ZHANG YIN

1957–

Known in China as the Queen of Trash, Zhang Yin—who also goes by her Cantonese name, Cheung Yan—made her fortune by buying up wastepaper and recycling it into paperboard to create packaging for exported goods. She owns the largest paper mill in the world.

Born Zhang Xiuhua (she later changed her name to Yin) in 1957, the eldest of eight children, Zhang had to begin working at an early age when her father was imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution. She worked as a bookkeeper in a textile factory and studied accounting at a trade school, before taking a managerial position at a paper-trading company in the city of Shenzhen, Guangdong province. During her time there, she heard about the opportunities in the wastepaper trade between China and Hong Kong.

In 1985, aged 28, Zhang used her savings of $3,800 to open her own paper-trading company, Ying Gang Shen, in Hong Kong. China’s export industry was booming, and paperboard (a thick cardboard) for packaging was in high demand. Since there was a lack of wood, the industry was turning to wastepaper that could be recycled into paperboard. Realizing that she needed better resources of wastepaper, Zhang looked to the US for supplies. In 1990, she traveled to Los Angeles, where she set up deals to obtain the necessary supplies for shipping back to China, taking full advantage of the spaces left in the container ships that had brought Chinese-made goods to California. In partnership with her husband, Zhang cofounded America Chung Nam, which grew to become the largest exporter of paper in the US.

Returning to Hong Kong, Zhang set up Nine Dragons Paper Holdings in 1995. Today, Nine Dragons has the world’s biggest production capacity for the manufacture of paperboard products from recovered paper supplies, making some 14.3 million tons of packaging materials each year.