China’s Changing Waste-Scapes A Guest Lecture with Dr. Joshua Goldstein

AS CHINA GLOBALIZES, industrializes, and urbanizes, material flows have intensified. So too have waste flows. China leads the world in recycling, importing more scrap copper, aluminum, paper, and plastic than anywhere else on earth. China also leads the world in environmental problems: toxic rivers, polluted air, leadlaced soils, cancer villages. We will focus in specifically on solid matter – garbage, electronic waste, recyclables – and tour China’s uneven and shifting “wastescapes.”