Recycling is more prevalent in "third world" countries due to a relatively cheap supply of human labor. Recycling is an extremely labor-intensive process. "YOU

Recycling is more prevalent in "third world" countries due to a relatively cheap supply of human labor. Recycling is an extremely labor-intensive process. "YOU WON'T FIND a Chinese version of Alan Bachrach [US recycling entrepreneur], just as you won't find an Indian, Kenyan, Vietnamese, or Jordanian one, either. The reason is that most of the world remains poor enough to justify employing people to do what Alan does with star screens and air guns. Consider what happens every night in the courtyard of the Shanghai high-rise where I live. Just past midnight you'll likely hear the clank of a bottle bouncing across concrete. If you follow that bounce back to its source, you'll come to a concrete hut, not much larger than a single-car garage, from which fragrant trash has been spilled several feet into the narrow asphalt road. It doesn't look like American trash: there are few boxes, cans, or bottles. Rather, it's mostly food waste — peels, husks, bones. Move a little closer, and you might see two or three hunched shadows atop the oozing mess, canvas bags swung over their shoulders, scrounging through it with bare hands, searching for metal cans, plastic bottles, or perhaps something better yet — a stray coin. They're not Shanghainese but often families of poor migrants from farms in the less wealthy provinces, making the best living that they can. Families that pick through trash in the middle of the night are just the last screen in a profit-driven process that, if you wait outside my building through the night, begins at the gate at first light. There you'll see a squat and brawny migrant woman wearing a fanny pack stuffed with small money, and carrying a small hand scale. If anyone is the Chinese equivalent of Alan Bachrach, presiding over a system that harvests recyclables from the trash, she is it. Her destination is the pile of cardboard tied with twine that's waited beneath the night watchman's gaze, and a waist-high balance scale of the sort that you might find in a doctor's office. As she pulls out the big scale, the early-rising old ladies in my building wander downstairs carrying a few plastic bottles, perhaps a small cardboard box or two, and maybe a small plastic bag filled with cans. The bottles and cans are priced individually; the boxes are attached to a small hook on the hand scale and weighed. Payment is equivalent to a few pennies, which the early risers take to the wet market, in search of the day's vegetables... There's no need for single-stream schemes to raise the recycling rate in Chinese cities because, in the end, my Chinese neighbors have something that most Americans don't: a recognition that "the recycling" is worth more than virtue. It's worth money." http://theweek.com/articles/455486/inside-world-forprofit-recycling http://theweek.com/articles/455486/inside-world-forprofit-re...