RAGS TO RICHES?
Eye-opening book explains what really happens to that unwanted stuff you donate
Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale
Adam Minter Bloomsbury
We don’t need Marie Kondo to tell us that we stockpile way too much stuff. So you might ask why you should acquire another book, especially one that may not spark joy.
Actually, it’s more likely to spark deep dismay about the staggering amount of waste that contemporary consumers produce. You might think of Adam Minter’s Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale as the hair shirt you don after relishing your brand-new Christmas booty. But this fascinating account of what happens to that sweater you bag for Goodwill or the totalled car your insurance company writes off is eye-opening — and even at times surprisingly hopeful. Sometimes one person’s trash is indeed someone else’s treasure.
Journalist Minter, who hails from two generations of junkyard owners, makes his living from writing about reuse. His last book, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-dollar Trash Trade, chronicled the fate of waste and international recycling. He carries on the work in Secondhand by following the merchandise — and the money — from objects discarded in Minneapolis or Tucson to ports as far-flung as Malaysia and Benin.
The rag-and-bone trade is now a huge, complex international business.
Anyone who has had to clean out the houses of beloved parents, and deal with the reality that no one wants their cherished china or heavy wooden furniture, will feel for the unloved objects Minter follows.
He begins with the proliferating companies, like Empty the Nest, that help facilitate those poignant cleanouts. Then it’s on to a Goodwill in Tucson, where he tracks a never-ending tide of objects. As he documents, by no means do most things donated to a Goodwill sell.
Next stop for the remaining flood of stuff is Goodwill Outlet Centers, where they’re sold by weight to specialists, many of whom will cross the U.S. border to resell in Mexico. Other quantities go to Pakistan or Africa.
What doesn’t make the cut there is often shipped back to the
United States to be broken down into rags — who knew rags are such big business? One company Minter studies sold about seven million kilograms of rags in the United States in one year. And then clothes cross the ocean yet again, to be broken down and respun into new fabric in India.
“A second-hand trade that once flowed in one direction — from rich to poor — now goes in every direction,” Minter writes.
His chapter on Japan is particularly eye-opening. Japan has been a huge market for second-hand goods, partly because apartments don’t tend to be gargantuan, so there’s incentive to own less. But as Minter documents, the Japanese are also in the vanguard of the minimalist movement partly because their affluence has allowed them to accumulate so much, so fast.
And Japanese birthrates have declined so precipitously that more people are dying than being born, which means there aren’t devoted relatives to clean out the apartments of the deceased.
Japan has eight million empty homes, known as “ghost homes,” and the elderly are encouraged to practise shukatsu, preparing for their own demise.
Of course, there are objects that are unlikely to ever spark joy again, like the 3.8 million unused fondue sets currently stashed in British homes. But in much of the developing world, second-hand shops are more common than shops selling new objects. Everyone knows about Cuba’s meticulously maintained vintage cars. Less well-known is the fact that Ghana is a world capital for fixing up U.S. cars sold at auction after accidents. In the South Bronx, damaged cars are packed with parts and shipped to Africa, where they’re repaired and resold. The same goes for old tube TVS. In Ghana, “Tamale, a town of, officially, 350,000 people, has more than a hundred Tv-repair businesses.
... In the big cities of Ghana and Nigeria — the most affluent parts of West Africa — the electronic repair shops are more common than Starbucks in Manhattan.”
Minter is no poet. His prose is statistic-rich and straightforward. He’s at his best in the chapters discussing the ecological impact of waste in terms of product durability, and encouraging companies to be more transparent about planned obsolescence. He reveals how some companies, like manufacturers of car seats, put expiration dates on their products and exhort people not to reuse them, even though there’s no hard evidence that “expired” car seats are unsafe.
He reserves particular ire for companies like Apple that actively — and probably illegally — discourage consumers from learning to fix their own electronics by warning that opening your phone will void its warranty.
Paradoxically, of course, a washing machine that lasts forever is not going to do much good for the economy — or for people in the developing world who can’t afford new ones.
In terms of a philosophy of wise recycling, Minter exhorts the media to “stop stigmatizing the trade in second-hand — especially the immigrant and ethnic-minority businesses that make up most of it. Instead, it needs to recognize second-hand as a globally significant industry and start covering it as such.
From Mexico to Ghana to
India, second-hand is the consumer economy. But good luck finding any quality, consistent news coverage.”
Secondhand serves as a fine model of how to start that coverage.