Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, Waste Wars is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.

Around the world, landfills, ports, and slums are overflowing with trash. Disputes about what to do with the tons of garbage generated by humans every day have given rise to waste wars in just about every country on earth. Some are border skirmishes. Others are waged 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 from deep inside the world of Indonesian trash traders, Turkish steel resellers, environmental whisper networks in the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanian burner boys trading in old electronics and has emerged to tell readers what he does know: globalized garbage is a bizarre, illogical industry. While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides, burned for fuel, or buried underground, most of it actually lives a second life, getting bartered, sold, re-sold, smuggled, salvaged, or re-purposed from one rich country or warring family or giant corporation to another, with devastating consequences for millions of people. In other words, someone's afternoon snack in America will become an almost geological event in Indonesia.

Waste Wars unveils a stark reality: What does the global business of trash say about our world today? And what does it say about us?