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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.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Lee Zeldin should trash EPA's national recycling plan
Like other Cabinet members in the Trump administration, new Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin has hit the ground running, canceling ideology-driven contracts for diversity, equity and 'environmental justice.' But it's not just these progressive favorites through which the agency has strayed far from its mandate to clean the environment. One of its less controversial core goals — and one popular with municipalities and corporations across the country — is the vehicle for spreading environmental damage across the world. To reverse that trend, Zeldin should roll back an EPA edict aimed at every city and town in the country: the national recycling goal. Instead of putting plastic in those blue bins, we should establish systems to recover valuable 'e-waste,' the rare earth elements and metals found in cellphones and other electronics — in other words, the very same things the Trump administration is working to get from Ukraine. Per the EPA, the goal is to increase trash recycling to 50 percent of solid waste by 2030, with the aim of 'managing materials more sustainably.' Think here of the plastic, glass and paper piled in the ubiquitous blue bins found on curbsides. It sounds like an admirable goal — but what seems like an unobjectionable practice turns out to be both uneconomical and damaging. The picture of just how that works is painted brilliantly in Alexander Clapp's forthcoming new book, 'Waste Wars.' Based on astounding on-the-ground reporting across the globe, 'Waste Wars' shines a spotlight on how plastic travels from rich countries to poor, where it is not recycled but dumped or burned. Clapp lifts the veil on the 'wishcycling' ongoing across the U.S. 'The waste that travels across the globe and often inflicts irreversible environmental damage is not the trash that — to much chagrin — goes into the garbage bin and then into the local landfill. It's the stuff that you place in the recycling bin in the conviction that doing so is helping the planet.' That's because the installed capacity to recycle those plastic bottles and other containers is both limited and domestically unprofitable. There is no current realistic market for recycled plastic. It's simply far less expensive to make new plastic than to refine existing stock. 'Virgin plastics' are made from byproducts of oil and gas refining, which occurs anyway, and are of higher quality. Markets tend to reward products that are cheaper and better. Only 9 percent of U.S. plastic is nominally recycled at all. Internationally, where the rate is higher, this eco-friendly practice relies on the lowest paid workers to do the required cleaning and sorting. U.S. plastic, long shipped to China before it closed its doors in 2017, is likely to wind up in what Clapp describes as a shadowy, informal market of those paid to send 'recyclables' in shipping containers bound for countries such as Ghana. It's what increasingly passes for industry in poor nations. This is the environmentally damaging supply chain, which the EPA's national recycling goal is helping to stock, by pressuring local municipalities to divert plastic to those blue bins and not to send it to dumps or incinerators. As hard as it is to believe, absent a breakthrough in technology and markets, localities would be doing the environment a favor by sending plastic to sanitary landfills or burning it. As I have described in my report on trends in recycling for the American Enterprise Institute, a new generation of 'waste-to-energy' incinerators holds the promise of mining the ash produced for valuable rare earth elements found in electronics, which are not separated at curbside, despite their high value. A February 2020 analysis by Purdue University of the e-waste stream finds 56 elements in electronic devices are routinely sent to dumps. The current system which the EPA's broadbrush national goal encourages also does damage to local government finances. It is costly to run separate trucks to pick up what's in those blue bins — especially when the contents may well have to be sent to landfills anyway, for lack of an existing market. This is not to say that everything placed in the curbside bins is done so foolishly. Per the EPA, some 80 percent of paper and cardboard is actually recycled. This points toward how a pragmatic EPA can lead — encouraging municipalities to separate and sell those materials for which there is a market, while disposing of those for which there is not. Those who believe they are saving the earth by not sending plastic to the landfill are currently doing the opposite, as rogue shippers dump 'microplastics,' some of which wind up in the water, poison sea life and pollute beaches. Nor is shipping plastic to Third World landfills, far less likely to be safely managed, an act of environmentalism. Just as we should strive to reshore some manufacturing, so should we do so with the disposal of all those Coke and water bottles. Memo to Lee Zeldin: drop the misleading recycling goal. Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
