, it’s I mean, it’s been fun. And I’m just I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed the books. Yeah, I sort of blew through them because there are just so many fascinating anecdotes about how this world works. And many of the stories I like digging into is basically anything in the world is interesting if you dig into with enough detail. Yes, definitely. Yeah, you share this opinion?
Adam Minter: Yeah, I do. I do. Since I since I was a child. I mean, that’s one of the things you learn. Growing up in a scrapyard is that there’s always something interesting in those barrels of plumbing scrap or electrical scrap or whatever else it is. So yeah, I mean, you just learn from a very early age to have that ethic of dig and it will be interesting.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. I’m glad you feel that way. I want to ask you, how exactly does one end up with a career like yours? Are you required to be born into it like you are? I feel like you occupy such a unique journalistic niche.
Adam Minter: So it certainly helps to have been born into the scrap industry, but it’s not a requirement. I mean, my background, my family background is, you know, we’re junk peddlers, we’re junk dealers. My great grandfather, Abe Leder, came over from Russia without anything. We’ll see you next time. So my future in the business was uncertain. It also became clear that I wasn’t necessarily We’ll be right back. I like writing. I should become a journalist. But the funny thing is, is that, you know, I didn’t really have any meaningful experiences that would appeal to any other publisher.
So I did what I could do. And that was I pitched Scrap Magazine, which was at the time the largest trademark. And I figured, well, I’ll do a few articles for them. And then, you know, I’ll find my way to the New Yorker. And seriously. And this was, you know, more than two decades ago. And it turned out, you know, that year after year, I’d keep saying that to myself. And I kept doing more scrap journalism. And it became a career. There are now other scrap and recycling journalists.
I think what made me unique, what maybe makes me unique, is that I can go anywhere in the world and, you know, for instance, this most recent book, I was in Benin and I can see people recycling and I can walk in there and they may be suspicious of me. But the moment I open my mouth and say, oh, I know what you’re doing. My family did this. I know how to sort that metal. It changes the dynamic because it is this business around the world that people don’t necessarily understand.
You’re not proud to say you’re a junk man. So, you know, a reporter comes in and he says he does it too. He’s probably not lying. And so that’s a point of commonality that allows me to go a little bit deeper.
Ross Kenyon: There is something that is pejorative, just built into that word. I think of that scene from The Wedding Singer, where Julia Guglia is dating the junk bond trader, introduces him as such, and he says, I don’t tell people you’re in junk waitressing.
Adam Minter: That’s your Yeah, you know, and it’s pop culture. I mean, it completely, you know, it’s over and over. It sort of turns its nose up at the business. I mean, the one that I’ve talked about lately in some of my public talks is Star Wars. And, you know, throughout Star Wars, every film has junkyards and junk trucks. And the last trilogy, Ray, who is repeatedly referred to as a scavenger, is something to be ashamed of. And so, yeah, it is a business throughout pop culture, throughout time, people just sort of look down on it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I mean, I guess where do you even start from when your grandfather came over and started being a rag picker, which you point this out in, I forget which book this is in, but people don’t even know that being a rag picker was a thing. And I have to admit that I was reminded of the fact that this was a thing that existed. But I guess how did... Recycling as we come to see it now, how did it start out? And also, if you’re able to weave this in, I thought the ethnic component, I thought it was very interesting that Ashkenazi Jews were very involved in the origination of this as a specific trade.
How did this all come to be?
Adam Minter: Well, I mean, you know, recycling has existed, you know, for millennia. I mean, anytime somebody melted down a piece of metal, a piece of bronze to make it into another piece of bronze, you know, a sword to turn it into a plowshare, if you will, you know, Recycling as we know it, as an industrial process, really emerged with the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, people were consuming a lot more stuff, producing a lot more stuff, and savvy entrepreneurs looked We looked at all of that excess waste and said, maybe we can feed this back into our industrial processes.
A lot of people are surprised to know, for example, the United States was importing in the 19th century scrap steel from the UK. It was very wealthy. It was throwing away a lot of steel. The U.S. was importing it and turning it into railway ties to build the transcontinental railway. So rag trading specifically started right at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Because England was producing so much wool, and people were wearing out that wool, and suddenly people were trying to figure out, well, what do I do with that wool?
What do I do with that cotton at home? And they realized, at least with the cotton, you could recycle it into paper, which is what by... You know, grandfather was doing in the early 20th century in Galveston, Texas. So it’s something that has always been there. And people sort of take it for granted. They don’t often know that it’s a critical component of all of our industrial economies. In the United States, half of the steel used in the United States, much of which is used for the automotive industry, comes from recycled resources, oftentimes from recycled cars.
If you go to China, well over half of their paper supply comes from recycled resources. They’re doing it because it’s a cheap and easily accessible raw material. Why did ethnic minorities like Ashkenazi Jews become involved in this? Well, it has always been the case in industrial economies, non-industrial economies, that ethnic minorities are not afforded the same resources. I really want to be a junk man or a junk woman. It’s something that you do because it’s the entrepreneurial sort of opportunity of last resort. And so anywhere I go in the world, and I’ve reported all over the world on the street, more often than not, it’s usually ethnic minorities outgroups who are doing it.
I tell the story that I was in Japan many years ago. And writing a story about Japan’s recycling industry. And I met with the Japan Iron and Steel Recycling Industry Association, the JISRI. And it was a very fun conversation. We spent an hour together. At the end of it, I just said to the board, I said, you know, because I’m always curious, how did you guys get into the business? What’s your family story? And what had been a very jovial conversation suddenly went dark and silent.
