WASTE WARS

Uncovering a dirty business.

In the 1970s, a self-appointed “garbologist” went through the trash of famous folks like Bob Dylan and published lists of what he found, hoping to reveal dark secrets. In Charles Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend, a character known as the Golden Dustman amasses a fortune from rubbish—or “dust” as the Victorians called it. Clapp, a journalist based in Greece, is a literal and figurative muckraker, exploring a slew of astonishing trash-related topics. In one chapter, he focuses on the island of Chios, observing that local residents rank among the world’s “most unethical ship dismantlers.” Clapp unearths trash and waste in Turkey, Ghana, Java, and Guatemala, which, he writes, “boast[s] a bleak history as the serial target of toxic waste dumping by US cities and corporations.” Not surprisingly, the United States exports much of the world’s trash. “By the early 2000s,” Clapp writes, “America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away.” The European Union doesn’t come off looking too clean, either. “At least as much plastic was getting jettisoned out of the European Union, from self-congratulating environmental stewards like Germany, whose state recycling quotas were often reliant on a filthy secret: much of the plastic that Germans claimed was getting ‘recycled’ was in fact getting shipped to the far side of the world, where its true fate was far from clear.” Clapp is loath to end on a hopeful note, but he tells of Izzettin Akman, a farmer in Turkey whose oranges and lemons are threatened by tons of trash that is dumped—and set on fire—near his crops. Akman takes to pursuing the garbage trucks in his pickup—“a lonesome sheriff against a system of globe-spanning waste mismanagement,” Clapp writes. “I’ll keep following the trucks until they stop coming,” Akman says. “Or until the world stops sending them.”

A fascinating and darkly revealing dive into the world’s garbage.