Zeng steps out of the car and opens the trunk. Inside is his suitcase and a hard hat. From his suitcase, he gets an orange safety vest of the kind worn by highway construction workers and slips it over his freshly ironed blue-and-white-checked shirt. Then he reaches into his wallet and takes out a business card, which he inserts into the clear plastic holder sewn into the vest.
JOHNSON ZENG
PRESIDENT
SUNRISE METAL RECYCLING
VANCOUVER, B.C.
At that, he shuts the trunk and walks through the front door of Cash’s. There’s a window on the other side, a slot through which documents and money can be exchanged, and—on a rickety chair—a sleepy man in a hard hat and greasy clothes who tries to avoid my stare.
JOHNSON ZENG
PRESIDENT
SUNRISE METAL RECYCLING
VANCOUVER, B.C.
At that, he shuts the trunk and walks through the front door of Cash’s. There’s a window on the other side, a slot through which documents and money can be exchanged, and—on a rickety chair—a sleepy man in a hard hat and greasy clothes who tries to avoid my stare.
“Hello?” Zeng says through the slot.
A middle-aged female face appears in the window, laughing, apparently in mid-conversation. “Can I help you?”
Zeng stands straighter, smiles broadly, and slips a card through the slot. “Good morning, ma’am!” He drags out each syllable with a fawning inflection. “I’m Johnson with Sunrise! I have an appointment with Michael [not his real name]!”
The woman looks at the card. “He’s not in.”
I see Zeng flinch. “No problem, ma’am! Do you know when he’ll be in?”
“Lemme check.” She walks away from the window.
Just before 8 a.m., Johnson Zeng eases his rented Chevrolet into a space in front of Cash’s Scrap Metal & Iron in St. Louis. He’s in the market to buy scrap metal he can ship to China, and this is the first stop of the day in the middle of a two-and-a-half-week road trip to regular suppliers that started in Albuquerque and will end in Spartanburg, S.C. But that, Zeng says, is nothing. “My last trip with Homer,” he recalls, referring to Homer Lai, the scrap importer in China’s Guangdong Province who provides him with most of his business, “we drove 9,600 miles in 26 days.”
The result? Millions of pounds of metal worth millions of dollars left the U.S. for China.
Zeng is one Chinese trader, in one rental car, traveling across the U.S. in search of scrap metal. By his estimate, there are at least 100 other Chinese traders like him driving from scrap yard to scrap yard, right now, in search of what Americans won’t or can’t be bothered to recycle. His favorite product: wires, cables, and other kinds of copper.
It’s an essential trade. In 2012, China accounted for 43.1 percent of all global copper demand, or more than five times the amount acquired by the U.S. that same year. A modern economy can’t grow without copper. One way to get that metal is to dig holes in the ground; the other is from scrap. Since the mid-1990s, China has taken both approaches, with scrap accounting for more than half of all Chinese copper production every year (peaking at 74 percent in 2000). Because China is still a developing economy, it doesn’t throw away enough stuff to be self-sufficient. Thus, for the last decade it’s imported more than 70 percent of the scrap copper it uses. Meanwhile, the U.S., which throws away far more scrap metal than it can ever use, has become the world’s most attractive market for the savvy Chinese buyer.
In effect, Zeng and his peers are the vanguard of sustainability, the greenest recyclers in an era when that means something. He’s the link that binds your recycling bin, and your local junkyard, to China.
![Johnson Zeng]()
Photograph by Thomas Prior for Bloomberg BusinessweekJohnson ZengZeng clicks away at his BlackBerry in his parked car, checking the London metal prices that set the global market for scrap metal. “Market is down.” He sighs. “But we will still try.” He’s a young-looking 42, but when his lips purse with concern—as they do now—his cheeks puff out slightly, highlighting the lines at the corners of his eyes.
Photograph by Thomas Prior for Bloomberg BusinessweekJohnson ZengZeng clicks away at his BlackBerry in his parked car, checking the London metal prices that set the global market for scrap metal. “Market is down.” He sighs. “But we will still try.” He’s a young-looking 42, but when his lips purse with concern—as they do now—his cheeks puff out slightly, highlighting the lines at the corners of his eyes.The BlackBerry buzzes. “Homer calling,” he says with a whisper as he presses answer and switches to his native Cantonese.
Zeng and Homer are interested in what’s known in the scrap-metal industry as “low-grade.” It’s an important term that means different things to different people. In general, low-grade scrap requires significant work—manual, chemical, or mechanical—to turn it into copper clean enough to be melted in a furnace. Telephone lines and Christmas tree lights are low-grade because somebody, somewhere, has to figure out how to profitably strip the insulation from the metal.
For Americans who care about recycling and preserving resources, the most important thing to know about low-grade scrap is this: It’d end up in a landfill if it weren’t exported. Demand for copper in the U.S. is too low, and labor is too expensive, to be worth any scrap yard’s time.
As Chinese low-grade scrap buyers go, Zeng is midsize at best. The previous night he told me he’ll try to spend $1 million on low-grade scrap for export to China this week.
Zeng wraps up his phone conversation with Homer and slips the BlackBerry into his shirt pocket. “He’s waiting by his computer,” he says as he grabs the car door handle. “I’ll send him photos.”
I check my watch. It’s just before 10 p.m. in China. “He’s staying up?”
“Of course! Some of the material, I don’t know what it is. Only he knows. So I call him. He’s the expert.” Homer is a former barber turned South China scrap-metal magnate. He learned the business by sorting imported scrap metal by himself; after a few years he knew the value of what Americans throw away better than the Americans.