I follow him out of the building and remove my mask. Though the air in Shanghai’s Pudong New Area is some of China’s most polluted, I find the contrast with the smelting room’s air to be refreshing. We walk around to the back where a pile of half-meter-long, solid stainless-steel cylinders are stacked haphazardly against the building. They look like bombs. “Minneapolis garbage, Shanghai gold,” James tells me proudly. He leads me past another smelting room, and across the fetid dirt road that serves as a main street for the workers who choose to live in Shanghai Metallink’s company dorms. Through a gate, we arrive in a newly laid concrete unloading area, about two acres in total, where dozens of pallets containing scrap stainless steel are being sorted by manual laborers.

“Over here.” James points. “That’s from Minneapolis. American Iron, that box. Alliance Steel, that box.” He is referring to American Iron & Supply Company (famed builders of a soon-to-be-operational metal shredder on the Mississippi waterfront), and Alliance Steel, respectively. Both are large Minneapolis scrap recyclers, and both have developed successful export markets into mainland China. Several times each year, James visits Minneapolis scrap yards to arrange for the shipment of low-grade scrap stainless steel and electronic scrap to his facility in Pudong. The stainless steel being recycled during my visit left Minneapolis, by rail, about six weeks earlier.

James invites me to examine the Minneapolis material. It’s a wild assortment of broken or defective industrial components, ranging from high-temp thermometers to circuit boards. One box is a mixed assortment of valves stamped “Rosemount, Inc.—Eden Prairie, Minnesota.” American Iron has been purchasing Rosemount’s high-tech scrap and defective equipment for years, though the decision to ship it to China is recent. American Iron paid around three cents a pound for the material. It will be processed and resold in China for around a dollar a pound. “Labor is cheap,” James explains. “So I can afford to have my people take it apart, sort it, by hand. It’s too expensive to do in my Chicago warehouse. A lot of it would be burned or thrown away.”

Joe Chen, another Chinese scrap processor who has bought Minnesota’s industrial scrap metal, explains it this way: “In China we can afford to have a no-landfill policy. I can pay people to pull the gold off a circuit board, separate the insulation from copper wire. All of it gets recycled. But in America, most of it’s garbage, unrecyclable. And it ends up in a landfill.”

As James leads me into his office at the edge of the smelting operation, he muses, “China is the best place for recycling now. But one day it’ll be too developed.”