Adam Minter recalls Wen’an, China — once considered the unofficial plastics recycling capital of northern China — as the most polluted place he’s ever visited. As the son and grandson of Minneapolis scrap yard dealers, that’s saying a lot.

Minter accepted a freelance writing assignment in China more than 15 years ago and ended up staying. He makes a living there as a financial columnist with Bloomberg View, with a frequent focus on trash.

And not just any trash. His recycling tell-all book, “Junkyard Planet” (Bloomsbury, 2013), is a 270-page odyssey outlining the fate of American paper, plastic, glass and metal after it’s tossed into household recycling bins or sold by scrappers.

While U.S. and Canadian industry buys some of the paper and most of the cast-off factory steel, much of the rest — especially plastics — ends up on barges to the developing world. In China, India and other corners of Asia, recycling plants fill entire cities like Wen’an, where low-wage workers pick through Christmas tree lights, plastic tubing and old computers, looking for materials that can be immediately reused or melted and sold.

Some of it will come back to the U.S. in the form of manufactured goods, from cellphones to coffee cups, marked “Made in China.”

Wen’an was so notoriously polluted, first by Chinese oil companies and then by recycling plants, the local government eventually forced the plastic recycling companies out. But in his book Minter chronicles how the small firms simply scattered across northern China, where workers still hand-wash plastic parts — the western world’s trash — in caustic solutions.

Where many environmental advocates see disaster, Minter sees promise — a global recycling industry that is gradually instituting cleaner technology, higher wages and better working conditions. And nonprofits such as Minneapolis-based Eureka Recycling, which collects household recyclables in Minneapolis and St. Paul, are making a special effort to track where the materials they collect are resold and how they’re repurposed, forcing the industry’s for-profit recyclers toward greater transparency.

RELATED: St. Paul new alley recycling begins Monday

Related Articles Trump aims to boost rural turnout in critical Wisconsin

Rescuers reach people cut off by Gulf Coast hurricane

US judge blocks Postal Service changes that slowed mail

Dodge Nature Center kicks off $40 million sustainability, accessibility campaign

Group of ‘armed citizens’ confronts health workers conducting random COVID-19 testing The Pioneer Press on Tuesday interviewed Minter, who now lives in Malaysia, about his findings. Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

There’s a psychological study you write about where a recycling bin is set out in a washroom, and suddenly, bathroom visitors are using more paper towels than ever before — waste inspired, ironically, by the opportunity to recycle. Should readers be recycling at all?

AM: Readers should definitely be recycling. There’s no question about that. Recycling has less impact on the environment than using virgin materials. But recycling is not a “get out of jail” card that expiates the sin of consuming. You’re still consuming. If they’re recycling because they’re concerned about the environment, they need to think more deeply about their consumption. Recycling is not going to take away the impact of their consumption, it’s just going to lower it. Nothing is 100 percent recyclable.

I hate, I absolutely hate, the image of the three arrows making a triangle. Paper can be recycled six or seven times. Most plastics can only be “down-cycled.” Down-cycling means that you are taking something that had a use and basically lowering the use value — for example, plastic candy wrappers can’t be recycled into new candy wrappers. You melt them down and you get a very ugly hard plastic. Who would want that plastic? Somebody making something really cheap, like plastic lumber. You lose the flexibility to use that product in a variety of ways. Even metals, whenever you melt down metals in the smelting process, there’s always material lost along the way. It’s not a closed loop. There will never be a closed loop.

When I was growing up, I heard a lot about “reduce, reuse, recycle.” You call “recycling” the “worst-best” option — the worst of those three. What happened to the rest of that mantra? Did we fail entirely?

AM: Actually, in my opinion at least, I think we’re starting to do a lot better on the other two. We’re starting to see product designers start to think, especially in the electronics area, about how they can build electronics that can be reused and their lives extended. I don’t think that it’s been forgotten entirely, but certainly we’ve focused a little too much on recycling if the goal is to reach “zero waste.” I’m always a little irritated when I hear people say “recycling is good for the environment.” It still takes a resource toll.

“Junkyard Planet” dashes a lot of Pollyanna images of the recycling industry functioning as a purely virtuous enterprise. You interview recycling company executives who are selling their scrap to the highest bidder, even if that means putting it on barges to China. And you talk about men in China who are bribing factory bosses with lavish dinners and prostitutes to get better access to the factory scrap. Is it all about money?

AM: Well, it’s all about markets, ultimately. You can put everything in your house in that recycling bin, and there’s a recycling company out there that will do its best to sort it, but eventually they’re going to have to pay somebody to do that sorting, or operate the machinery that does that sorting. Unless there is actual demand for the stuff that you are recycling, there’s no point in recycling it. It’s not a purely virtuous act. It’s an economic act.

The image of well-meaning but inefficient neighborhood committees bringing entire refrigerators and baby carriages to be recycled during World War II seems like a pretty good metaphor for your book. Eventually, the government steps in and basically leaves the task to the poor who do a much better job of finding and removing the valuable strips of copper for recycling. Has much changed?

AM: The people who start doing recycling around the world are generally those who don’t have other options. Nobody starts doing it as hobby. It’s always people on the margins of society that are doing it. It’s more accurate to say it’s an immigrant business. Everywhere you see it, it’s immigrants. In Japan, it’s Koreans who control a large part of the industry. Here in Malaysia, it’s Indian immigrants. In the United States, it was Jewish. In Manhattan, it’s become largely dominated by Latinos. What that tells you is there is a business here, and businesses need to run efficiently. There’s that financial incentive to do it.