01-03-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Lee Zeldin should trash EPA's national recycling plan
Like other Cabinet members in the Trump administration, new Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin has hit the ground running, canceling ideology-driven contracts for diversity, equity and 'environmental justice.' But it's not just these progressive favorites through which the agency has strayed far from its mandate to clean the environment. One of its less controversial core goals — and one popular with municipalities and corporations across the country — is the vehicle for spreading environmental damage across the world. To reverse that trend, Zeldin should roll back an EPA edict aimed at every city and town in the country: the national recycling goal. Instead of putting plastic in those blue bins, we should establish systems to recover valuable 'e-waste,' the rare earth elements and metals found in cellphones and other electronics — in other words, the very same things the Trump administration is working to get from Ukraine. Per the EPA, the goal is to increase trash recycling to 50 percent of solid waste by 2030, with the aim of 'managing materials more sustainably.' Think here of the plastic, glass and paper piled in the ubiquitous blue bins found on curbsides. It sounds like an admirable goal — but what seems like an unobjectionable practice turns out to be both uneconomical and damaging. The picture of just how that works is painted brilliantly in Alexander Clapp's forthcoming new book, ' Waste Wars.' Based on astounding on-the-ground reporting across the globe, 'Waste Wars' shines a spotlight on how plastic travels from rich countries to poor, where it is not recycled but dumped or burned. Clapp lifts the veil on the 'wishcycling' ongoing across the U.S. 'The waste that travels across the globe and often inflicts irreversible environmental damage is not the trash that — to much chagrin — goes into the garbage bin and then into the local landfill. It's the stuff that you place in the recycling bin in the conviction that doing so is helping the planet.' That's because the installed capacity to recycle those plastic bottles and other containers is both limited and domestically unprofitable. There is no current realistic market for recycled plastic. It's simply far less expensive to make new plastic than to refine existing stock. 'Virgin plastics' are made from byproducts of oil and gas refining, which occurs anyway, and are of higher quality. Markets tend to reward products that are cheaper and better. Only 9 percent of U.S. plastic is nominally recycled at all. Internationally, where the rate is higher, this eco-friendly practice relies on the lowest paid workers to do the required cleaning and sorting. U.S. plastic, long shipped to China before it closed its doors in 2017, is likely to wind up in what Clapp describes as a shadowy, informal market of those paid to send 'recyclables' in shipping containers bound for countries such as Ghana. It's what increasingly passes for industry in poor nations. This is the environmentally damaging supply chain, which the EPA's national recycling goal is helping to stock, by pressuring local municipalities to divert plastic to those blue bins and not to send it to dumps or incinerators. As hard as it is to believe, absent a breakthrough in technology and markets, localities would be doing the environment a favor by sending plastic to sanitary landfills or burning it. As I have described in my report on trends in recycling for the American Enterprise Institute, a new generation of 'waste-to-energy' incinerators holds the promise of mining the ash produced for valuable rare earth elements found in electronics, which are not separated at curbside, despite their high value. A February 2020 analysis by Purdue University of the e-waste stream finds 56 elements in electronic devices are routinely sent to dumps. The current system which the EPA's broadbrush national goal encourages also does damage to local government finances. It is costly to run separate trucks to pick up what's in those blue bins — especially when the contents may well have to be sent to landfills anyway, for lack of an existing market. This is not to say that everything placed in the curbside bins is done so foolishly. Per the EPA, some 80 percent of paper and cardboard is actually recycled. This points toward how a pragmatic EPA can lead — encouraging municipalities to separate and sell those materials for which there is a market, while disposing of those for which there is not. Those who believe they are saving the earth by not sending plastic to the landfill are currently doing the opposite, as rogue shippers dump 'microplastics,' some of which wind up in the water, poison sea life and pollute beaches. Nor is shipping plastic to Third World landfills, far less likely to be safely managed, an act of environmentalism. Just as we should strive to reshore some manufacturing, so should we do so with the disposal of all those Coke and water bottles. Memo to Lee Zeldin: drop the misleading recycling goal.