And they said, well, we don’t talk about it much, but we’re all ethnic Koreans. And if you know Japan, ethnic Koreans, a lot of them were brought over as slave labor around World War II, and they are a highly discriminated against group, and they continue to be the people who run a large component of the recycling industry there. And that situation exists for countries all over the world.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s very fascinating. What’s especially surprising about this is that junk traders are often relatively wealthy. It seems like you, well, you document a number of cases where people are shockingly well off from having participated in this trade. Yet it seems like dominant groups in society neglect it to their own economic fate. They would be better off if they adopted it in some ways.
Adam Minter: Right. I mean, the potential to make money in this industry and to accumulate vast amounts of wealth is almost limitless. And I think one of the reasons why people are surprised about this is because they still look at it as garbage. Now, that’s changing a little bit in some more affluent developed countries where we start talking about it as recycling. And then it sort of gets this environmental sheen. And I don’t know, people associate with Patagonia in the North face and expensive apparel or something.
But in reality... The recycling industry, if you grow up around it, if you work in it, what you quickly realize is that it’s the raw material industry. And it’s just a competing raw material. And if you look at it from that point of view, is it really surprising that somebody, you know, that competes with steel mills, that competes with copper smelters, that competes with paper mills or Dow Chemical to make plastics, that they would have the opportunity to create vast amounts of wealth. They don’t always start that way.
Rarely do they. I mean, every large scrap business I’ve ever The opportunity to scale those businesses into quite large raw material supply businesses is really quite large.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I can’t imagine that. Well, we might come back to the raw materials, the industrial side of things, but I think it might be helpful for people to wrap their heads around what happens on a more consumer-facing level. And your book, Secondhand, documents the story of goodwill and how things work when And one of our Nori podcast, Patreon patrons, what a sentence that is, recently is in the process of selling her home and becoming an RV nomad and has been spending a lot of time at Goodwill. Goodwill, one could say.
And very curious to hear exactly how all of that works. And me too, I was fascinated by it. What happens if you give a shirt of, I don’t know, what kind of quality? How do you even introduce this topic so gigantic? Sorry, Adam, this is a big, big mushy question. Can you help me?
Adam Minter: Yeah, I mean, I wrote a book about it and I had the same problem. I know I want to go inside of a goodwill and show what goes on in it, but then it’s like, how does that fit into a wider narrative? As a writer and a reporter, it’s that black box. There are lots out there that nobody’s really written about or shone a light on and it’s not easy and Goodwill doesn’t necessarily welcome or not just Goodwill, Salvation Army or anybody else welcome you into their operations as would any other company to show you exactly how they do things.
For me, the entry point was really very personal. It was something that everybody goes through, and that was the need to figure out what to do with my mother’s things after she passed away several years ago. My sister and I, over time, we’d come into town, and each of us would divvy up some of the stuff or take it to Goodwill. Then one weekend, we were both in town, and we said, we’ve got to finish this job. It’s been a couple of years of trying to figure out what to do with mom’s stuff.
We got down to her china. And my mom loved her China. My sister was living in New York. She didn’t want to transport the China out to New York. I was living in Shanghai at the time. I didn’t want to take the China to China. And so we sort of had this argument. You take it. No, you take it. No, you take it. No, you take it. And finally, we decided we’re going to take it to Goodwill. And as I’m waiting at the Goodwill drive-through donation site, I realized that’s the way to write about this because it is a place that is a point of contact for, at least in North America, for pretty much I call it the Kleenex of thrift, meaning we don’t say tissue in the US, we say Kleenex.
When it’s time to get rid of stuff, we say let’s take it to Goodwill, even though we may mean taking it to the Salvation Army or some other thrift store. That for me was the entry point, is what happens to my mom’s china. And it became for me, once I found a Goodwill that was willing to let me basically just hang out in their warehouses for weeks at a time, finding one that would let me in. And that was the Goodwill of Southern Arizona, which is a network of, I think it’s 16 stores in the Tucson area.
Just to back up, goodwill, you know, many people think it’s just this one giant entity. It is a giant entity in that it’s a federation, but there are actually, there’s a national office and then there are 140, I think it’s 141 goodwill federations around the United States and Canada that have their own territory and they are allowed to operate more or less how they want to. So, you know, what you say about one goodwill usually applies to others, but there’s always going to be, you know, there’s always going to be differences.
So that sort of was my entry point is I wanted to know what happens to the stuff after they take mom’s stuff or dad’s stuff or grandma’s stuff. Who wants it? Because for me, the central question for a lot of my journalism around waste is ultimately, what’s the market? Who’s going to buy this stuff? You can’t pay people to take your garbage. You can pay people. People won’t do it for free. They have to have some financial incentives. So I wanted to know, in a sense, what are the financial incentives along the way?
What makes this giant 140 Federation operation work? That was kind of how I got into it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m still trying to wrap my head around this is my potential failure as a host of just trying to find useful entry points in. I guess some of the stories I thought were really interesting that might be good bright lines for us to focus on. I thought the car seats in Mexico section was very interesting and also how clothes move and are discounted progressively and then what happens to clothes that actually do not clear goodwill to consumers. Maybe those are two good places to start.
Adam Minter: Sure. Well, let’s talk about clothes. Clothes for me is super interesting for a number of reasons, but probably the most important reason is Goodwill will tell you that it is the single most important item that goes through their stores. One, because of volume and two, because of the value. And Goodwill is a non-profit organization. They take the money that they earn from these clothes and use it to basically fund job training programs. And so, you know, a big part of goodwill staffing is related to those job training programs.
And so they have a financial incentive to make sure they get every penny out of that blouse. So what happens? You know, if I take a t-shirt and I drop it off at a Goodwill donation site, somebody is going to take that shirt and put it in a bin full of clothes that will then be, once it’s full, taken over to a group of sorters. And these sorters are trained people. They also usually have informational sheets, clipboards, whatever it is saying, you know, that almost have flow charts on them that will say, okay, this is this brand of shirt.
