It's hard to think of a more intriguing picture of industrial ecology. Two-hundred thousand Bangladeshi workers decompose tankers into thousands (millions?) of tons of steel, furnishing 80% of the nation's steel needs. Then women and children get the final scraps, again to be sold to local merchants.

Harvesting grocery-store-style plastic bags from the rivers is another major undertaking that represents huge-scale recycle/reuse. At some level, these endeavors must qualify as environmental enterprises. Even if the tanker deconstruction was not completed in the most sanitary or energy-efficient manner, quite a bit of both energy and land-use costs are avoided by reusing all of that metal.