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Author: Adam Minter Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1635570123 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
"Revelatory, terrifying, but, ultimately, hopeful." -Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE SIXTH EXTINCTION From the author of Junkyard Planet, a journey into the surprising afterlives of our former possessions. Downsizing. Decluttering. Discarding. Sooner or later, all of us are faced with things we no longer need or want. But when we drop our old clothes and other items off at a local donation center, where do they go? Sometimes across the country-or even halfway across the world-to people and places who find value in what we leave behind. In Secondhand, journalist Adam Minter takes us on an unexpected adventure into the often-hidden, multibillion-dollar industry of reuse: thrift stores in the American Southwest to vintage shops in Tokyo, flea markets in Southeast Asia to used-goods enterprises in Ghana, and more. Along the way, Minter meets the fascinating people who handle-and profit from-our rising tide of discarded stuff, and asks a pressing question: In a world that craves shiny and new, is there room for it all? Secondhand offers hopeful answers and hard truths. A history of the stuff we've used and a contemplation of why we keep buying more, it also reveals the marketing practices, design failures, and racial prejudices that push used items into landfills instead of new homes. Secondhand shows us that it doesn't have to be this way, and what really needs to change to build a sustainable future free of excess stuff.
Author: Adam Minter Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 160819793X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday's newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don't want and turn it into something you can't wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter--veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner--travels deep into a vast, often hidden, five-hundred-billion-dollar industry that's transforming our economy and environment. With unmatched access to and insight on the waste industry, and the explanatory gifts and an eye for detail worthy of a John McPhee or a William Langewiesche, Minter traces the export of America's junk and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of how the way we consume and discard stuff fuels a world that recognizes value where Americans don't. Junkyard Planet reveals that Americans might need to learn a smarter way to take out the trash.
Author: Adam Minter Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1635570123 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
"Revelatory, terrifying, but, ultimately, hopeful." -Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE SIXTH EXTINCTION From the author of Junkyard Planet, a journey into the surprising afterlives of our former possessions. Downsizing. Decluttering. Discarding. Sooner or later, all of us are faced with things we no longer need or want. But when we drop our old clothes and other items off at a local donation center, where do they go? Sometimes across the country-or even halfway across the world-to people and places who find value in what we leave behind. In Secondhand, journalist Adam Minter takes us on an unexpected adventure into the often-hidden, multibillion-dollar industry of reuse: thrift stores in the American Southwest to vintage shops in Tokyo, flea markets in Southeast Asia to used-goods enterprises in Ghana, and more. Along the way, Minter meets the fascinating people who handle-and profit from-our rising tide of discarded stuff, and asks a pressing question: In a world that craves shiny and new, is there room for it all? Secondhand offers hopeful answers and hard truths. A history of the stuff we've used and a contemplation of why we keep buying more, it also reveals the marketing practices, design failures, and racial prejudices that push used items into landfills instead of new homes. Secondhand shows us that it doesn't have to be this way, and what really needs to change to build a sustainable future free of excess stuff.
Author: Adam Minter Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1608197921 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
How can garbage turn into gold? What does recycling have to do with globalization? Where does all that stuff we throw away go, anyway? When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday's newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don't want and turn it into something you can't wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter-veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner-travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, 500-billion-dollar industry that's transforming our economy and environment. Minter takes us from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to recycling factories capable of processing a jumbo jet's worth of trash every day. Along the way, we meet an international cast of characters who have figured out how to squeeze Silicon Valley-scale fortunes from what we all throw away. Junkyard Planet reveals how “going green” usually means making money-and why that's often the most sustainable choice, even when the recycling methods aren't pretty. With unmatched access to and insight on the waste industry, and the explanatory gifts and an eye for detail worthy of a John McPhee or William Langewiesche, Minter traces the export of America's garbage and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of how the way we consume and discard stuff brings home the ascent of a developing world that recognizes value where Americans don't. Junkyard Planet reveals that Americans might need to learn a smarter way to take out the trash.
Author: Vince Beiser Publisher: Penguin Group ISBN: 0593541707 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
The powerful ways the metals we need to fuel technology and energy are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval, and rising violence — and how we can do better. An Australian millionaire’s plan to mine the ocean floor. Nigerian garbage pickers risking their lives to salvage e-waste. A Bill Gates-backed entrepreneur harnessing AI to find metals in the Arctic. These people and millions more are part of the intensifying competition to find and extract the minerals essential for two crucial technologies: the internet and renewable energy. In Power Metal, Vince Beiser explores the Achilles’ heel of “green power” and digital technology – that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars, and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt, and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet. Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can minimize the damage. Power Metal is a compelling glimpse into this disturbing yet potentially promising new world.
Author: Gideon Rose Publisher: Foreign Affairs ISBN: 0876096267 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Although we’re not particularly well known for it, we at Foreign Affairs care a great deal about the state of the physical world and all its inhabitants, and have run a substantial number of articles about environmental, conservation, and climate issues. So we decided this spring that it was time to pull together some of the highlights of our coverage in this special collection. The articles presented span a range of topics and perspectives, from Steven M. Wise on animal rights to Bjorn Lomborg on environmental alarmism, Elizabeth Economy on China’s pollution problem, and Fred Krupp on fracking. Reading them over, it is hard not to be shaken by the scale of the damage being wrought on the planet and its non-human inhabitants by rapid, unregulated growth around the globe. But it is also hard not to recognize how much sensible public policy could do to address the problem. We hope this is a useful guide in those efforts.