And so long as it’s in good condition, we will price it at say $2.99. If they find a problem with it, maybe it hasn’t been washed, Goodwill isn’t going to wash it, you know, maybe if there’s kind of a hole or it’s just, you know, anything like that, it may go into a bin that’s set aside for a market that will pay less for it. That could be within a Goodwill outlet store where stuff is sold by the pound, or it may be designated for immediate export.
And there are markets that will buy the lower cost clothes. One of the interesting things that’s happened with Goodwill recently is that they found that the overall quality of clothes coming through their doors and getting into the soriners' hands has actually declined. And we know this. I mean, as clothes become cheaper, they become cheaper. I have like pairs of pants that have ripped after like a single use. Their clothes do not seem like they are very sturdy these days. Right, right, exactly. I mean, you know, people have been joking, oh, they don’t make them like they used to, but it’s certifiably the case.
I mean, if If you talk to the Goodwill Sorters, and these are some of the most fascinating and insightful people on American consumer habits that you will ever meet. I mean, they know everything about us. But they will say, you know, if you talk to them, you know, over the last two years, we’re just seeing the stitching isn’t as good. You know, the fabric, the thread count, you can feel it in your fingers. And I was just amazed, you know, when you spend time with these sorters, they’ll pick up a garment and they’ll feel it between their fingers and, you know, they’ll say, okay, this thread count is just so much lower than it was when we got the same brand six months ago.
That’s a problem for Goodwill because it means it’s not going out usually to the sales floor where they make the most money. It’s going to the outlet. You can’t export that stuff anymore. You can think there was a time maybe you could export the lower quality stuff to, say, West Africa or East Africa. They don’t want it either. So then it becomes a cost for Goodwill. So maybe they have to pay somebody who turns it into stuffing to take it. Goodwill will not landfill or incinerate clothes.
They don’t want to do that. But then they may have to pay somebody to take it off their hands. And so that becomes a real problem. And it’s an ongoing problem for the organization. So, you know, but the preference really is to have things sell domestically. But on average, of the stuff that goes out onto a thrift store shelves, only about a third to 40% actually sells on that thrift store shelves. And then that stuff will be brought back into the warehouse in 2020.
So, it’s really a very complex market ecosystem and, you know, they’re always on their toes. You know, in Tucson, the man who’s in charge He showed me his address book. It’s filled with people from Pakistan and from Ghana and from Malaysia and from Indonesia. These are people who are coming in to these Goodwills or calling or emailing saying, I want to buy clothes from you that I can import into my market. You know, they all want different stuff. They all want a different mix. And that means that these goodwills need to stay on top of it.
It’s a business.
Ross Kenyon: Isn’t it just terribly unethical to dump our excess clothing in these West African markets though, Adam? I mean, this is a common argument, but is there something to that?
Adam Minter: I would say that even the language itself is the wrong language to use. I have been covering recycling and secondhand for more than two decades, and I have yet to see anything ever dumped into West Africa. It’s always important. Imported. And I think the distinction is really, really important. One, to dump makes it sound like, well, you’re looking for a garbage dump. Well, from an economic perspective, that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s always going to be cheaper for somebody in the United States with some of the lowest landfill costs in So, in that sense, it just doesn’t make economic sense.
That stuff only goes there because somebody is paying for it. Nobody’s paying for it to go over there. They’re paying to import it. And those are the people who are looking at it, calling up Tucson, calling up someone in Boston and saying, I want this stuff for my market so I can resell it. So they’re importing it. And so you then have to say, you have to sort of flip the question and say, well, you know, if there’s a guy in Accra, Ghana, who knows he has a market for secondhand clothes in Accra, that there are people who want to buy secondhand clothes.
Yeah. I see an economic opportunity there. And I would say he’s not only doing something, you know, he’s doing something very ethical. And the partner, his exporting partner, who is putting those clothes together for him, who would maybe not otherwise have somewhere else to send them, is doing a good as well. So I wholesale, and I’ve written this, I wholesale reject the term dumping because I just don’t think it’s grounded in economic reality.
Ross Kenyon: Does that also hold true for things like what is typically deemed e-waste? Yeah. What even is that?
Adam Minter: And, you know, we all know what we’re talking about. If I say the words together, e-waste Africa, your listeners immediately have an image of probably young black men stoking fires fueled by bundles of wire. And almost certainly, they may not know this, that picture was taken in a large dump in Accra, Ghana called Agbag Bloshi. The people who go and do these stories don’t spend much time in Ghana. It’s very easy to go to Agbag Bloshi. And if you go there, you will see electronics.
You’ll see wires and maybe some plastic cases being set on fire. But you have to ask where that stuff’s coming from. And it’s not coming off the boats carrying containers of electronics into Accra. That’s not what beans burn there. What that stuff is, and you have to go and actually hunt it out, is that’s the stuff that’s been in Accra, Ghana for 20 years. And finally, it can’t be recycled and reused anymore. What the stuff is that’s coming into Ghana now and into Nigeria and into even some of it’s still going into China or Indonesia or Malaysia, where I live, is reusable, repairable electronics.
And that makes sense because, again, why would you put... I’m just thinking of one trader I know, $5,000 to ship a container of old computer monitors from Boston to Accra. And then you’ve got to spend another $5,000 to $6,000 on taxes getting them in. Why would anybody tax garbage in the first place if there’s no value there? The value there is that this is low-cost stuff that’s considered better than what’s available in the local markets to begin with. It’s massively pretested. That’s another way to look at used.
Instead of calling it used, just call it massively pretested. And it’s at a great price point that works for people. And even if it’s broken, the skill level of the repair community in Ghana and West Africa is extremely high. And so they want to import this stuff because, you know, say you have a broken iPhone. I don’t know, in Kansas City, you maybe will sell that for $10. And I’ve seen these transactions take place to a West African trader who will then bring it to West Africa and he will take it to his repair guy and it’s all guys.
