The Dirty Little Secret Hiding in Your Garbage Can

New York Times

01-05-2025

Here's a way to while away a Sunday: Open up 'Waste Wars' — the journalist Alexander Clapp's inquisitorial takedown of the global garbage industry — to any page, and read aloud a line or two chosen at random. Like the sortes Virgilianae of the Romans, it's a kind of divination game — only here, it's all already come true, and the objective is to see how many rounds you can stand before succumbing to the all-pervading horror.
From the introduction: 'You are currently living in a world in which the human ability to create garbage' has 'surpassed Earth's ability to generate life.'
Describing conditions in a trash village in Ghana: 'Indeed, parts of the Korle Lagoon landscape have been burning longer than many of Agbogbloshie's residents have been alive.'
Quoting an Interpol official: 'You have groups getting out of the drug and weapons trade and entering the waste one. The risk is so much lower, the reward so much bigger.'
According to Clapp, global trade and global finance — even much of the emerging 'green' economy of the global North — are floating on an awesome sea of castoff dreck.
Dispiriting premise notwithstanding, 'Waste Wars' does manage to live up to the adventurous ring of its subtitle; trash's afterlife is wild indeed. Readers follow the author on a whirlwind tour to discover what, exactly, happens to the things we chuck in the bin, haul to the dump or sell to the scrapyard. The answer: nothing good.
'Much of what you have been led to believe was getting 'recycled' over the last generation has never been helping the planet,' Clapp writes; instead, it has simply been shipped to remote corners of the developing world, there to be chemically converted, releasing toxic byproducts, or to languish while slowly poisoning whatever rivers, forests, farms and people happen to be in the way.
From Central America to West Africa, Greece to Indonesia, Clapp serves up a stirring picture of the deliberate and surprisingly profitable despoliation of one half of the planet by the other.
Some of this is not, in a sense, news. That much of what passes for responsible waste disposal constitutes 'a morality performance,' in Clapp's words, is something of which many of us have been dimly aware, even as we dutifully file our spent water bottles into the proper receptacle.
What does come as a revelation is just how much money is to be made off trash, who makes it and the sheer variety of their means. In Kosovo, scrap metal 'is the economy,' Clapp writes, the country cannibalizing its own industrial infrastructure to the tune of $40 million per annum; in China, government proxies pay 'plastic traders to take weeklong tours of Southeast Asian nations to scout out potential warehouses to shred and melt old Western plastic.'
Clapp traces the links in an international daisy chain of pliant governments, dubious corporate interests and deluded consumers, all the while keeping in view the very real human stakes: In Turkey, for example, the author meets the family of 30-year-old Oguz Taskin, who burned to death while dismantling an American cruise ship in a gray-market shipyard.
Equally astonishing, if no less depressing, is just how long this whole sordid business has been going on, and how long some people have been trying to stop it. In its closing pages, 'Waste Wars' quotes a former Kenyan president: 'We do not want external domination to come in through the back door in the form of 'garbage imperialism.'' That was in 1988; by then, refuse had already begun accumulating en masse, a crisis that eventually led the country to pass sub-Saharan Africa's strongest ban on single-use plastic bags.
As an instance of organized, rational resistance to Big Junk, Kenya is not alone, and Clapp documents other noble efforts mounted by local actors the world over. Such attempts, however, face long odds — as they do in Kenya, where the bag ban has been under assault from (of course) plastic manufacturers, who promise enhanced recycling facilities in exchange for the law's repeal.
Such is the way of all garbage. Insofar as 'Waste Wars' advances an overall resolution to its eponymous conflict, it is the effective dismantlement of what has been called the 'throwaway society' born of midcentury America, exported abroad as part of a geopolitical strategy, and by now hard-wired into the hearts and minds of billions.
Uprooting this ideology seems rather a distant prospect — at least on these shores, where plastic straws, as we have lately been told, are not only functionally superior to their biodegradable counterparts, but must be understood as essential props to patriotism.
There are moments, in Clapp's book, of great sweep and humanity, and even a few of surprising levity. But these must be looked for, bobbing forlorn amid the computer parts and zip-lock bags stretching clear to the horizon. His is not a fun game, nor is it meant to be.