Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

by Alexander Clapp

A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, Waste Wars 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 them: 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 readers 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?

• Publish Date: 25 February 2025
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Imprint: Little, Brown and Company
• Edition: Kindle Edition
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 400
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Anti-Western Ideology And Dearth Of Bibliography Mar Otherwise Solid Enough Examination Of The Topic. This is one of those books that has a lot of great information... and then doesn't really document where that information came from. Clearly, Clapp traveled extensively and did a lot of first hand observations - which is clear from the narrative. And yet there is also quite a bit of discussion of histories old enough (yet still modern enough) that Clapp could not possibly have conducted such interviews himself, such as one comment from a letter from an activist in 1992 Guatemala regarding the trade in trash being more lucrative at the time than the drug trade! Thus, there is enough that wasn't directly observed that the bibliography should have been longer than the 13% the Advance Review Copy form of this book I read a few months before publication had. Still, that was only call it a half star deduction, as 13% is really close to the 15% that I'm trying to relax my standard to (from 20-30%).  

 

The other half star deduction is from the explicit and pervasive anti-Western commentary - at one point going so far as to claim that "Indigenous societies were in greater touch with Earth's natural rhythms than white settlers. They had a more profound sense of moral purpose." While this statement was perhaps the single worst in the narrative, there were numerous similar comments spread throughout the entirety of the text, enough that some may wish to defenestrate this book early and often.  

 

But don't. Read the book. There really is quite a bit here, and while some of it is included in other works on the trash trade and trash life cycle - such as Year Of No Garbage by Eve Schaub, Worn Out by Alyssa Hardy, and Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Wallis - Clapp manages to go to other areas (such as Indonesia) not covered in these other works and show their own problems and opportunities in stark clarity. Indeed, remove the blatant anti-Western bias, and this is truly a solid work in the field, showing a wide breadth of the overall problem of the life of trash after it is thrown away and now nothing ever really solves this particular problem... in part due to the classic peril of there being too much money to be made by *not* solving it.

 

So read this book. Maybe you agree with the author's biases, maybe you're vehemently opposed to them. Either way, I'm almost 100% certain that even if you happen to be an actual expert in the global trash trade... you're *still* going to learn something from having read this book.

 

Recommended.