Author: Eve O. Schaub Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1510775404 Category : House & Home Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
"Eve’s brave and honest experiment reveals the shocking impact of the throwaway society we’ve become and at the same time showing small ways we can all do better.” —Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder of Plastic Free July Year of No Garbage is Super Size Me meets the environmental movement. In this book Eve O. Schaub, humorist and stunt memoirist extraordinaire, tackles her most difficult challenge to date: garbage. Convincing her husband and two daughters to go along with her, Schaub attempts the seemingly impossible: living in the modern world without creating any trash at all. For an entire year. And- as it turns out- during a pandemic. In the process, Schaub learns some startling things: that modern recycling is broken, and single stream recycling is a lie. That flushable wipes aren’t flushable and compostables aren’t compostable. That plastic drives climate change, fosters racism, and is poisoning the environment and our bodies at alarming rates, as microplastics are being found everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the placenta of unborn babies. If you’ve ever thought twice about that plastic straw in your drink, you’re gonna want to read this book.
Author: Nick Harkaway Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0345803728 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
Nick Harkaway, author of Angelmaker, presents a rousing and energizing look at how we can meaningfully and constructively engage with technology—creating an essential handbook for anyone trying to be human in a digital age. Some say our devices will lead us to ruin: isolating us from our neighbors, warping communication, delivering an unregulated flood of information that will destroy our humanity. Some say they will be our salvation: enabling global communication and social engagement, putting all the world’s facts at our fingertips, and erasing the barriers that divide us, bringing out the best qualities of humanity. In The Blind Giant, novelist and blogger Nick Harkaway takes us on a lucid, insightful and personal tour of how we live our lives in our technology-obsessed culture. A self-described “missing link” between the pre-Internet generation and the “digital natives” who have grown up with technology, Nick is an enthusiastic guide to digital culture who weaves together examples from literature, psychology, neurology, sociology, history, and his own life while exploring the hazards and joys of the human-machine relationship. In the final analysis, whether we meaningfully engage with the machines we have created, or risk living in a world which is designed to serve computers and corporations rather than people, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned with our digital future.
Author: John F. Carr Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 1476614571 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
H. Beam Piper is one of science fiction’s most enigmatic writers. In 1946 Piper appeared seemingly from out of nowhere, already at the top of his form. He published a number of memorable short stories in the premier science fiction magazine of the time, Astounding Science Fiction, under legendary editor John W. Campbell. Piper quickly became friends with many of the top writers of the day, including Lester Del Rey, Fletcher Pratt, Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp. Piper also successfully made the turn from promising short story writer to major novelist, authoring Four-Day Planet, Cosmic Computer, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and Little Fuzzy, which was nominated for a Hugo award. Even those who counted Piper among their friends knew very little about the man or his life as a railroad yard bull in Altoona, Pennsylvania. This biography illuminates H. Beam Piper, both the writer and the man, and answers lingering questions about his death. Appendices include a number of Piper’s personal papers, a complete bibliography of Piper’s works, and an essay on Piper’s Terro-Human Future History series.
Author: Carl H. Nightingale Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108645380 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 825
Book Description
This is a biography of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of. It is a history of how cities gave humans immense power over Earth, for good and for ill. Carl Nightingale takes readers on a sweeping six-continent, six-millennia tour of the world's cities, culminating in the last 250 years, when we vastly accelerated our planetary realms of action, habitat, and impact, courting dangerous new consequences and opening prospects for new hope. In Earthopolis we peek into our cities' homes, neighborhoods, streets, shops, eating houses, squares, marketplaces, religious sites, schools, universities, offices, monuments, docklands, and airports to discover connections between small spaces and the largest things we have built. The book exposes the Urban Planet's deep inequalities of power, wealth, access to knowledge, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. It asks us to draw on the most just and democratic moments of Earthopolis's past to rescue its future.
Author: Oliver Franklin-Wallis Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1398505463 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION WRITING A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 INCLUDED IN THE GUARDIAN'S BEST IDEAS BOOKS OF 2023 ‘A gripping read that will anger as much as it fascinates’ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall ‘An incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts’ Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland ‘Urgent, probing and endlessly interesting’ Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment 'There are stories in all our discarded things: who made them, what they meant to a person before they were thrown away. In the end, it all ends up in the same place – the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass.' When we throw things ‘away’, what does that actually mean? Where does it go, and who deals with it when it gets there? In Wasteland, award-winning journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on an eye-opening journey through the global waste industry. From the mountainous landfills of New Delhi to Britain’s overflowing sewers, from hollowed-out mining towns in the USA to Ghana’s flooded second-hand markets, we meet the people on the frontline of our waste crisis – both those being exploited, and those determined to make a difference. On the way, we discover the corporate greenwashing that started the recycling movement; the dark truth behind our second-hand donations; and come face to face with the 10,000-year legacy of our nuclear waste. Both shocking and hopeful, Wasteland is the timely and ultimately human story at the heart of an urgent global issue.
Author: Adam Minter
Author: Adam Minter
Author: Adam Minter
Author: Adam Minter
Author: Vince Beiser
Author: Gideon Rose
Author: Eve O. Schaub
Author: Nick Harkaway
Author: John F. Carr
Author: Carl H. Nightingale
Author: Oliver Franklin-Wallis