The repair of West Africa is guys for a reason which I won’t go into right now. And they’re able to add some value to it. It’s a working iPhone and they’ll sell it for $100. I mean, those are killer margins and that’s why that stuff flows.
Ross Kenyon: Is one of the concerns that people have that some of these tasks involve opening up electrical components that have things like mercury or other noxious chemicals and there’s just not adequate protection for employees? I guess this is true for all sorts of the quote unquote But recycling industry in China and other places that these things only happen over there rather than in the United States because we have tougher environmental regulations and it’s too costly. So we export it so that people with less protections that cost less and they internalize those costs of our consumption habits.
Is that like the fair charitable way to state this case? No. Okay, so I’ve done a bad job.
Adam Minter: It’s not. With electronics, the number one reason that electronics move into emerging markets is because people want to reuse them. New stuff is expensive, used stuff is less expensive. And if they are not being exported for reuse, they’re being exported for parts. So you may have a phone that’s beyond saving, but I guarantee you there’s a chip or some parts in it that somebody can pull out and they will use that for the repair of a phone that... That’s already in these markets. And if you go to West Africa, if you go to Africa in particular, the people who repair stuff will say their number one bottleneck is getting parts.
So how do they get parts? Well, they import broken stuff and then they harvest the parts out of them. I mean, that’s what’s driving this trade. On the recycling end, you know, never mind the actual stuff, but if we’re talking about recyclables, things that are no longer stuff, and I realize this gets metaphysical, but stuff that we would classify as recycling, and it’s a great... The reason that stuff moved over is because it’s raw materials. It’s a cheaper raw material. If it’s coming from a developed country, the quality of that recycling tends to be very high.
That’s a funny concept to people who aren’t in the business, but the recycling, the pay The paper that’s manufactured in a place like China and the cardboard manufactured in China for the China market tends to be a very low quality. And one of the reasons is because it uses a lot of recycled content. And the more recycled content you put in your paper or your metal tends So, you know, this notion that, you know, we can’t afford to do it. I think the better question to be asking, again, and I always encourage people to think about recycling in raw material terms, is why are we exporting raw materials to China?
Why are we exporting parts to China? And when you start asking those questions, I think you get better answers. I mean, the reason why you would export raw materials to China is because you have more raw materials at home than you can use. And that’s true. I mean, the U.S. uses a lot of materials. About two-thirds of what’s generated as a recyclable in the U.S. is recycled in the U.S. But then you still have that one-third. And so you can either landfill it or you can find somebody who wants to buy it.
And for a lot of years, China was a very willing buyer. They’ve decided that they want to start using more of their own domestic stuff, so they’re not doing that anymore. So now we’re seeing a change. Who’s buying that stuff from the U.S.? People are always surprised, you know, ones who use that terminology, dump. The U.S. is dumping its recycling. Well, Canada is now one of the top two importers of American recycling. Well, are you telling me that the American recyclers are dumping on Toronto?
I don’t think so. Well, why is Toronto, why is Canada importing it? They’re importing it because it’s a raw material they can use. And likewise, the U.S. will import recycling from Canada because there are certain grades of recycling that Canada has maybe in precious metals or whatever that we can’t import. So that to me is the frame of reference by which I look at this stuff. I have it on very good authority, though, Adam, that the United States is dumping unsafe car seats for children into Mexico.
Can you comment? When I was at the Goodwill of Southern Arizona in Nogales, Arizona, which is just across the border from Nogales, Mexico, I saw car seats being auctioned off to people in Mexico who were bringing them over as wholesalers and reselling them. You know, flashing red lights went off because if you’re a parent, you are indoctrinated quite early that used car seats are unsafe. They have expirations on the backs of them and they must be destroyed lest somebody who is reckless or maybe doesn’t know better uses them and kills a child, you know, with this unsafe used car seat.
So I was deeply concerned. I thought this was deeply unethical. And so I went home and I discussed it with my wife and she’s like, well, you should at least find out what they’re doing. And maybe that’s a great story about Goodwill doing something horrible. And I went and I looked and it turns out that there are no federal laws against using used car seats. There are no even federal guidelines on used car seats. And I did some more reporting and I found some people on background who were authoritative on how the U.
S. government And they said there’s one of two possibilities why there’s these expiration dates in these campaigns. One, they’re just trying to keep themselves from getting sued. Or two, it’s a marketing scheme, which I thought was very interesting. It wasn’t enough for me to write about. So then I started contacting car seat manufacturers, asking them if they could just please tell me how they determine how a car seat expires. Do they work with the plastics manufacturers? I only got out of the 10 largest car seat manufacturers on the planet.
Only two responded to me and only one responded directly to the questions about how they determine these expiration dates. And that answer was no comment. So then I sort of found myself at a crossroads and I started calling around to some other countries. I got to Sweden and Sweden actually has some of the world’s best automotive safety regulations. And they also have some very good insurers who want to see children kept safe because they don’t want to pay out. And after contacting them, they made it clear to me that they’ve done testing there on used car seats.
They’ve held on to car seats over time to see how they degrade and they don’t. And so what became apparent to me was two things. One, you know, marketing is everything. And we’ve seen this before that manufacturers can be hostile to recycled products because they compete with new ones. But it was also a reminder to me, you know, it’s sort of an entrepreneurial reminder. That the things that we may very well consider waste are going to be valuable to people and valuable in other places and other countries and valuable in ways that maybe we don’t appreciate.
In Mexico, car seats are very expensive as they are here. And so a used car A car seat is an affordable way for somebody to protect their child. You know, it may be a stretch for somebody to buy a car there in the first place. Then if you have a large family in Mexico, they do have large families. To afford car seats for all those kids is not easy. So if you can get one for $10, $15, And so, it gets back to this theme that’s been important in my work is that you shouldn’t assume your definition of waste is the definition of waste that everybody else embraces.
