Waste Wars
On sale
27th February 2025
Price: £20
‘A mind-altering and unforgettable read‘ Adam Tooze
A globe-trotting investigation into the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.
Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. The millions of tonnes of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars, cons and cover ups across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. And few people have any idea they’re happening.
Roaming across five continents, Alexander Clapp delves deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists in the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour. He reveals how most of our trash actually lives a secret second life, getting shipped, smuggled or dumped from one country onto another, 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 has spawned a massive global black market, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If our astonishing wastefulness reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the hidden business of trash say about our world today?
A globe-trotting investigation into the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.
Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. The millions of tonnes of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars, cons and cover ups across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. And few people have any idea they’re happening.
Roaming across five continents, Alexander Clapp delves deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists in the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour. He reveals how most of our trash actually lives a secret second life, getting shipped, smuggled or dumped from one country onto another, 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 has spawned a massive global black market, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If our astonishing wastefulness reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the hidden business of trash say about our world today?
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Reviews
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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