Why do we end up putting so much material on barges to China — and why China?

AM: The U.S. generates so much recyclable stuff, more than it can use, and China generates less than it can use. It’s supply and demand. U.S. recycling — U.S. trash, if you will — is considered very high quality. Americans expect the best, and they often throw it away before its “life” is over. Another major importer of electronic waste from the United States is Belgium. They have one of the most advanced factories for recycling that stuff, and the U.S. doesn’t. The short answer is China is the world’s biggest raw materials importer.

Plastic is especially problematic in your book. Is it still tough to recycle plastic in the U.S.?

AM: It’s tough to recycle it anywhere. There’s hundreds of different kinds of plastics, and you can’t have different kinds of plastics and mix it in a vat and make a very high-quality product. It’s a technology issue, and we’re getting better at the technology. There’s huge volumes of money that are going into figuring out how to identify different kinds of plastics on an assembly line so you get some separation.

In your book, Houston is a bit of a test case for the challenges of trying to encourage door-to-door recycling. In San Francisco, municipal solid waste recycling exceeds 70 percent participation, while Houston is struggling in the single digits.

AM: A place like San Francisco is very, very compact. You don’t have the suburban sprawl. Houston is very, very spread out. To collect as much as one block in San Francisco, a recycling truck is going to have to go maybe a mile, and burn a lot more fuel, and spend a lot more time. I’ve spent some time with Waste Management in Houston. They’ve spent time to map and more efficiently approach their recycling, eliminating things from the recycling bin in Houston like glass. It’s not profitable for them. You’re throwing in this very heavy thing that has very little value. When you’re taking the heaviest thing out of the recycling bin, that saves fuel. That saves space. It makes the rest of the stuff more viable. Waste Management has been very aggressive about eliminating glass from the recycling bin. They will still offer it, but they make it clear to cities it will cost more for cities to do it. It’s a big shift.

Cities such as St. Paul and Minneapolis have moved toward single-sort recycling — putting everything in one bin. Does that make sense to you?

AM: I am a big proponent of single sort, and I know that a lot of my friends in the environmental community are not. For the simple reason, it encourages people to put more stuff in their bin. The studies are very clear: People are not going to recycle as much if they have multiple bins. A lot of people don’t like, to quote, “play with their garbage” and put the papers in one bin and the cans in another. The one argument that there is against it is you contaminate some of your recyclables. You find some paper in your metals, or more damnably, some plastics in your cardboard. The mills, they go crazy about “contamination” in the recycling stream. It lowers the value of the cardboard. You want as pure a cardboard bale as you can get. But with the technology, it’s getting easier to remove. Related Articles Trump aims to boost rural turnout in critical Wisconsin

Rescuers reach people cut off by Gulf Coast hurricane

US judge blocks Postal Service changes that slowed mail

Dodge Nature Center kicks off $40 million sustainability, accessibility campaign

Group of ‘armed citizens’ confronts health workers conducting random COVID-19 testing

Back to China now. It’s hard to get the pictures out of my mind of bare-chested men in China, working without gloves or goggles, washing recycled plastics in caustic solutions. The smokestacks emitting toxic dioxin chemicals from melted metals aren’t much cheerier. Yet from an environmental perspective, you’re not entirely pessimistic. Why?

AM: Here’s the thing: I look at recycling as a choice. You have one of two ways to get your raw materials. You can dig a hole in the ground, cut down some trees, drill some oil wells. Or you can buy some recycled products. The very worst copper recycling operation I have ever seen is much better than the best copper mine. The very worst cardboard recycling, I still see as far preferable, as the best clear-cut. This is an industry my grandfather was in, and he did some dangerous things I don’t like seeing people do. In the 15 years I’ve been covering recycling in China, I’ve seen safety standards improve. Do they meet U.S. standards yet? No. But the arrow is pointing in the right direction.

You’ve said that since the book was published, the recycling industry has really had a rough time due to a downturn in raw materials or commodity prices, with lots of folks going out of business. Who are these folks? How is the industry adapting?

AM: It’s been the worst downturn the recycling industry has seen in modern times, and it’s not a recycling downturn — it’s a commodity downturn. The economy of China has slowed down significantly. The iron ore producers in Brazil are badly hurting right now because China’s construction industry has slowed down. Who has gone out of business? You’re seeing the privately owned independent recyclers focused on the things that don’t go into your recycling bin going out of business. Most of what is recycled in the United States is stuff from businesses, factories, the stuff left over in the manufacturing process. Automobiles are one of the leading things, by weight.

The nation’s largest recycler is Waste Management in terms of volume. And they’ve been very up front. Since the commodities downtown, they’ve had a tough time with their municipal contracts. There have been a lot of contracts renegotiated with cities. It may mean that cities are going to pay more for the contracts.

You say some cities are moving away from measuring recycling success by the ton, or by how much is diverted from landfills. Instead, they’re looking to environmental measures, like greenhouse gas emissions prevented, and benchmarking those. Does that worry you?

AM: It doesn’t worry me. It really encourages me. I think it’s the right way to be looking at recycling. The movement to measure the environmental impact has been led by the state of Oregon. … The weight of what we put into our recycling bins has been going down. Americans are consuming fewer printed newspapers, for instance. When you ask recyclers to benchmark their success and failures by weight, you’re sort of dealing them a losing hand. And it’s not just paper. The aluminum can industry has been making cans thinner, thinner and thinner.