About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherLittle Brown & Company

ISBN-10031645902X

ISBN-139780316459020

eBay Product ID (ePID)28068283513

Product Key Features

Book TitleWaste Wars : the Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

Number of Pages400 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2025

TopicEnvironmental / Waste Management, Environmental Science (See Also Chemistry / Environmental), Globalization

GenrePolitical Science, Technology & Engineering, Science

AuthorAlexander Clapp

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.3 in

Item Weight21.2 Oz

Item Length9.7 in

Item Width6.4 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

Reviews"Since its inception centuries ago, the global economy has consisted of complex commodity chains: extracting, transporting, manufacturing, distributing, profiting. Only very recently in historical times have we added the 'downstream' chains, dumping the resultant consumer waste -- somewhere, somehow. In rich countries, we pay high municipal fees for the removal of our refuse. We may even feel good about sorting to recycle it. Does this do any good? If the news is really so bad, better that someone as sober and courageous as Alexander Clapp delivers it to us."-- Georgi Derluguian, author of Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus, "Citing astounding statistics on the growth of waste and weaving in wrenching stories of people whose lives have been upended by garbage from far away, Clapp shines a spotlight on a subject that needs to be addressed."-- Booklist, "Clapp's important and courageous book explores the environmental damage unleashed by the west's offloading of its trash." -- Financial Times, "Waste Wars is the Star Wars of trash, a witty and brave account of Alexander Clapp's journey into the underbelly of modern life. You'll meet garbage-spotting drones, journalists who register pet fish as waste brokers, and go on a hunt for the El Dorado of poison. As Clapp explains, we live in a world where our ability to create garbage has surpassed Earth's ability to generate life. The consequences are terrifying, but Clapp's great book somehow leaves you awe-inspired by the sheer outrageousness of the human ingenuity that has created this toxic mess." -- Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First, "Out of sight, out of mind. Waste Wars, however, puts the picture very much into your mind, and it's hard to imagine any reasonably affluent Western reader--and compared with the people in the places where the rubbish ends up, every Western reader is 'affluent'--reading this book and not having their conceptions of the world fundamentally changed."-- The Daily Telegraph, " Waste Wars is perhaps the most comprehensive indictment of consumer capitalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring . Fearless as he travels to some of the least appealing places on earth, Alexander Clapp lifts the heavy stones of green washing to reveal the literal and moral filth that Western societies have been dumping on their poorer cousins in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for decades. Always engagingly written with jaw-dropping anthropological detail, Clapp introduces us to courageous tragic characters compelled to clean up the mess of Western material avarice from the bizarre electronic slums of Ghana to the deathyards breaking up ships in Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. If you wish to know how the world really works, read this book."-- Misha Glenny, author of McMafia, "Alexander Clapp traveled across continents, jungles and trash heaps to bring to life the real, multi-billion-dollar story of what happens to our garbage. Clapp presents a frank, and frankly gross, examination of who is making money off what we throw away... this 400-page microhistory will be fun, funky and, of course, leave no dumpster undived."-- Scientific American, 10 Most Anticipated Microhistories for 2025, "Waste Wars is the Star Wars of trash, a witty and brave account of Alexander Clapp's journey into the underbelly of modern life. You'll meet garbage-spotting drones, journalists who register pet fish as waste brokers, and go on a hunt for the El Dorado of poison. As Clapp explains, we live in a world where our ability to create garbage has surpassed Earth's ability to generate life. The consequences are terrifying, but Clapp's great book somehow leaves you awe-inspired by the sheer outrageousness of the human ingenuity that has created this toxic mess."-- Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First, "Journalist Clapp debuts with a rollicking deep dive into the absurdities and intricacies of the global trash trade... 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... It's a stirring and dogged investigation."-- Publishers Weekly, "Clapp is a lively writer, and his deeply researched book deftly combines history and global economics with stories of real people and tangible details of modern life. You will never look at plastic bags the same way."-- The Washington Post, "Clapp's concern is less about the global effect, though he acknowledges the widespread pollution and effects on climate change, than the inequalities of distribution of the rubbish itself. In a sense it's a kind of critique of capitalist consumption and its economic disparities made by looking not at the buying power but throwing away power of the wealthy. It's a book about how the global north dumps on the global south."-- The Guardian, " Waste Wars is an infuriating, eye-opening and spell-binding account of the globally uneven and unjust politics of trash. Clapp shows how the rubbish the affluent people of rich countries produce travels to poorer countries for processing, creating mountains of toxic waste in the global South, or whirlpools of plastic in our oceans. A must-read for those concerned with the health and hygiene not only of the planet, but also of the people who populate it!"-- Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade, "Superb reporting that definitively answers the question we really never ask: where on earth does all that stuff go when we're done with it? This majestic account will transform the way you look at trash--and hopefully it will spur some real change at the highest levels."-- Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

SynopsisA 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?