What really happens to everything you recycle

Mint

27-05-2025

Waste Wars. By Alexander Clapp. Little, Brown; 400 pages; $32. John Murray; £25
What happens to that single-use plastic bottle after you, a conscientious citizen, place it in a recycling bin? Most people, if they think about it at all, assume it really will be recycled, probably at a facility not far away. Much more likely is that the bin is only the departure point on a long journey to the other side of the world, where that bottle will, at best, be washed, dried, sorted by material, turned into pellets and then reconstituted into something flimsier, such as packaging.
Consider that a victory. If it is packaging itself that has been chucked, it will probably end up as a filthy form of fuel, powering the production of cement or even tofu. Or it may go all the way just to sit in Asia or Africa, blighting the landscape, clogging rivers, entering the ocean, being swallowed by marine life—and perhaps finding its way, via the global fish trade, back into your home and even into your body. It is recycling, but not as people traditionally think of it.
The broad facts of the fiction of recycling are no secret. But Alexander Clapp, a journalist (who has contributed to 1843, The Economist's sister publication), does something engrossing, if not entirely appealing, in his book. He follows rubbish, travelling to some of the world's most unpleasant places to chronicle the effects of consumption: villages in Indonesia buried under mountains of Western plastic, a ship-breaking yard in Turkey where men tear apart the toxic hulls of American cruise ships with hand tools, a fetid slum in Ghana where migrants extract valuable metals from the rich world's discarded computers and mobile phones.
'Waste Wars" also contains jaw-dropping but forgotten stories, such as that of the Khian Sea, a vessel carrying a season's worth of ash from garbage incinerators in Philadelphia, which set sail for the Bahamas in 1986. The ship and its toxic cargo were denied entry, forcing the crew to look for alternative dumping sites. After 27 months of being turned away from every conceivable port, it arrived in Asia with an empty hold. The captain admitted years later to dumping the ash in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Mr Clapp's aim is not just to display his ample reporting chops, but to trace the rise of a controversial form of globalisation: the growth of the global trade in waste. As Western countries put in place stricter environmental regulation, the job of disposing of their waste fell to poorer ones. Take the ostensibly green European Union: in 2021 it produced 16m tonnes of plastic waste, less than half of which was recycled within its borders.
Some exports are well-meaning and welcomed. Used electronics arrived in Ghana as donations to bring people online. China imported plastic waste to use as feedstock. Turkey turned imported scrap metal into highways and skyscrapers. Some of the steel from New York's twin towers, shipped to India as scrap metal, now holds up several buildings, including a college and textile showroom. But too many transactions are exploitative and even dishonest. Shipments of supposedly recyclable paper have turned out to be full of dirty plastic. Diapers soiled by American infants have arrived in batches of supposedly recyclable plastics to stink up the outskirts of Beijing.
The Basel Convention, which came into effect in 1992, dealt with the shipment of hazardous waste but left plenty of loopholes. Poor countries have been trying to stop the flood ever since. In 2017 China, which then received half the world's plastic waste bound for recycling, banned its import. Much of that waste travelled to South-East Asia instead. Similar bans in Thailand and Indonesia went into effect this year, fuelled by environmental concerns. If they are enforced, the garbage will find its way somewhere else, such as Malaysia, another big recipient of plastic.
Trash talk
What is to be done? In a world where humans produce their own weight in new plastic annually, there are no easy solutions. After hundreds of pages describing the problem, Mr Clapp is light on prescriptions. He suggests making rich-world companies financially liable for 'the fate of that which they insist on overproducing". He points the finger of blame at globalisation, weak international co-operation and Western overproduction.
There are problems with this. The first is that tightening regulation in the West will only make countries more likely to find workarounds involving poor ones. Global action is also probably a non-starter at a time when long-standing alliances are being tested. As America withdraws from the Paris Agreement (again) and guts the Environmental Protection Agency, the idea that it would impose measures to prevent the export of waste or require firms to do more for the environment globally is unrealistic. Meanwhile, Mr Clapp barely mentions China's role as a manufacturing power, as though importing Western waste absolves it of its own sins of overproducing cheap goods. To portray China as a faultless victim is wrong.
At times Mr Clapp's rhetoric sounds suspiciously like a call for de-growth. It is all very well to tell Americans to be less wasteful. But try telling that to the hundreds of millions of Asians emerging from poverty and buying consumer goods for the first time. The West has spent centuries lecturing the East on what is good for it. 'Don't be like us," however well-intentioned, rings the same discordant note.
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