Word: scrap
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Beijing, the dividends from recycling are instant: hard cash for discarded cardboard, paper and plastic bottles, paid by the junk men who trawl the streets on tricycles each morning, yelling "Collecting scrap! Collecting scrap!" So fierce is the demand that a bag of trash rarely makes it to the curb before someone is poking through it in search of recyclables...
...destination of much of Beijing's recyclable scrap is Dongxiaokou village, on the capital's northern outskirts, where 700 families work on sorting and preparing it for a second life. The yards of Dongxiaokou are filled with stacks of old radiators, piles of cardboard, old tires and inner tubes, mounds of glass smashed into tiny shards, nests of tangled rebar and cooking-oil jugs looped together with string. A mountain of plastic bottles more than two stories tall looms over the squat brick buildings where recyclers live and work. "Somewhere in there is a bottle you used," says a woman...
...Just as China's economic boom fueled a roaring demand for the raw materials of much of Asia and Africa, so has it spurred an insatiable appetite for recyclable scrap paper, plastic and metals. In recent years, amazing stories have emerged around the world about stolen manhole covers, junk haulers making healthy salaries, and coins being melted down because their value as scrap, with China the big buyer, exceeded their face value. China's scrap trade has lifted the fortunes of both the very wealthy - such as Nine Dragons Paper CEO Zhang Yin, whose recycled-paper manufacturing company made...
...While Dongxiaokou's scrap yards have epitomized China's industrial boom over the past two decades, the global economic slowdown has left the scrappers struggling as prices for raw materials plummet. A group of men from Henan sit at a table playing a card game called "Fight the Landlord." They're the owners of a huge mound of plastic bottles they could process, but if they sold them now, they would lose money - scrap prices have fallen to levels not seen in years. "You want to know why our prices are dropping?" says Zhang Zhongming, 43, who moved...
Somalia's lack of government and extreme poverty make it an ideal breeding ground for piracy, and the Cold War's end helped make that possible. "I can remember driving down the roads in Somalia, and you'd see all these scrap heaps of MiGs and tanks" from the 1969-1991 reign of Siad Barre, the Somali dictator allied with the Soviet Union, Zinni says. "During the Cold War, one side or the other kept authoritarian regimes in power who controlled this sort of thing...