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Book

Waste wars : the wild afterlife of your trash

Call Number

  • 363.728 C589 (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2025.

Physical Description

viii, 390 pages : maps ; 25 cm

Summary

"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 we look. Some are border skirmishes. Others involve hustling 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 -- reporting deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise-ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistleblowing environmentalists in 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 discovered: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot-potato second life, getting shipped, sold, resold, 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 past forty years, our garbage has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar economy, one that off-loads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about Western society, what does the business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?" --

Contents

  • Introduction: Mayhem in Mesopotamia
  • Part one: Toxic tropics. Banana republic ; The chemical century ; Cash for trash ; Debt and development ; Merchants of disease ; Guns and germs ; Trash ash odyssey ; Rising up ; American exceptionalism ; The waste trade strikes back
  • Part two: E-waste on the Odaw. State and slum ; To the quays of Tema ; Treasure ; Logging on ; Technological tinkering ; The flexible mine ; Start-up cesspools ; A new Agbogbloshie? ; Going fishing ; Magical things
  • Part three: Aegean abomination. Global junk heap ; Shipping out ; Into the heart of Anatolia ; Deadly business ; Scrap shepherds ; Scrap nation ; At Europe's edge ; Greeks bearing gifts ; Coming home
  • Part four: Pacific plastic. A long journey ; Plastification ; The greatest miracle yet ; One-man multinational ; Plastic China ; Mad scramble ; A trash chief ; A trash scion ; Back to the Pacific
  • Conclusion: Whither waste?

Subjects