Latest news with #AlexanderClapp
USA Today
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Be the smartest person at the dinner party: Niche nonfiction books to read
Want to be the most interesting guest at a dinner party? Be the most well-read. There are many earnest, unpretentious reasons to be a regular reader, from stepping into someone else's shoes to escaping from the stress of day-to-day life. But admit it, there's a little part of you that also wants that scholarly reputation. Why not capture the attention of your peers with a riveting celebrity backstory or share a fun fact from a new wellness book? Lately, I've been talking up Sophie Elmhirst's 'A Marriage at Sea' to anyone who will listen, wowing them with the survival story of a shipwrecked couple who spent 118 days at sea. Whether you're looking to impress your friends or want to further your quest for knowledge, here are 10 niche nonfiction books that will keep you engaged as you get smarter. 'Waste Wars' by Alexander Clapp Learn the sinister afterlife of your trash in this investigation of the global garbage trade. Clapp spent two years reporting across five continents to uncover the 'secret hot potato second life' of trash and its devastating consequences for poor nations. You won't look at your trash the same once you know about the shipping, selling and smuggling behind the scenes. 'Everything is Tuberculosis' by John Green You're about to learn more about tuberculosis than you ever thought possible. In his latest nonfiction venture, Green makes the compelling case that much of human history is shaped by this deadly disease, from poetry to poverty and colonialism. With a narrative drive through charismatic tuberculosis patient Henry, 'Everything is Tuberculosis' is a fascinating deep dive. 'You Didn't Hear This From Me' by Kelsey McKinney Gossip is far more defined in cultural tradition and currency than you realize. 'You Didn't Hear This From Me,' from the host of the 'Normal Gossip' podcast, explores our obsession with gossip and its role as lighthearted banter to social capital and what happens when it gets weaponized. 'How to Kill a City' by P.E. Moskowitz Readers who live in major cities are guaranteed to look at their metropolis differently after reading Moskowitz's expertly crafted 'How to Kill a City.' Not only will you learn about the history behind major changes in cities like New York, New Orleans, Detroit and San Francisco, but you'll also learn about who the bad actors are in city-wide gentrification and the systemic forces allowing it to happen. 'What is Queer Food?' by John Birdsall This 2025 release from culinary writer Birdsall intertwines queer identity and food culture, showing how the LGBTQ+ community has often used food as a tool for joy and community in the face of persecution. 'What is Queer Food?' follows the early days of LGBTQ+ civil rights movements to Cold War-era lesbian potlucks to the appetites of icons like James Baldwin and Truman Capote. 'Say Nothing' by Patrick Radden Keefe Now a Hulu series, Keefe maps the consequences and trials of The Troubles in Ireland through the murder and abduction of Jean McConville. 'Say Nothing' chronicles the conflict with empathy, impact and narrative flair, from Irish Republican Army member Dolours Price to peace negotiator Gerry Adams to the McConville children. 'Why We Swim' by Bonnie Tsui This book is for anyone who's a regular at their local gym pool, played mermaids as a kid is ocean-obsessed. In "Why We Swim," Tsui investigates the human behavior behind the popular sport, from pleasure laps to exercise to swimming in dangerous terrain to test our limits. 'Before We Were Trans' by Kit Heyam A historical analysis of the past, present and future of trans identities, historian Heyam paints both a narrative and educational look at the complex realities of gender expression and identity. From Renaissance Venice to Edo Japan to early America, 'Before We Were Trans' teaches eager readers about people defying gender binaries throughout history. 'The Chiffon Trenches' by André Leon Talley If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in the cutthroat world of editorial fashion, "The Chiffon Trenches" is for you. This memoir from the former "Vogue" creative director will give you an intimate glimpse into fashion figureheads like Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld and Oscar de la Renta while also illuminating the industry's pervasive racism. 'The Soul of an Octopus' by Sy Montgomery I can't even count how many friends and family members I know who have read this and felt fundamentally changed. 'The Soul of an Octopus' is a 2015 deep-dive (literally) as naturalist Montgomery befriends octopuses, learning their unique personalities and cleverness. Along for the ride, you'll learn about how these intelligent creatures problem-solve and connect. Need a book that feels like a hug?: 8 comfort reads for when life gets hard Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
Scientific American
31-07-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
What Books Scientific American Read in July
Billions of dollars are spent every year moving countless tons of trash all around the world in a waste black market—and no one knows exactly where it all goes or who is making a profit. Science journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years living out of a backpack in search of toxic dump sites hidden deep in unmapped jungles and traversing mountains of trash visible from space for his new book Waste Wars. 'A lot of global trash over the last 30 to 40 years has been going to poor countries under the guise that it's being recycled,' Clapp told Scientific American in a recent interview. But humans break down that waste in a lethal and dangerous process that releases toxic chemicals into the air and water, he said, and those chemicals disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations. 'If you're sending waste to another country, you're not calling it trash on any export document—you're calling it recyclable material,' Clapp added. 'One thing that I hope my book encourages or leads people to question is how much of our waste is actually moving around the world.' —
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- The Guardian
From the archive: The sludge king: how one man turned an industrial wasteland into his own El Dorado
