Word: scrappings
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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...
...meat even." Now the specter of deprivation is emerging again. Plastic bottles, which sold for $1,175 to $1,300 a ton as recently as the summer, are now trading in the $300-to-$450-a-ton range. Zhang claims that as a result of the downturn in scrap prices, the losses sustained by some of his neighbors have ranged from...