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Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
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30/99
Critics' Rating Index
60/99
Readers' Rating Index
79/99
Scholars' Citation Index
92/99
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About This Book
A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of few people have any idea they're happening. Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell listeners what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world. Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage—the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away—has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?
Reviews
"One can take the view that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with moving trash across borders to manage it; but it is hard to see much upside from the way the trade has evolved."
"A fascinating and darkly revealing dive into the world's garbage."
"Clapp shines a spotlight on a subject that needs to be addressed."
"Although Clapp makes a strong case for the unfair and all too symbolic fact of the powerless working in unhealthy conditions to recycle or bury the rubbish of the powerful, it leads him down a number of dead ends ..."
"Despite such depressing conclusions, reading Waste Wars isn't depressing."
"There are moments, in Clapp's book, of great sweep and humanity, and even a few of surprising levity."
"Little, Brown has given Waste Wars a bright cover, maybe to telegraph the abundant humor and humanity of Clapp's prose."
"Clapp's reporting underscores that garbage is not just an intractable problem of modern capitalism but also an encapsulation of the global inequities that define our waste-filled world ..."
"The biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem ..."
"A rollicking deep dive ..."
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