Photo Gallery: Look Inside the Scrap Yards Sending Copper to China

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, computer technician Jim Delfino was laid off by the Florida company at which he had worked for over two decades. After five years of looking for employment in the same field, Delfino gave up and instead took a job as a sorter at a Chinese-owned scrap yard in Tampa. The pay was decent, and since it was manual labor, it didn't matter that Delfino's computer skills were somewhat out of date. In fact, the first time Delfino's son Christian came to visit the site, in 2015, he couldn't help recognizing some of the old monitors, CPUs, and printers piled up in stacks, waiting to be processed. "The same equipment he was working with in the computer tech industry was now getting trashed," recalls Christian, a Brooklyn-based photographer.