We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2022: When a Romanian businessman returned to his hometown and found a city blighted by mining waste, he hatched a plan to restore it to its former glory. He became a local hero, but now prosecutors accuse of him a running a multimillion dollar fraud By Alexander Clapp. Read by Simon Darwen
Scientific American
11-07-2025
- General
- Scientific American
Your Garbage Has a 'Wild Afterlife' on the International Black Market
Sorting your trash and recycling is common practice: break down the cardboard boxes, separate the compostable material and plastics and put them into the correct containers, put the trash on the curb, and you're done. But what happens next is where the story gets interesting. A billion-dollar industry exists around moving countless tons of waste from wealthy countries to poorer ones. For two years journalist Alexander Clapp lived out of a backpack and visited the smelliest parts of the most beautiful places on Earth—looking for hidden dump sites in the Venezuelan jungle and scaling mountains of trash in Ghana—for his new book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. He tracks the massive scope of waste management, from top-level international relations to underground whisper networks, and reveals the dirty underbelly of what happens to our trash. Scientific American spoke with Clapp about the people who break apart and sort our trash all over the world, the growth of the global waste economy and the future of waste management. [ An edited transcript of the interview follows.] On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Can you tell me where our exported garbage and not-quite-recyclable goods end up? It would depend what type of trash we're talking about, when we're talking about it or from which country it's being discarded. But a lot of global trash over the last 30 to 40 years has been going to poor countries under the guise that it's being recycled. That trash will get broken down, or someone will attempt to make some use out of it—to extract some profit from it—and that's an extremely dangerous and often lethal process where all sorts of contaminants and forever chemicals enter local ecosystems. They go into the air, they go into the water, and they do huge amounts of damage—damage to, disproportionately, the most vulnerable populations in the world. Why would one country ever, under any circumstances, buy the garbage from another country? Is someone getting scammed, or is there a legitimate reason to buy boatloads of biological, technological or toxic waste? That is one of the reasons why I got interested in this topic. We send our waste to the very countries that cannot handle their own domestic waste outputs. I think the dichotomy that's worth keeping in mind with the waste trade is that it's not necessarily rich countries versus poor countries; within poor countries, you have importers who are actually buying the waste for pennies, and they are very much part of the problem. The most important thing to understand about the waste trade is that in the 1980s many poor countries felt that they had no option other than to import waste from the so-called global north. They were heavily indebted; they were desperate for factories, ports, industry of any kind. And so I think there's a really insipid, disturbing history of how and why the waste trade began. Which leads to the question—how much money is actually involved in this global waste economy? Let's say it costs $140 to put a ton of old plastic in a landfill. A waste broker would actually have to pay the landfill in order to bury that plastic. But what if instead you could sell that plastic to an importer in Malaysia for a few dollars? Then you're not paying $140; you're actually making $2 or $3. That said, a lot of the waste trade, by nature, is operating underground. If you're sending waste to another country, you're not calling it trash on any export document—you're calling it recyclable material. One thing that I hope my book encourages or leads people to question is how much of our waste is actually moving around the world. What are you most interested in regarding the future of this waste economy and of waste management on a global scale? I think what's really interesting about the global waste trade is that in many ways it's like the global drug trade. You see organized crime groups that are getting more and more involved in the waste trade because, frankly, the supply of this stuff is endless. The punishment if you get caught moving waste is negligible. I think the future of waste export and waste movement is organized crime. I think they're going to see this as a monumentally lucrative opportunity. What was the most shocking story you uncovered while researching for this book? The most shocking story probably was with the cruise ship-dismantling industry in Türkiye. On the Aegean coast of Türkiye, there's a [town] called Aliağa where American cruise ship companies disproportionately send a lot of their ships to be dismantled. And you would think that the process of deconstructing a cruise ship would be mechanically refined, but it's actually kind of this maniacal process done almost entirely by hand where you have armies of helmeted men filing into these cruise ships and breaking this stuff up. One thing that I found was that most of the men who get recruited into doing this work have little idea of what they're doing. They've never seen the ocean before. They were recruited from the middle of Türkiye and given a week's worth of training. It's absolutely excruciating. What was the most surprisingly common occurrence across all of your research? In terms of the most common story that I would hear, it's the extent to which in poor countries trash, and especially plastic, is just regarded as another commodity. Generally [the people I encountered didn't] think about this stuff as a potentially toxic substance. That was shocking to me. In places such as Java and [other parts of] Indonesia, hundreds of tons of Western plastic are imported every week and used as fuel in tofu factories, and then that tofu gets exported around the world's most populous island [Java]. I was just struck by how kind of pedestrian it seems to just burn plastic in places to get rid of it or to find some use for it.