And so, that was really sort of the parable and the lesson of the car seats is that there is value in these things and you just have to look for it and you have to look at how that value is sometimes manipulated for marketing purposes.
Ross Kenyon: One of the phrases I use when I approach you about doing this show is that it unveils a world of quotidian miracles. What should people do listening? I know you focus on reuse being so much better than recycling. That’s why it’s first in the triad. Right. But what should someone do who’s listening, who cares about, I imagine people listening try not to waste nearly as much as they might otherwise do. They probably recycle more than average. This is an environmental climate podcast. You know the audience.
What should they care about? What shouldn’t they care about?
Adam Minter: Let me start with what they shouldn’t care about. They shouldn’t care about stuff being exported. I think there’s become this real phobia, especially in North America, about exporting our used stuff, our recyclables. The bottom line is, is that if somebody is importing your used stuff, that’s somebody who wants it, who wants to use it. And they’re not taking it away from a higher value in North America. I mean, they’re creating the higher value because if they’re buying it means that somebody in the U.S.
doesn’t want it as badly or doesn’t want it at all. Clothing is a great example of that. I mean, the U.S. generates so much excess used clothing. And if it didn’t go overseas, there would just be nowhere. I’ll take a container load of that. And yes, I will pay the shipping. That’s how it works. So, if something... Including the climate impact. And so if somebody can keep using something, that means there’s less climate impact because you don’t have to manufacture as much stuff.
You know, on what we should do. I mean, you know, I’m not one to preach to people and I’m always reluctant to do it. But I will say, and I think we all know this, is, you know, the buying less ultimately is, you know, from a zero impact lifestyle. I mean, buying less stuff is really important. So yes, you know, shop secondhand if you can. But, you know, if everybody is shopping secondhand, sooner or later, everything is going to wear out. And it’s just not realistic anyway.
I mean, then we’re going to be left with no stuff. And so I always recommend to people, look, if you’re going to buy something, buy the durable product. And this is what I’ve done. And really writing this book had a huge impact upon me personally, because if you go to where I went and saw all of this stuff just piling up, you realize there’s at least a large percentage of it not usable because it’s just cheap stuff. It makes an impact. And so for me personally, when we buy something, when my family buys something, we try and buy something better.
Buy that better quality pair of shorts. Men’s clothing is very hard to buy secondhand because if you talk to the thrift stores, they’ll tell you men wear their clothes very hard. So there just isn’t much coming in. So I bought a new pair of shorts the other day and I bought a better pair of shorts. I’m not going to name the brand, but it’s just the fabric’s better, the thread count is higher, stitching’s better. I’m cognizant of the fact that’s a privilege. Not everybody can pay a little bit extra, you know, and so I’m always reluctant to recommend that to people.
But for me personally, Personally, as somebody who can, I look at it as, look, this pair of shorts is going to last me longer. You know, if at some point I decide to donate it or somebody decides to donate my shorts, I’m pretty confident that this pair of shorts will have another life. It will keep lasting. All of us are going to buy new stuff. We’re going to continue buying it. That’s just the nature of civilization at this point. But buy that better stuff.
And if you’re buying better stuff, if that better stuff is taking more out of your bank account, it means you’re buying less stuff. That’s not the only reason to do it. But obviously, we all want to be buying less. But if you are buying, buy with an aim to the secondhand market. And that isn’t as crazy as it sounds. I mean, if you’ve ever bought a car, most people, middle class people who buy cars say, OK, I’m buying this car. What’s the resale value going to be?
What am I going to get for a trade in seven years? I think that’s a really good way to be thinking and being a modern, environmentally minded consumer.
Ross Kenyon: What happens to the countries and entrepreneurs that are importing American waste if there’s just less waste? Obviously, the price will go up and they’ll have less available, but what is their next best option to reusing American waste? What would happen?
Adam Minter: Well, that’s a really interesting question. I mean, right now, you know, the global economy is changing very quickly. And so I’m going to speak to this, you know, as a pre-COVID moment. But, you know, one thing I was seeing in West Africa during my reporting for this last book, and I’ve since confirmed it’s still going on, is you are seeing more and more Chinese junk, more and more Chinese stuff, more and more Chinese recycling being exported out of China into Africa. And so you see Chinese used clothes, for example, competing with American and European and not in Africa, but in other parts of the world, Japanese used clothes, which tend to be a very high quality.
And so, you know, what’s going to be interesting to see happen is as these emerging economies that have developed so rapidly and so significantly over the last 20 years, as they really adopt I don’t want to say American style consumption, but sort of modern consumption patterns. They will be creating the supply. The question is these very countries that are now creating the supply, the excess junk, they are needing to import less and less of it. And so I think what we may be facing, and we’ll really have to see how it plays out over the next few years, is an excess of secondary materials, as they would be called in the industry, you know, whether it be recyclables or used clothing or used computers.
I think you’re going to see probably more and more of that stuff being recycled or landfilled. And so it’s going to be a challenge for the current traders. What do they do to hedge? Are there financial instruments like there are in other commodities markets? Oh, sure. Sure. So the big recycling traders, and by big, I mean, you’re talking tens of thousands of tonnes, say, of aluminum. And there’s different grades of aluminum scrap or copper or whatever. They actually do hedge. They will hedge their positions using futures contracts.
Is that available for different types of clothing grades or is that not financialized? You know, I asked about that and the person I asked about it looked at me like it was absolutely insane. Why is that any more insane than pork bellies or aluminum? It’s not, you know what I mean? It really isn’t. But what is interesting about the used clothing trade is it’s a massive trade, and yet it has stayed very, very, it still is, it’s very massive, but you haven’t seen large consolidations.
