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Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- 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.
Mint
27-05-2025
- General
- Mint
What really happens to everything you recycle
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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New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Dirty Little Secret Hiding in Your Garbage Can
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.
The Hindu
28-04-2025
- General
- The Hindu
Waste Wars: How the Global North's Garbage Industry Is Poisoning the Global South
Published : Apr 28, 2025 20:21 IST - 10 MINS READ Alexander Clapp's Waste Wars is an exceptionally frightening and depressing book. Strangely, it is also very inspiring. It inspires in two ways. First, one is awestruck at the journalistic brio and thoroughness Clapp brings to bear on a task he undertook, that of describing the state of garbage in today's world and of telling us how we got here. Second, one is inspired by the tantalising possibilities he points to that should help mankind flip a seemingly hopeless situation of being overwhelmed by waste into one of mastering the problem and finding neat, wholesome and sustainable ways to overcome it. There is a wealth of information that makes condensing this book difficult. But this review will focus on some of the big themes that emerge. This will include broad patterns over time, some geographical and geopolitical considerations and those based on the nature of the waste being produced and disposed. Often these overlap. One clear pattern is that as soon as the pesticide industry emerged and the dangers of its safe disposal were understood, something that Rachael Carson drew the world's attention to, the manufacturers began cleaning up their backyard. Environmental laws were put in place and mechanisms to monitor compliance were set up. But there was a crucial lapse. The laws only applied to the US and later to some other parts of the Global North. For the rest of the world, the Global South, the default assumption was that they would receive all the waste that an ever-burgeoning industrial world generated. Soon USAID began despatching large stockpiles of waste to India, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Haiti. The place did not matter so long as it was far from the US. Also Read | India's environmental pioneers: The forgotten story An industry established itself around waste. It involved collecting the worst pollutants—often the residue of legal chemicals, including old asbestos, cyanide-laced waste, PCBs, hydraulic fluids, and infectious hospital waste—and then exporting them to poor countries. Where possible, it was disguised as international aid. In a short-time this grew into a billion-dollar business. Third world debt and development went hand in hand. A village of waste Right wing governments in Latin America depended on the US for military aid. Waste was then forced on them. Even the Soviet Union, ostensibly against exploitation by capitalism, became an imperial power, exporting waste to Benin, a client state. The oil crisis of 1973 was an inflection point. Many nations became debtor nations, borrowing money to buy oil. They could no longer afford to buy new steel or aluminium and were forced to turn to scrap metal from Europe. This was given to them as foreign aid. In these cases, waste was no longer waste; it was a tool for development. The gaps between the clean North and the dirty South continued to widen. The most dispiriting part of this saga of horrors is the tale of 'waste villages' in East Java. Here a native paper production industry was established decades ago, exploiting the local abundance of bamboo. Once all the bamboo was cut, the compulsions to keep the mills going meant scouring the world for new raw material. The US and Netherlands stepped in, selling their waste paper to Indonesia. Anne Leonard, who alerted the world to planned obsolescence, traced some of this waste from Seattle to Java. The flattened waste paper that reached the mills contained a lot of plastic sheets as well. They could not be returned and so they began to be spread on rice fields in Java. Soon all the paddies disappeared; fields of gray plastic replaced them. The hot tropical sun dried them. The natives soon discovered a use for them, as fuel. The dried plastic was burned, not in the very high temperatures that rendered the toxins in them neutral, but in ordinary kilns and stoves. Worse, they were used as fuel to make tofu and crackers, two items of food the villagers began to sell to other parts of Java. The food was contaminated by the toxins, but nobody cared. The business was so profitable villages began to elect 'trash chiefs' to ensure fair distribution of the fuel among all the families in the village. Klapp describes the state of those villages: the soil is barren, the animals are dead or dying, the water tables are contaminated and the rivers and streams are the most toxic in the world. Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish Alexander Clapp John Murray, London Rs.799 But the citizens of this wasteland are happy. Do you want us to return to rice cultivation? they ask. Not when burning free plastic is the closest to printing one's own money, Clapp observes. Turkey figures often in Clapp's narrative. It lay on the fringe of the fertile crescent, considered the cradle of civilisation and one of the most beautiful places on earth. Until 2018, when the Chinese ban on plastic imports took effect. Looking for other sites to dump rubbish the Global North found parts of Latin America, Africa, India, south east Asia and two places in their own backyard, Greece and Turkey. Turkey's construction boom was helped by cheap imports of US and European scrap steel and aluminium. The metals were recycled and some of it sent back to the US. Why? Because the dirty job of recycling often contaminated scrap was outsourced. Later, the manufacturing of white goods itself was exported so all the pollution took place on foreign lands. Once used, the stuff was shipped back to destinations in the third world. The planning and implementation were perfect, often guided by USAID and the World Bank. Ghana is another horror story. It was at one point the world's largest recipient of electrical and electronic waste. In the capital is a slum, Agbogbloshie, where gangs of young Ghanian boys work on the western world's electrical and electronic detritus. Some burn wires to extract the copper in them; some dissolve them in acid. Others dismantle phones and hard disks for all the minerals that can be harvested from them. Smaller teams of smart boys profit from them without soiling their hands. They scour the phones and hard disks for photographs of pretty white women. They then use them to scam older white men and to appeal for donations. They do not always find victims but when they do life is good for the contributions they elicit are always in Dollars or Euros. Some knowledge of how to use the Internet and English goes a long way. Much cyber crime springs from these African slums. Don't blame the locals, says Clapp. Blame the callousness of the West and their carelessness in handing over unerased laptops and phones that are still in working condition to waste merchants. Across much of the equator gathering, sorting and burning trash has become the default occupation of humanity, not farming. Some development projects in poor nations involve financing provided by rich ones. Roads have been laid in Somalia that lead nowhere. The tarmac was laid to hide the toxic material buried under the roads. The idea of Trumpism There is a pristine lake in remote Central America that was filled with extremely toxic liquid. This is the closest one can get to the perfect crime, Clapp notes. The surroundings are ruined for many years to come. The US would install and uninstall governments in the 'banana republics' based solely on the willingness of the rulers to accept garbage. Waste ash, falsely labelled fertilizer, generated in Philadelphia once travelled in a thrice renamed ship, across three oceans, five continents with three stopped at ports in 20 countries before dumping the whole load in Haiti, its original destination. The delay was to ensure the installation of a pliable set of officials there. Kosovo, one of the youngest nations in the world has an economy almost entirely dependent on waste recycling, done mostly by poor Roma people, descendants of migrants from India. No less than 60,000 tons of steel from the 9/11 attacks on New York, were used for construction in India. They were exported from the US because they were contaminated and Indian laws did not stop the deal. Five tiny nations, all tax havens, (Liberia, Malta, Panama, Marshall Islands and the Bahamas) own the bulk of the 1,20,000 bulk cargo carriers, oil tankers and container ships that ply the seas of the world. The ship breaking industry, marked by lax laws and little enforcement, is both dangerous and profitable and is concentrated in places from Turkey to Chittagong. Alang, in India. in one of the biggest and dirtiest ship breaking yards in the world. The US, the world's largest generator of hazardous materials, has not yet signed the Basel Convention, the rules of which forbid illegal exports of dangerous material. So, all the fine words in declarations and speeches are just rhetoric. The truth about waste was out there. Clapp has gone around the globe, observed and described it. He should be applauded and thanked for a unique job well done. Clapp's talent for the cutting phrase, the arresting analogy, and the eye-catching description leads to multiple descriptions of the same or similar phenomena but is rewarding since it means fine prose throughout the book. He does sound breathless at times: He has been breathing so much foul air. One thing the book teaches us is that Trumpism is much older than Trump. Trumpism is the idea that white Westerners are exceptional and that nothing should be allowed to prevent them from having their way. So, an Ayn Rand like selfishness guides the actions of the rich nations. The poor and the weak have no rights or claims; they can be and are treated like vermin. An extreme callousness propels the privileged and the wretched of the earth have to accept this situation as normal and given. Also Read | Linnaeus' taxonomy and the roots of scientific bias Clapp's book should be treated as a belated wake up call. If we brush these issues under the carpet the twin monsters of climate change and mass extinction of species will, in due course, swallow us. It is not that all production of pesticides or chemicals is bad or that recycling is not an option. It is that rather than invest in the procedures and processes that would neutralise the damage waste does, preferably close to the places that produce them, the cheaper option of transporting waste to the most powerless and miserable parts of the world is what is almost always done. This troubles Clapp and he wants the situation remedied. We should awaken the better angels of our nature and subdue the political and business interests that ensure the perpetuation of a greed-and-profit-motive led world. Then a set of decent, clean, practical and fair solutions should be put in place. Kerala, which is making progress towards setting up workable, decentralised and community driven systems aimed at achieving zero waste, and the rest of India, can take this as a warning and an encouragement. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey told us this story in 2018, from an India-centric point, when they collaborated to produce Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India. Clapp updates us with a far more frightening picture with the focus on the Global South. He offers us some cheer with tantalising glimpses of how this situation can be flipped. The knowhow and the money are available. What is missing are governments pushing the right policies and technologies and civic minded citizens rooting for change. If you were not a post-colonialist, this book will turn you into one. P. Vijaya Kumar, a retired college teacher of English, is based in Thiruvananthapuram.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Yahoo
How Poorer Countries Became the World's Dumping Grounds
Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it. Although she'll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years. For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—'a messy reality,' the reporters wrote, 'that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.' The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet's poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world. This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It's also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world. The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions. [Read: What America owes the planet] Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called 'anti-wealth.' In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot. Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste? 'America's newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,' Clapp writes. 'It didn't extend to other countries.' As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and '80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: 'poison or poverty.' By the end of the '80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South. This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society's margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land. By the late '80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It's a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one. The global redistribution of 'anti-wealth' did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it 'exploded' in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn't waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as 'recovered byproducts.' Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained. To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren't all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum 'clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt'—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls 'a story of foreign domination by other means.' More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world. Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting 'recycling.' It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it's hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate. [Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics] In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country's growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe's plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country's southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic. The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth. In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world's plastic waste. 'There was an opportunity here,' Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: 'redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.' In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold. The international waste trade is a 'crime,' Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing 'certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.' Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience. Article originally published at The Atlantic
