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A review by lkedzie
Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp
3.0
New Cosmos has an animated cold open on its Clair Patterson episode "A Grave Threat." It is an effective cold open. The visuals are great with the magenta Blob-like goo. The sense is one of madness, not science. This scene is out of someone experiencing a paranoid delusion as he sees the secret poison that covers the world...but he is right.
Anyway, If you are looking to have that experience, this is the book for you!
Waste Wars is about how garbage becomes nothing. Spoilers: it doesn't. Instead, the reader is introduced to different global sites that have become the receptacles of the world's garbage. Some are illicit, cases of literal toxic waste sites discovered without a clear chain of custody. Most are permitted, representing a trade in refuse with the flow going from wealthier nations to poorer ones, usually in ways that represent a sort of de facto colonialism. Many are praised: the book is about why that is wrong.
The major stops are Guatemala, Ghana, Turkey, and Indonesia. The industries here (possibly excluding the first) amount to greenwashing. The premise is that this trash is going to locations that can reclaim value from it in an environmentally sound manner where benefit inures as much to the nations getting the trash, in terms of a forward-thinking industry that skips over that dirty period of growth. Meanwhile the nations that get rid of the junk that is not economically viable for them to process. The catch-22 there being that the reason they are not economically viable is due to their own environmental regulations, whereas the other nations have no such protections.
It is not colonialism, but if you hum a few bars it will play along, specifically in the way that it reduplicates the resource extraction mode of colonialism, with one nation extracting material wealth from another, building infrastructure alleged to benefit the other nation (but that really only helps with the wealth extraction), but in a Bizzaroland format where it is the export of material detriment and the negative environmental externalities. And not even that sometimes, in that the primary market for what of value can be extracted from the trash is the exporters, in their constant need for more raw material to turn into junk after a brief phase of use.
The book is at its best when the text takes on a Wolfeian flair. The author visits these sites and asks questions, including some cool but admittedly unproductive shoeleather investigation and with plenty of focus on the affected parties. The Ghana section is the best in that the author view expands to cover the complexity of the multi-party business with a multi-layered geography. I had a passing knowledge of some of the areas here, specifically shipbreaking, but this is a good look, containing both a focused look through individuals and a global, macroeconomic picture of what is going on and why it matters. It is powerful stuff.
The book's structure is awful. Its chapters are tiny. I think that the goal is short attention span spackle, but instead it makes the book feel like a much longer read than it is. The tone is harsh and condemning. I generally feel that this is warranted, given the subject matter, but in congress with the chapter style it gets A Bit Much - you made this conclusion in the last chapter three pages ago; I feel more distracted than persuaded seeing it repeated. I am also just enough of a Libertarian to struggle with parts of the premise, even with being enough of a historian not to.
The most difficult chapter is the one on plastic. The author's unstated contention is that some day we will look on plastic like DDT or leaded gas. Plastic's recyclability is as much a myth as a safe cigarette, and with about as much industry meddling. It, or so the book contends, it is functionally not disposable, becoming a permanent pollutant with no known true removal.
There is no call to action here. The introduction suggests that the author has stopped using single-use plastics. But myself, even if I wanted to, I am not sure that I could, looking at the role that some play in my life. There is a whole infrastructure that is not there to support such a change, at least for me and my needs. There is also no reason to single out single-use plastics when the problem is plastic in general. There is some moments of anti-consumption talk in the book, but it falls into the cliche of anti-technological thought in general. Yes, people do wasteful things with their smartphones, but what is the acceptable ratio of frivolity to seriousness? Is it like Blackstone's formulation where one suicide prevention is worth 10 people radicalized? And (here comes that irritating Libertarian again) can you trust giving someone the power to try and mitigate that?
So yes, if you are like me, you will be reading these words on an e-reader made of plastic, drinking a liquid from a plastic container, eating a breakfast that you cooked yourself, but that every component thereof was contained in plastic in some way and that used plastic cookware, seeing through glasses with plastic lenses in a plastic frame and think 'well, ****.' To some extent, that applies to all the book's arguments. I would like to believe that there is some way to factor in the price of cleanup to different goods, but short of rolling back other environmental legislation (hey, for a Decision '24 bonus round, that might happen!) it would take a reduction in standard of living that goes past a sort of idealized social leveling and into real harm for some people.
