We talk with Adam Minter, a columnist at Bloomberg and author of the fantastic book Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade.
This episode of The Prepared’s podcast is sponsored by Supplyframe and the 2019 Hackaday Prize. If you’ve got a hardware product - something truly groundbreaking or an improvement on something that already exists - then go to prize.supplyframe.com to enter and win up to $125,000!
Adam demonstrates how not to ride a forklift.
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Notes:
60 Minutes’ 2008 investigation into e-waste, and a Youtube copy of the video version.
A short documentary on Panipat, the city in India where massive quantities of used textiles are reprocessed and recycled into “shoddy,” an inexpensive wool textile.
Lastly, Adam was kind enough to share a short video he recorded in 2011 at an OmniSource facility in Fort Wayne, IN. What you’re seeing below is scrap being fed into a shredder by conveyor; the operator has a live, thermal imaging view to see what’s going on inside the machine: