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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.