Still a recommend for its solid journalism with bite, but know that you're going into World Made by Hand or Parable of the Sower here.
My thanks to the author, Alexander Clapp, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, for making the ARC available to me.
Anyway, If you are looking to have that experience, this is the book for you!
Waste Wars is about how garbage becomes nothing. Spoilers: it doesn't. Instead, the reader is introduced to different global sites that have become the receptacles of the world's garbage. Some are illicit, cases of literal toxic waste sites discovered without a clear chain of custody. Most are permitted, representing a trade in refuse with the flow going from wealthier nations to poorer ones, usually in ways that represent a sort of de facto colonialism. Many are praised: the book is about why that is wrong.
The major stops are Guatemala, Ghana, Turkey, and Indonesia. The industries here (possibly excluding the first) amount to greenwashing. The premise is that this trash is going to locations that can reclaim value from it in an environmentally sound manner where benefit inures as much to the nations getting the trash, in terms of a forward-thinking industry that skips over that dirty period of growth. Meanwhile the nations that get rid of the junk that is not economically viable for them to process. The catch-22 there being that the reason they are not economically viable is due to their own environmental regulations, whereas the other nations have no such protections.
It is not colonialism, but if you hum a few bars it will play along, specifically in the way that it reduplicates the resource extraction mode of colonialism, with one nation extracting material wealth from another, building infrastructure alleged to benefit the other nation (but that really only helps with the wealth extraction), but in a Bizzaroland format where it is the export of material detriment and the negative environmental externalities. And not even that sometimes, in that the primary market for what of value can be extracted from the trash is the exporters, in their constant need for more raw material to turn into junk after a brief phase of use.
The book is at its best when the text takes on a Wolfeian flair. The author visits these sites and asks questions, including some cool but admittedly unproductive shoeleather investigation and with plenty of focus on the affected parties. The Ghana section is the best in that the author view expands to cover the complexity of the multi-party business with a multi-layered geography. I had a passing knowledge of some of the areas here, specifically shipbreaking, but this is a good look, containing both a focused look through individuals and a global, macroeconomic picture of what is going on and why it matters. It is powerful stuff.
The book's structure is awful. Its chapters are tiny. I think that the goal is short attention span spackle, but instead it makes the book feel like a much longer read than it is. The tone is harsh and condemning. I generally feel that this is warranted, given the subject matter, but in congress with the chapter style it gets A Bit Much - you made this conclusion in the last chapter three pages ago; I feel more distracted than persuaded seeing it repeated. I am also just enough of a Libertarian to struggle with parts of the premise, even with being enough of a historian not to.
The most difficult chapter is the one on plastic. The author's unstated contention is that some day we will look on plastic like DDT or leaded gas. Plastic's recyclability is as much a myth as a safe cigarette, and with about as much industry meddling. It, or so the book contends, it is functionally not disposable, becoming a permanent pollutant with no known true removal.
There is no call to action here. The introduction suggests that the author has stopped using single-use plastics. But myself, even if I wanted to, I am not sure that I could, looking at the role that some play in my life. There is a whole infrastructure that is not there to support such a change, at least for me and my needs. There is also no reason to single out single-use plastics when the problem is plastic in general. There is some moments of anti-consumption talk in the book, but it falls into the cliche of anti-technological thought in general. Yes, people do wasteful things with their smartphones, but what is the acceptable ratio of frivolity to seriousness? Is it like Blackstone's formulation where one suicide prevention is worth 10 people radicalized? And (here comes that irritating Libertarian again) can you trust giving someone the power to try and mitigate that?
So yes, if you are like me, you will be reading these words on an e-reader made of plastic, drinking a liquid from a plastic container, eating a breakfast that you cooked yourself, but that every component thereof was contained in plastic in some way and that used plastic cookware, seeing through glasses with plastic lenses in a plastic frame and think 'well, ****.' To some extent, that applies to all the book's arguments. I would like to believe that there is some way to factor in the price of cleanup to different goods, but short of rolling back other environmental legislation (hey, for a Decision '24 bonus round, that might happen!) it would take a reduction in standard of living that goes past a sort of idealized social leveling and into real harm for some people.
Still a recommend for its solid journalism with bite, but know that you're going into World Made by Hand or Parable of the Sower here.
My thanks to the author, Alexander Clapp, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, for making the ARC available to me.