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The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Book Reviewed by:An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy—and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away?
In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind. In India, he meets the waste-pickers on the front line of the plastic crisis. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. In Ghana, he follows the after-life of our technology and explores the global export network that results in goodwill donations clogging African landfills. From an incinerator to an Oklahoma ghost-town, Franklin-Wallis travels in search of the people and companies that really handle waste—and on the way, meets the innovators and campaigners pushing for a cleaner and less wasteful future.
With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we're all buried in trash.
Wasteland is an engaging read, and Franklin-Wallis writes in a personable style lightened by occasional touches of wit. But it's hard not to come away feeling deflated, despairing at the sheer scale of our wastefulness—and how deeply embedded it is in our way of life. As the book convincingly argues, waste isn't just a byproduct of our consumer economy. In a very real sense, waste is what keeps it running. Corporations' very business model depends on disposability, on consumers buying—and throwing out—more and more stuff. "The modern economy is built on trash," as Franklin-Wallis pithily observes...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
Let's say you have an empty shampoo bottle or yogurt container. Should it go in your recycling bin or the trash? Chances are you'll check for the familiar three-arrow recycling symbol before deciding. But as Oliver Franklin-Wallis explains in Wasteland, the symbol we've all come to equate with recyclability simply means that an item theoretically can be recycled, not that it will be recycled in practice.
Adding to the confusion in the United States is that there is no federal recycling system in place to set uniform standards nationwide. Instead, recycling facilities and the items they accept vary widely across the country. "Recycling decision-making is currently in the hands of 20,000 communities in the U.S., all of ...
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