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Planet junk: a journey through discards
A trawl through the global tide of cast-offs shows how we might avoid drowning in them.
A sprawling, insightful travelogue through the world of repair, reuse and waste, Secondhand takes readers deep inside the consumer economy's back end. In exploring the vast global tide of used and discarded goods, Adam Minter, a journalist writing on technology and the environment, delivers a book as crammed with oddities and gems as the second-hand shops he loves to haunt.
Manufacturing - the start of the expanding consumer pipeline - is environmentally damaging enough. The United Nations estimates that the fashion industry, for instance, is responsible for 10% of global greenhouse-gas emissions and 20% of waste water. Some 85% of textiles then end up in landfill, or are burnt. Our homes are filled with other products - furniture, kitchenware, shoes, décor, appliances - that meet similarly ignominious and unsustainable ends. But a significant portion of global consumer goods finds second and third lives through the reuse economy. It is the costs and benefits of this afterlife of stuff that Minter examines with a sense of wonder and cautious optimism in Secondhand.
In effect a follow-up to Minter's Junkyard Planet (2013), Secondhand is anecdotal rather than analytical. Itjourneys from Goodwill usedgoods stores in Arizona to the textile-salvage importers of Nigeria and Pakistan, and the market stalls of an enterprising Mexican merchant known only as Shoe Guy. Sprinkled with...