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Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
by
30/99
Critics' Rating Index
60/99
Readers' Rating Index
79/99
Scholars' Citation Index
92/99
Volume of Reviews
82/99
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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
"You will never look at plastic bags the same way."
"But these must be looked for, bobbing forlorn amid the computer parts and zip-lock bags stretching clear to the horizon."
"Clapp shines a spotlight on a subject that needs to be addressed."
"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."
"You can absorb only so much polychlorinated biphenyl and polybrominated diphenyl ether before you realize you're being poisoned."
"Clapp borrows from Packard's examination of 'planned obsolescence,' but he adds some modern insights and twists that even Packard himself might not have envisioned ..."
"The biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem ..."
"A fascinating and darkly revealing dive into the world's garbage."
"It's a stirring and dogged investigation."
"Somewhat undermines the exposé element of the book."
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