And even when you have organizations as big as Goodwill, as I said earlier, it’s the various federations that will trade their stuff. I mean, And theoretically, if Goodwill, the international organization decided we want to work with somebody to create a clothing trading hedge, they could do it. But that’s just not how they function. And so it’s a huge trade, but it’s this massive trade that still happens, you know, on almost like a container by container basis. And I guess it just hasn’t scaled in a way that justifies those contracts yet.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that makes sense. Buying durable products, advice that you have given somewhat reluctantly, you may even be even more reluctant to give more specific advice, but where do you even look? Because I think a lot of the products that I even have access to that think about buying, they’re just not always that well made. Where can people even look for this sort of thing?
Adam Minter: You can, I mean, you can look for it. And I mean, you know, you just start The Google machine, if you will. I mean, looking up durable men’s clothing. If you Google that, you’re going to start finding some brands. Consumer Reports is a really interesting tool because they really do try and help their members. It’s a member-based subscription. Find products that will have the lowest cost of ownership. And that’s particularly important when you’re buying things like appliances. And as you know from reading the book, I’m very interested in washing machines because we’ve talked about the declining quality of clothing, but appliances too.
We have good consumer survey research on this and good warranty information. We have my grandmother, her washing machine, that thing lasted for two decades and didn’t need a repair. Anybody who’s Tried to buy a clothes washer in recent years knows that it’s exceedingly difficult to buy a machine that’s going to last you five years without repairs, much less 20. But there is, in fact, at least one brand out there, and I write about them in the book, I’m not afraid to mention them, is Speed Queen. They basically build their home machines like commercial laundry machines.
And commercial laundry machines, a laundromat is going to want a low cost of ownership. They don’t want to be repairing those machines. So if you take your commercial laundry machine and put it in the home, You’re going to have a very durable machine that’s going to last a long time. But, you know, so I found Speed Queen and I went and visited them and they were really helpful to me in laying out this case. But I can also say it took me a long time to find companies that were, you know, sort of doing things that way, much less would let me in the door.
But, you know, you just kind of have to search for them. And there are clothing brands that do make a better quality, you know, T-shirts. There are brands that will stitch your jeans better and you can find them. You can search for them. It’s out there.
Ross Kenyon: I wonder if this is just the way that consumer brains work with the discount rate where people tend to just care about the immediate price. They care about that more than some future price because that’s distant. Who knows if it’ll ever arrive even though it most certainly will. Just our psychology. And there was a Great Planet Money, I think, or maybe it was Freakonomics episode some years back about how all of the incredibly unbundled airlines where you basically just pay for like the smallest seat and have to pay even for water.
And every upgrade are among the most profitable airlines, but people rate them the lowest. And I think that’s a great illustration of this where you’re just like, oh, this other washing machine is an extra $300. But why can’t you just take into account that thing will last an extra decade? It just doesn’t work with our brains.
Adam Minter: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. And yet I think there are some shifts happening. You know, I think the used car lot and its relationship to the dealership, you know, a new dealership is a really interesting relationship. And I think we’re seeing it pop up in other products. I mean, you know, the way it traditionally works is, okay, I’ve driven this car for, you know, how many years or how many miles. I want to trade it in and buy a new one. And so you take it to the dealership.
They have a used car lot. They offer you a price and you take it and you get a discount on your new one. And so that’s that’s why, you know, you have things like Kelly’s Blue Book, you know, and you have sites out there that are telling consumers are very keenly interested to know what their used car is worth. And for a long time, it was really only cars where we were thinking that way. But here and there, we’re starting to see it pop up in other products.
The most obvious is in smartphones and some electronics. You can go to an Apple store now, trade in your phone and get a discount on your new phone. And it works exactly like a used car lot. They will appraise it for you right there, tell you what it’s worth based upon if the screen is scratched up or whatever. Now, given that’s a more valuable product than, say, the flashlight that’s sitting on my desk next to me. But then the psychology then becomes over time, the consumer is going to be saying, hey, wait a second, this phone has some value.
This used phone has some value. Maybe my next one I should be buying with that value in mind in the way that we have always been doing. With cars, at least for decades and decades. And now it’s not just, you know, phones where we’re seeing people are starting to realize there’s value, you know, in the secondary market. We’re starting to see it with apparel, which surprised me. And Patagonia, which is expensive stuff, but they are an outdoor brand that makes very high quality clothes. They have a program called Wornwear.
And what that is, is it’s basically the used stuff. Patagonia will repair some of it, clean some of it. And they will sell it in their stores, which is really, to me, is kind of a revolutionary consumer moment where you have a high-end apparel maker selling used versions of its stuff. And they will say, if you talk to them, and I’ve talked to them, they’re very upfront about it. They said, one, it’s environmental. But two, from our point of view, it gives people, like a college student, a lower price point to enter our brand and become a regular customer, which sounds an awful lot like a used car lot.
And we know over the course of the pandemic, but it started before then, that secondhand clothing trading away from eBay, sites devoted specifically to trading secondhand clothes out of people’s closets are doing extremely well. Poshmark is one as well. Again, I think it’s probably still at the margins of our consumer society, but I at least think that you do have certain kinds of consumers starting to think about certain kinds of products with total cost of ownership in money. I mean, again, we’re not at the point where it is with cars, but I think at least in some quadrants, probably more than quadrants, but you’re starting to see that shift.
But of course, I mean, these are major shifts in consumer thinking, and it’s still, as you’ve said, I mean, it’s that price that’s in front of you that more often than not matters most.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think of those shows? I guess it’s been a while since I’ve seen them, but there’s like American Pickers, Pawn Stars, these, I guess, American Roadshows, like the great granddaddy of them all. Right, Antiques Roadshow, yeah. Yeah, Antiques Roadshow, there you go. What influence did that have on the waste or junk industry? Sure.