Hindustan Times
07-06-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Gangs, exploding fingers, black markets: Check out the wild afterlife of trash
It is strange, and sinister, how garbage travels. An empty packet of chips from the US, a diaper discarded in Germany and a plastic bottle from the Netherlands have all ended up with rice farmers-turned-trash miners in Indonesia. Primeval forests are being razed in parts of that country to make space for 'trash towns'. Since 1992, this chain of islands has been 'processing' thousands of tonnes of plastic waste a year, with the mounds turning fields barren and grey. In just one example, in the village of Gedangrowo in East Java, all 150 families have switched to drying the plastic shipped in from the Global North, and selling it to tofu and cracker factories for fuel. Elsewhere, 40 tribes living in Agbogbloshie — now classified as a garbage dump in Accra, the capital of Ghana — hammer out old ceiling fans and pry open motorcycle motors, refrigerators and computers to get at the metals and minerals within. Agbogbloshie is known as one of the largest e-waste 'processing' centres in the world. But all they really do is break the e-waste apart and scavenge from it what they can. There are no safety standards. There is no regulation. Some of those who scavenge here, for instance, spend all day burning plastic wiring to get at the metal within, which they then exchange at nearby units for cash. India, meanwhile, takes in millions of tyres, to burn in pyrolysis plants to extract either a dirty industrial fuel or steel. These plants, often unlicensed and unregulated, emit clouds of carbon dust that hang over cities ranging from Indore in Madhya Pradesh to Palghar in Greater Mumbai. Pyrolysis releases toxic heavy metals such as benzene and dioxins into the air, and into local water bodies. In Malaysia, similar sediments in water bodies have led to mass hospitalisations. And on and on it goes… Trash Talk How did garbage become the stuff of a globalised black market? Athens-based journalist Alexander Clapp, winner of the Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award, began researching this question five years ago. His findings make up his first book, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash (February 2025). The idea for it took root in the wake of China's ban on plastic, in 2017, he says. 'I began seeing all these stories pop up about containers of trash getting sent to countries that weren't expecting it, or didn't want it. In Romania in 2020, I stumbled upon all this plastic waste and started realising one could tie all these different geographic threads — Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe — into a single story about where the West's trash ends up, and why.' He spent the next two years travelling across five continents, talking to port workers, scavengers, recyclers, activists, environment ministers. 'What countries have the luxury of exporting trash? Which ones are desperate and must accept trash?' he says. Examine this and it is clear 'that the waste trade has become a barometer of global standing. Much as one could write a book about the 16th century told through the spice trade, our present world can be understood through the globe-spanning movement of waste.' Organised grime In his book, he writes of how, 'for hundreds of years, European empires enriched themselves by taking what they needed from the Southern Hemisphere.' As hypercapitalism spawned mountains of waste, he adds, 'In the 1980s, the so-called Global South became not just a place to take from — but also a place to put things… Poor countries no longer just propped up your living standard; they also cleaned up your environment.' As oil prices shot up in the '70s, raised by Arab countries to protest the West's support for Israel in the midst of an ongoing conflict, debt mounted to critical levels in the impoverished former colonies of the Global South, and currencies weakened. When garbage from the North was positioned as an opportunity, many of these countries signed on, not out of desire but desperation, Clapp says. Former colonies were given millions in down-payments, and decades of debt relief, particularly if they accepted radioactive and industrial waste. Soon, plastic and e-waste were added to their heaps. 'Investment' in roads, hospitals and other infrastructure was linked to deals around trash. The result of these agreements: it cost less than $3 to bury a tonne of the West's toxic material in Africa. 'Many supporters of the waste trade argue that countries like the Philippines and Nigeria willingly accept the West's waste, and that's true. They do. But if you examine the history of how and why the waste trade started, it's clear that many such countries have long felt they have no option other than to accept such garbage. It's been either poverty or poison,' Clapp says. 'I think this is precisely how capitalism works: through the exploitation of people and states that have negligible means of fighting back.' To add to the complications, these countries had little to no history of dealing with toxic waste, since they produced little to none of it themselves. This meant they had an incomplete picture of what they were taking on, and an even less-complete idea of what to do with it. There was no real know-how in the field; no real disposal facilities. The result is that toxins leached into land and water; fingers were blown off in makeshift 'processing' units; air was polluted and landfills grew. It is only lately that the ramifications of more than four decades of this trade are being acknowledged and discussed, Clapp points out. Meanwhile, the numbers continue to climb. Electronic waste, the fastest growing category, has grown by 82% between 2010 and 2022, according to the fourth United Nations Global E-waste Monitor report, released in 2024. Volumes are expected to rise further, from 62 million tonnes a year in 2022 to 82 million tonnes, by 2030. Less than 25% of this waste is documented and recycled. The rest is still pouring into places such as Agbogbloshie in Ghana, and Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh.
