Remains of the Everyday, Kipple Yard: Images, essays and links to accompany the book.
Still under construction, but please look around and leave comments, etc....

Dongxiaokou: Living and Working in a Recycling Market

From the mid 1990s to about 2015 in Beijing and pretty much every other city in China, informal migrant recyclers diverted pretty much every material that could potentially be reprocessed out of the urban waste stream, and almost all of those materials passed through a recycling market where they were sorted, aggregated, and traded for cash, and loaded for shipping to processing hubs.  These markets, at times completely informal and relatively covert, and at times semi-recognized and so larger in scale and more established, were the centers of migrant recycler communities. Everyone in the urban recycling chain--collectors, truckers, brokers--depended on these markets; migrant businesses, grocers, restaurants, primary schools for migrant recyclers children all clustered around them; and for the brokers who rented stalls in these markets, the markets were often literally home.  

I frequented about 20 Beijing recycling markets between 2000 and 2010, some under the management of Beijing district governments, some under independent management that achieved varying degrees of local government recognition, and some that were wholly informal and fairly temporary. 

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