Adam Minter: You know, not as much as you would think. The big influence on the industry over the last, say, three decades was eBay. That changed a lot because all of a sudden people found out that these things they thought were really scarce. There’s 17 of them on sale right now on eBay. And these other shows sort of just kind of, you know, they served as sort of color to the black and white image that eBay was presenting. So they haven’t had as big an influence as many people might have assumed they had.
The real shift in the market came when online, you know, sales secondhand really started in the late 90s. And then these have just sort of followed along on that trend. Speaking personally, I mean, I love Antique’s Roadshow. My grandmother and I used to watch it. She took me to thrift stores and garage sales as a very small kid. So when we weren’t going to garage sales and thrift stores as much anymore, we could sit around and watch that. And guess what? That lampshade.
So it was a lot of fun for us. But ultimately, then you go on to eBay and see if you can find that stuff. In general, eBay was not great for the stuff industry, the antique stores, because it did take away some of the pricing power. With all that price transparency, you just couldn’t charge some of those outrageous prices for what we call collectibles anymore.
Ross Kenyon: I had a change in my psychology about this recently. Secondhand definitely did this for me where I began looking for... Oh, I also read a book called Meet the Frugal Woods. I don’t know if you know those folks. No, I don’t. I’m not a... Oh, okay. Yeah, they’re financial bloggers. Super minimalistic, frugal as the name implies. And they try to get everything free or extremely discounted and do a lot of garage sales and thrift shops and that whole thing. And I stopped at a garage sale in my neighborhood and spent like 20 minutes negotiating.
I just couldn’t do it. But then I can also log on to Amazon and find products that They’re vetted by hundreds, thousands of people say this thing is good or this thing is crap. And then I can decide and it’ll ship to me very quickly or I can delay the shipping and get free money for Kindle like ebooks or movies. And like it’s hard to compete with like that amount of e-commerce ease versus the like messy system of like finding like a one-off product in a store or from someone on the street.
I don’t know. What do I need to become a proper junk fan? Because I feel like Amazon has really spoiled my brain for it.
Adam Minter: Right. I keep asking myself that question. I’ve been asked various versions of this question in the past. I mean, in some sense, like all I can do is really speak to my own experiences. And that is like, I grew up around this stuff. And yet I appreciate it. What really shifted things for me was having to do two home cleanouts of relatives who had passed away. This is a grimmer answer than probably you wanted, but having to go through somebody’s accumulated belief. It shifts how you think about stuff.
I mean, you just start to see, you know, it hit me, you know, along the way, especially with my mom’s stuff. It’s like, you know, none of this stuff that I’m keeping and protecting and desk drawers or whatever it is, is going to mean a I mean, your stuff just doesn’t matter. And then, you know, I went out on, you know, for this book, I, you know, I spent a lot of time going out on home cleanouts with home cleanout services, both in, in Minnesota, and then also in Tokyo.
Two places where this business is growing very rapidly because you have rapidly aging societies and populations. And seeing other people go through this process and children of elderly parents who are downsizing or passed away having to realize that their parents' stuff that they curated so carefully doesn’t matter. It suddenly takes away some of the fun of being a materialist and shopping on Amazon. And it was interesting to me and very striking. You know, I would get to know some of these home clean out people I spent time with.
And to a person, they all said the same thing. You know, I’ve really become a minimalist. And the other thing that a couple of them brought up. They said, when I go to weddings, the two of them said the same thing to me. They said, when I go to weddings, I don’t buy off the registry anymore. I’m not buying the china. I’m not buying the linens. I’m not buying whatever it is on the registry. I’ll buy them a gift certificate for a really nice restaurant or buy them a couple days in the hotel if that’s on the registry for their honeymoon or help pay for the tickets to get to Thailand or wherever it is.
But I’m not buying them stuff that their kids are going to have to clean out at some point. And I think that Kind of thinking it’s not very fun. And that kind of experience is definitely not fun. But I think for me and talking to people who’ve read this book, I think those kinds of experiences and thinking about what’s accumulated in our homes and in our parents' homes in particular helps to shift habits away from, you know, wanting to click everything on Amazon. That’s a grim answer, but it’s really sort of where I finally come down on this.
The specter of death being a cure to materialism? Yeah, I mean, it’s probably not the answer you’re looking for, but really, it’s the one where, you know, when I’ve seen people really reduce their consumption, it’s when they’ve been around needing to down people who have downsized. You know, and it may not be because of death. It may be because they’re moving into a 55 plus housing complex, but they still got to get rid of this stuff that they thought they were going to keep forever. And there’s nowhere for it to go.
You know, you got to donate it. Nobody wants it. Your kids don’t want it. Your kids don’t want your stuff. So what are you going to do with it? And that really does make an impression upon people.
Ross Kenyon: It’s been weird for me because my parents recently moved and in the process, by the way, just moving in general, you realize how much crap you have that you don’t want. And like, why did I keep this? That’s universal, right? That’s just everybody. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. Yeah. So they’ve been working at their lifetime accumulation of tchotchkes. I’ve gotten a fair number of my childhood mementos sent out to me, which I will keep in my basement until I die, probably.
And then my kids will have to figure that out. But I’m not sure if anyone listening out there has been going through this too, but If you’re older and have kids or you have parents who are thinking about this, there’s sort of like a pre-death process of getting to clean out that has become fashionable. I’ve heard it from both sets of parents, from my wife’s parents and mine too, about not wanting to have to trouble you guys when that happens. That’s weird. I think it’s quite common now, though.
You document some of these services that ease this along.
Adam Minter: Yeah, it is common. And I think the psychology, I mean, it’s a really interesting thing I found just talking to my friends. Again, grim topic, but going into your grandparents' house while they’re still alive or go to your parents' house and saying, oh man, one of these days I’m going to have to deal with that cabinet. And that kind of thinking, I think, is becoming more pervasive. And there was the Swedish Death Cleaning book a few years ago. I don’t know if you saw that.
