Waste Wars
The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
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- R$ 84,90
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- R$ 84,90
Descrição da editora
2026 Nautilus Gold Award winner for Journalism & Investigative Reporting (Special Honor: Investigative Excellence)
A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.
Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.
Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell readers what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world.
Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage — the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away — has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Clapp debuts with a rollicking deep dive into the absurdities and intricacies of the global trash trade. In the 1970s, Western countries began exporting their toxic waste to developing nations; Clapp chronicles how, despite these nations having since banded together to end the toxic waste trade, it has continued to flourish under the guise of recycling. In Ghana, Clapp visits Agbogbloshie, a town where discarded electronics "donated" by Westerners are stripped for parts in hazardous and backbreaking work (which is actually for the Westerners' benefit—it prevents scammers from accessing their information). In Turkey, Clapp meets with the family of a young man who perished in the shipbreaking trade, which strips old cruise ships for parts (the steel contributes to Turkey's construction trade, a key source of power for President Erdoğan's rule). In Indonesia, Clapp discusses how the country's robust paper recycling program was forced by a complex series of machinations to take on U.S. plastic waste, and profiles farmers who've turned to trading plastic, which is burned as fuel. Clapp can veer into a provocatively melodramatic tone ("I had flown to Indonesia to witness the lunatic phenomenon of ‘trash towns' "), but he also plainly states the cruel ironies facing his interviewees (one Agbogbloshie worker engaged in the dangerous trade of burning e-waste tells Clapp, "I pray to God every day to stop the burning. But for now I need it"). It's a stirring and dogged investigation.
