Recycling is primarily an environmental issue, right? Wrong. In this modern age of disposability and rapid turn-over, recycling is no longer just about saving the planet, it's about feeding ever-growing economic demand. As Antony Funnell reports, the sheer enormity of the global recycling industry is challenging our understanding of terms like 'waste' and 'rubbish'.

Adam Minter has a gift for talking rubbish.

He's been doing it all over the world. Spreading the word that trash, waste, junk—whatever you want to call it—isn't just a by-product of our consumer-oriented society, but an essential part of its economic future. And he has the stats to prove it.

The largest volume export from the US and from the EU to China is none other than scrap—meaning waste paper, plastic, rubber, textiles, and metals of course. It's gigantic.

'The global recycling industry employs more people on this planet than any other industry but agriculture,' he says. 'On average it turns over as much money as is generated within the Norwegian economy. We're not talking about a niche industry that makes some cute sustainable greeting cards made from yesterday's newspapers, we are talking about an industry that turns over roughly US$500 billion per year.'

By some estimates, that figure is likely to reach US$1 trillion by 2020.

The son of a scrapyard owner from Minneapolis, Minter grew up surrounded by junk: it funded his schooling and put food on the family table. His father made money out of the things other people discarded, and it was that first-hand experience of the economic value of rubbish that led Minter on a mission to document the size and scale of the global recycling market. Now a foreign correspondent based in China, his observations are detailed in a newly published book called Junkyard Planet: travels in the billion dollar trash trade.

'On balance it touches almost everything that you buy, not just the products that say “recycled” or “post-consumer waste included”, but everything from your automobile engine to the bumper on the back of your automobile. It's a staggeringly large industry,' Minter says.

'The statistic I like to give people in the United States and Europe is that, by volume, the largest volume export from the US and from the EU to China is none other than scrap—meaning waste paper, plastic, rubber, textiles, and metals of course. It's gigantic.'

Scientist and former CSIRO executive director James Bradfield Moody also lectures on the underestimated value and potential of waste. Moody, who co-authored The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource Limited World, believes the astounding growth of the global recycling sector over the past few years is directly tied to issues of supply and demand.

'When we were in a world where we were just harvesting resources that were plentiful and cheap, waste was simply that, it was something to get rid of and ignore. Now we are entering a world where resources are scarce and valuable and we want to manage them. But coupled with those two things—rising demand for resources, and scarcer supply of resources—there is a third thing that's happening and that is that we have this enormous amount of waste that is sitting there in our communities,' he says.

'The OECD estimates that more than four trillion kilograms of waste is produced in OECD nations every single year. And that waste becomes the opportunity that can solve the problem of increasing demand and reducing supply.'

Minter agrees, stressing that recycling is now clearly a global economic issue, not simply an environmental one.

'Nobody is going to pick through somebody's trash, which in many cases is what recycling is, without an economic incentive to do so. It's very nice that there are environmental benefits to this industry, I think that's fantastic, but ultimately it's an industry that competes with the primary raw materials industry; which is to say, your old recycled beer can, when it goes into a scrapyard, is directly competing with aluminium mined out of a bauxite mine. I mean, that's ultimately what makes this industry work.'

The long-term viability of the globalised recycling sector, he argues, is also directly tied to future levels of consumption. And like the raw materials industry with which it competes, recycling is vulnerable to market volatility and took a huge hit during the global financial crisis.

'Things like scrap steel, scrap copper, scrap paper, they dropped in many cases as much as 90 per cent. Why did the price drop? Because nobody wanted it anymore. And so in places like the United States and the EU and Australia, warehouses that would take scrap paper in, for example, but with the purpose of sending it to China where it would be manufactured into new boxes, they had to start sending it to the landfill and to incinerators because nobody in China needed it anymore, because nobody in China was manufacturing boxes for things like new iPads or new Nike shoes.'

'It's only when China's economy recovered and the US economy recovered and everybody wanted to buy iPads and Nike shoes again that there was a demand and a reason to recycle,' says Minter. 'And we have to think of recycling in those terms. Without consumption, without people wanting new stuff, there is no reason for anybody to collect your recycling out of a bin.'

So industrial need, driven by consumer demand, is the real force behind today's mega-recycling push. But that's not to say that in meeting a consumer demand, there can't also be significant benefits for the health of the planet. As Minter points out, the two can go hand in hand, and economics doesn't always have to take the initial lead. That's certainly the experience of Weine Wiqvist, the managing director of Avfall Sverige, the national waste management organisation in Sweden.

A decade ago the Swedish government banned the use of waste as landfill, a move which left the country with a rather large rubbish problem. But, as a consequence of that decision, the economics of dealing with the nation's waste were drastically transformed. The new government policy spurred on local recycling efforts; and today, according to Weine Wiqvist, more than half of Sweden's refuse is now repurposed or recycled, with the remainder sent for incineration.

Even that incineration process represents a form of reuse, because the sophisticated, low-emission facilities used by the Swedes convert around 30 per cent of the heat generated by the incinerators directly into electricity, with the rest diverted into a complex system for heating water pipes.

In fact, the Swedish waste management system has proven so effective at generating electricity and additional heating that in recent years Sweden has begun to run out of waste. They're now in the rather unexpected position of having to import rubbish from neighbouring countries in order to keep the system operating.

Those imports, according to Wiqvist, now account for around 15 per cent of the total volume of waste needed to maintain the incineration system at optimal performance. That equates to around 800,000 to 900,000 tonnes of waste, all of which the Norwegian government, and others in the region, now pay Sweden to take care of.

So, in a world where so much of what we waste is no longer wasted, and where rubbish is no longer rubbish, but a recoverable resource, is it time to rethink the way in which we talk about the things we discard?

Certainly James Bradfield Moody believes we need to rethink our use of words like 'trash', 'garbage' and even 'waste' because they no longer accurately reflect the true value of unwanted or discarded commodities. Perhaps worse than that, they actually serve to diminish our understanding of their true potential.

The future is rubbish Listen to Future Tense's investigation into the US$500 billion a year recycling industry.

Minter says it should come as no surprise that countries like China and India dominate the recycling market. Low wages are an issue at play, of course, but he also points out that recycling has long been part of the culture of both countries.

'If you travel through the countryside or in Chinese or Indian cities the thing you see most people doing other than agriculture, or maybe keeping a stall, is actually walking around and picking up whatever refuse is available on the ground,' he says. 'And more often than not, that's not refuse, that's recyclable material that they take home and sort and help turn into raw materials.'

By contrast, says Minter, issues of terminology and perception are particularly problematic in Western countries like Australia and the United States where recycling is still seen by many as a niche household activity.

'Roughly only 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the global recycling supply chain comes from your home recycling bin,' says Minter. 'The home recycling bin has an important place, but it's only a very small and, one might even argue, slightly insignificant portion of what the globe recycles.

Find out more at Future Tense.