Swedish Death Cleaning is basically... It’s the same thing. This idea and these emotions associated with it and the practicality associated with it, I think, are starting to circulate around the culture. I really do believe that. I mean, without doing some really intricate consumer surveys, there’s no way to pinpoint it. But just talking to people... Reporting this, seeing what businesses are being created. I think there is something sort of brewing out there. And I have a feeling COVID may have accelerated some of these thoughts just because people have been staying home and cleaning out closets.
And I have to think it has some kind of consumer impact down the line, but we’ll have to see.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is there a great secondhand market for Hummels? Is that what those things are called?
Adam Minter: Not anymore. And that was interesting. Hummels, yeah, these German porcelains, usually of children, quite intricate, beautifully painted. That’s your thing. It’s not my thing, but it may be somebody’s thing. And there was a period of time where these Hummels, you go to any antique store, any flea market of any worth in the United States, and they would be going for $300, $400, $500. And who’s buying them? The people buying them or retirees, their kids are out of the house. They finally got some cash in their pocket that they can go and spend that kind of money on a Hummel.
And so they drove the market. And they love these things. You know, that was their thing. But the people who love the Hummels are going and gone now. And so the market for Hummels has collapsed. And so if you go into antique stores now, that Hummel, that one, For $30 at one point, I mean, they’re struggling to give them away for 50%. You see them in the double-digit pricing. And where will they be 10 years from now, 50 years from now? Who knows?
Maybe somebody will see that there’s something truly great in these mass market collectibles. Mass market collectibles is kind of an irony, if you ask me. But right now, it doesn’t seem like it’s there. And we’ve seen this happen in other countries. I mean, the Beanie Baby one is the notorious one. I mean, the people who really love the Beanie Babies grew out of them very, very quickly in that market crash. So, you know, again, it’s this idea that we have things stored in our home that are worth something.
You know, they’re worth something. You know, they’re worth sentimental value. They’re worth something to you. But odds are almost nothing in our homes has any value beyond the raw materials. When you look at the really big market in the sky, if you will.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one word for it. Yeah. Once one of my grandparents died, there was hullabaloo in the family because there was discovered a large stash of milk glass, which I think that was heavily overstated the value of that. Right. Everyone’s like, Oh, this is this will be a nice little little financial bonus. Like this is nice to find. Is it possible they got anything for that? Or do they probably have to pay someone to take that out of there?
Adam Minter: They probably, I mean, probably they got, probably got something out of it. But, you know, I mean, it’s interesting if you talk to people at like these antique markets and they’ll say, you know, every day somebody’s coming in saying, oh, I’ve got this thing that’s 100 years old, you know, and they always say that’s the As soon as I say it’s 100 years old, they assume it’s worth something. And it’s almost an immediately tip that it’s not worth something. Just because it’s 100 years old doesn’t mean anything.
And a lot of these collectibles from 100 years ago, they were included in a sack of flour to get you to buy the sack of flour. How many sacks of flour were sold? It was a mass market product. It was a Hot Wheels. And there just isn’t any residual value there. There’s only so many Mona Lisas.
Ross Kenyon: Well, hopefully if one grandparent died and they had a house full of mid-century modern furniture. Well, there you go. That’s the jackpot, I think.
Adam Minter: Right now it is. Yeah. Oh, man. But it’s funny because my grandmother lived, she was a great collector of art glass and she loved that stuff. And she was alive for when the mid-century thing first started. And she thought it was just the most bizarre thing. Who would want to buy that? You know, that was the mass market stuff of her childhood. And why on earth would anybody spend money on that? And I remember being at antique stores with her and she would just scoff at it showing up.
You know, I regret I didn’t buy some at the time. You know, we could have made some real money 10 years old.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe this is beyond your ken or maybe you’ve seen these trends for long enough to know, but what determines when something comes back in that kind of way? Will Hummels have a comeback? Is there any way to predict this at all or is it just totally random?
Adam Minter: You know what you can predict is that the collectibles market is driven by nostalgia and nostalgia tends to be based in people’s childhoods. You see a lot of toys from the 1970s and early 1980s getting hot now in antique flea markets. Why is it? It’s because Gen X is in its peak earning years. They have some money and they’re feeling nostalgic for their childhood. I can’t say for the life of me why Hummels, that post-World War II generation in the United States, why they would be sentimental or nostalgic for German figurines of the 1920s and 30s beyond me.
So I don’t know. I don’t think I can explain all of it. But one thing you can definitely bank on, it’s been the case since World War II, is people wanted to buy memories of their childhoods. And, you know, once they reach those peak earning years, they’re buying them. That’s what’s driving a lot of the collectibles market. You know, with mid-century modern, it’s... The people who are children then, they’re not buying that stuff. It’s probably different in furniture, but the collectibles, you can pretty much graph it.
People want to buy the toys and some of the knickknacks from their childhood.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to think about what the first thing I thought of was pogs. Is there going to become a period where I want to buy expensive pogs? Is that going to happen to me, Adam?
Adam Minter: What? Yeah, maybe it will. I mean, you know, who would have guessed, I don’t know, like Battlestar Galactica action sets from the 1970s would be selling for, you know, hundreds of dollars in antique stores. So who knows? It’s...
Ross Kenyon: That’s going to be weird. Okay, I’ll keep that in mind. Well, we covered so much stuff here, both from a more institutional, industrial, high level, all the way down to what consumers deal with, both selling, buying, and beyond. Is there anything that we left out that might be worth covering? Are you pretty content?
Adam Minter: I feel pretty good about it. I mean, you certainly have a lot to work with. Yeah, but I just thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it was my pleasure. I’m really happy we got to have you come on and do this. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher. Tell your friends and thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
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