Trash for Cash: Making a Killing and Making a Living on Garbage in China

Pomona College's Pacific Basin Institute presents a talk by Joshua Goldstein on the growing global garbage complex from the perspective of China's street-level trash traders.

In this age of globalization one sector has arguably grown faster than any other: the global trade in trash.  Since 1990 the value of globally traded wastes and scrap has shot up by roughly 2000%.  And the overwhelming majority of those empty bottles, crushed cardboard boxes, and junked appliances are on their way to China.  Indeed, the US's biggest export to China's in this century has been scrap.  China's domestic market in trash is also huge and continues to grow as consumerism becomes a way of life and a sign of wealth.  At least 3 million Chinese make a living that is directly dependent on post-consumer wastes.  This presentation will try (and certainly fail) to make sense of the growing global garbage complex from the perspective of China's street-level trash traders.

Joshua Goldstein is an Associate Professor in modern Chinese history at the University of Southern California and author of the book Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-Creation of Peking opera, 1870-1937.  His current research focuses on the lives of trash-pickers in urban China and on the growing importance of recycling and the global trade in scrap and post-consumer waste in the Chinese economy.