From EPA research archives, here's a photo found by author Adam Minter (ShanghaiScrap, Bloomberg). Minter covers the history of Automobile hammermill-shredders in this month's Foreign Affairs (a serious coup for an international relations cultist like me).
If you want to understand the scrap electronics business, you should study the scrap automobile business. And the hard rock mining business.
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| 1974 by Bruce McAlister |
As Minter points out in a recent blog post,
At the time this public domain image was shot, abandoned cars were among the most serious environmental crises facing the United States. Estimates vary, but in 1970 General Motors – theoretically, a knowledgeable source – estimated that there were at least 40 million cars abandoned in public places across the United States. In 1967, New York City reported 70,000 cars were abandoned on its streets, alone. By scale, and seriousness, abandoned cars exceeded any waste disposal problem before or since (including the so-called “e-waste” crisis).
