cotton road 棉花之路

Yesterday I filmed again at Yuan Tian Clothing Factory with a few of the workers, but the majority of my time was spent watching the loading of a truck with months worth of cotton scraps from the factory.  Everything has value in the production chain at Yuan Tian; nothing is wasted. Mrs. Jiang and her managers spent the better part of the afternoon overseeing the weighing of bags of cloth scraps as they were loaded. The workers doing the loading were hired by another factory to haul the scraps.  They weren’t entirely sure what the scraps were going to be used for, but Mrs. Jiang noted that some would be used to make toys, some would be shredded and used as insulation in electronic instruments like calculators.  The polyester fibers would be melted down, and perhaps used to make plastic for electronic parts. 

Loading was incredibly dusty work.  The workers kept throwing bag after bag into the truck and insisting that everything would fit.  Mrs. Jiang and her staff suggested they come back the next day and do two loads, but the workers disagreed. They finally finished around 5 pm, strapped down the towering load, and drove off.  Elizabeth Peng, my translator for the day, and I got into a cab about 5 minutes later to head home. As our cab rounded the block we saw the truck stopped on the side of the road by a police officer who was writing the men a citation for the precariousness height of their cargo.