Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries And The Sca

A riveting investigation into the dark underbelly of the global trash trade - a dirty, multi-billion-dollar industry that almost no one knows exists. The total mass of the world's manmade materials has recently come to equal the entire biomass of the earth. This means we are living in a world where man's ability to create garbage, or eventual garbage, has surpassed the earth's ability to create life. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing, and disputes about what to do with the tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged in just about every country on earth. Some are border skirmishes, fought to move trash out of one place and dump it into another. Others are waged across thousands of miles. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening. For every story about how a commodity gets hustled through world supply chains for consumption, there exists another untold story about how it gets discarded for renewal - or for eternity. Some trash gets tossed onto roadsides. Some gets burned for fuel. Some gets buried underground. But most of it lives a hot potato second life, getting bartered, sold, re-sold, smuggled, salvaged, re-purposed from one country or mafia or corporation to another, with devastating consequences for millions of people. Waste Wars tells the stories of five trash conflicts being waged in different corners of the world right now. They are representative but rich strands in the story of our planet's runaway garbage pandemic. In each theater, a different commodity is being smuggled or imported or bartered. Sometimes there is a winner; sometimes there is a loser. And in each theater a different political dilemma - from global inequality to the pitfalls of green politics - is presenting itself through the seemingly pedestrian medium of trash. A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, Waste Wars exposes the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade in which almost everyone in the world unknowingly engages and asks: If the handling of its trash reveals deeper truths about a particular society, what does the global business of trash say about our world today? Review: Waste Wars is the Star Wars of trash, a witty and brave account of Alexander Clapp's journey into the underbelly of modern life. You'll meet garbage-spotting drones, journalists who register pet fish as waste brokers, and go on a hunt for the El Dorado of poison. As Clapp explains, we live in a world where our ability to create garbage has surpassed Earth's ability to generate life. The consequences are terrifying, but Clapp's great book somehow leaves you awe-inspired by the sheer outrageousness of the human ingenuity that has created this toxic mess -- Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST Briskly paced and filled with colorful and dubious characters worthy of the true crime book it is, Waste Wars inverts the standard story of extractive capitalism to focus on the globalized trillion-dollar waste disposal industry that each year moves billions of tons of toxic garbage from the Global North to the Global South. A quintessential story of deviant globalization, Waste Wars depicts the United States as an empire of plastic, one that deployed disposable mass consumerism as a way to beat the Soviets in the Cold War, only to extend it down to the present day into a structure of globalized overconsumption and wanton disposal that threatens to devour the entire planet, with the poor countries and peoples of the Global South as its first victims -- Nils Gilman, author of DEVIANT GLOBALIZATION Superb reporting that definitively answers the question we really never ask: where on earth does all that stuff go when we're done with it? This majestic account will transform the way you look at trash - and hopefully it will spur some real change at the highest levels -- Bill McKibben, author of THE END OF NATURE Waste Wars is an infuriating, eye-opening and spell-binding account of the globally uneven and unjust politics of trash. Clapp shows how the rubbish the affluent people of rich countries produce travels to poorer countries for processing, creating mountains of toxic waste in the global South, or whirlpools of plastic in our oceans. A must-read for those concerned with the health and hygiene not only of the planet, but also of the people who populate it! -- Laleh Khalili, author of SINEWS OF WAR AND TRADE The most comprehensive indictment of consumer capitalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Fearless as he travels to some of the least appealing places on earth, Alexander Clapp lifts the heavy stones of green washing to reveal the literal and moral filth that Western societies have been dumping on their poorer cousins for decades. Always engagingly written with jaw-dropping anthropological detail, Clapp introduces us to courageous tragic characters compelled to clean up the mess of Western material avarice from the bizarre electronic slums of Ghana to the deathyards breaking up ships in Turkey, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. If you wish to know how the world really works, read this book -- Misha Glenny, author of MCMAFIA In the seconds it has taken you to scan the few lines of this blurb, tens of thousands of plastic bottles have been discarded. Pause to consider that awesome fact for a moment and they are followed by tens of thousands more. One million per minute, every minute, every hour of every day. We are burying our planet in trash, which thanks to the plastic revolution will outlive us by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Where does all this waste go? The fact that this shocking disaster is largely invisible in the rich world is no accident. As Alexander Clapp shows, it is the result of a ghastly form of globalization that dumps the garbage of the rich on the poor. A mind-altering and unforgettable read, Clapp has written an essential and deeply disturbing book -- Adam Tooze, author of CRASHED Waste Wars cracks open standard recycling rhetoric to expose the toxic truths within. No study of global inequality is complete without the information in this excellent book -- Malcolm Harris, author of PALO ALTO Since its inception centuries ago, the global economy has consisted of complex commodity chains: extracting, transporting, manufacturing, distributing, profiting. Only very recently in historical times have we added the "downstream" chains, dumping the resultant consumer waste - somewhere, somehow. In rich countries, we pay high municipal fees for the removal of our refuse. We may even feel good about sorting to recycle it. Does this do any good? If the news is really so bad, better that someone as sober and courageous as Alexander Clapp delivers it to us -- Georgi Derluguian, author of BOURDIEU'S SECRET ADMIRER IN THE CAUCASUS Clapp has performed an important and courageous service by exposing the workings of this furtive activity to sunlight -- Financial Times Out of sight, out of mind. Waste Wars, however, puts the picture very much into your mind, and it's hard to imagine any reasonably affluent Western reader . . . reading this book and not having their conception of the world fundamentally changed -- Daily Telegraph Deeply disturbing. Covering five continents, he shows the ways in which waste has generated a dangerously criminal black market, with devastating effects on some of the world's poorest countries -- Glasgow Herald, Top 10 Books to Read Now He ventures out to all corners of the Earth to hear stories of illegal fly tipping on a gargantuan scale, dubious recycling procedures, and the repeated story of the poor being left to deal with the crap that the rich world throws away . . . Searing -- Observer Entertaining . . . the stories he has to tell are extraordinary - and shocking . . . the trillion-dollar waste-disposal industry is exposed in all its awfulness -- Country Life Horrifying . . . I've read books that have made me tearful, nauseous and aroused, but never one that made me feel the acrid taste of burning plastic at the back of my throat -- Sunday Times Extensively researched and delivered with great humanity - you can almost smell the rot from Clapp's writing and it doesn't come from the bottom of a rubbish skip but the heart of our consumer economies -- Irish Independent Clapp ventures across five continents in his bid to expose dubious recycling procedures and the human cost of such abject failures . . . While Clapp argues convincingly about how the powerless often work in dangerous and unregulated conditions to bin the waste of the powerful, the industry's frustrating obfuscation of reality helps maintain this exploitation and hampers his efforts to tell the filthy truth. Still, it doesn't lessen the impact when the dustbin of humanity is laid bare -- New Statesman Jaw-dropping -- The Economist Author Biography: Alexander Clapp is a journalist and writer based in Greece. His reporting has appeared in publications including the New York Times, The Economist, the London Review of Books, and The Guardian Long Read. Clapp is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, among them a Whiting Nonfiction Grant, Matthew Power Literary Reporting Prize, Robert B. Silvers Reporting Grant, and a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award. He has also received the Alistair Horne Fellowship at Oxford and a Berggruen Fellowship in Los Angeles.