Good read: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/business/worldbusiness/13SCRA.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
It's about the insatiable appetite of Chinese steel companies for American scrap metal. What would be buried in an American landfill is instead shipped to China, recycled, and used to manufacture new products, which are then exported, often back to America. I'd be interested to know the process by which scrap metal is recycled into usuable material, and whether recycled metal is of similar quality as the fresh stuff.
In any case, the article talks of how China's massive supply of low-wage workers gives it an advantage in this regard. While Americans don't have workers willing to sort through mountains of rubble, extracting the useful from the useless, the Chinese definitely do.
Everywhere in this culture are signs of this resourcefulness -- every scrap of available dirt is used as soil to grow stuff; every part of the pig, save the squeal, goes into the frying pan.
During the past few weeks, the bus trip from Zhuzhou to Changsha has been particularly thrilling. Along one six-block stretch of road at the southern edge of Changsha, every building has been systematically reduced to rubble. What would probably be no sweat for an American crane is instead a lot of sweat for hundreds of sledgehammer-wielding Chinese men.
At dawn, as the bus rumbles by, they're out, swinging away furiously at the two-story brick buildings, not a hardhat on any of them, or safety goggles, or shirts; at dusk, as we pass again, the same guys are two or three buildings down, still swinging away furiously, as a team of women sort through the piles of rubble the men have left behind. The women stack bricks in one cart, pile steel rebar in another cart, load concrete blocks into another. A bobcat is close behind them, loading scrap into blue dumptrucks.
I'll be interested to see the construction process, once the destruction is complete. Probably, the same workers will use the same materials to rebuild the buildings they spent the past two months systemically destroying. Sisyphus, welcome to Changsha.
