Did you know that during the Cold War, 10% of East Germany’s GDP came from taking waste from West Germany? People couldn’t move across that border, but rubbish could – and it moved from the richer territory to the poorer one.
That’s a pattern that repeats itself again and again in Alexander Clapp’s eye-opening expose of the global waste industry. Trash from the EU is shipped across the world to be burned in East Asia. Obsolete electronics burn in Ghana, after they’ve been stripped for salvageable parts. Sewage sludge, incinerator ash, medical waste, banned chemicals, it will all “take the path of least resistance” towards countries forced to choose between poverty or poison.
Consumerism already relies on underpaid extractors and sweatshop labour in developing countries. It has an even uglier shadow side, where those goods end up back in those same countries to be thrown away or burned. This ‘trash colonialism’ is barely regulated and scarcely understood – and the richest countries have a strong incentive not to look.
Waste Wars begins with a historic overview of how the waste trade went global. Everyone used to deal with their own garbage, a hundred years ago. Troublingly, it is often rising environmental standards that set trash off on international journeys. When Silent Spring was published in the US in the early 1960s, much tighter controls were brought in on certain chemicals. Enterprising businesses quickly bought up stockpiles of these chemicals and offloaded them for a profit to African nations. Scrubbers fitted to power stations collect toxic ash that has to be dumped somewhere. A US city benefitting from cleaner air will need a poorer neighbouring state to take that ash.
Some of this happens legally, much of it doesn’t. Sometimes dodgy deals are done with landowners and elites to accept waste, or desperate governments will negotiate exploitative waste-for-aid deals. At other times dumping happens fraudulently. Clapp tells stories of shipping documents falsified along the way: barrels of white power might be loaded onto ships as toxic waste, but unloaded as fertiliser. That kind of fraud means that toxics aren’t just dumped in a hole in a foreign land, but spread over farmers’ fields, destroying soil fertility for a generation.
The book is full of stories like this. In one case the president of Benin signed a deal to accept nuclear waste from France, which he planned to dump in the ancestral village of a political rival. This plan was leaked to the press in France and caused a scandal, but as Clapp writes, it’s the stories we don’t hear about that are most troubling.
The first part of the book tells the story of how the waste trade has grown in both size and scope. The story includes the thwarted attemps to regulate it with the Basel Convention (the US never signed it), and China famously closing its doors to overseas waste in 2017 as part of ‘Operation National Sword‘. The second half of the book spends time in some of the places where waste has settled since. The author visits Agbogbloshie in Ghana, global center of the e-waste trade. He gets to know workers and describes how certain tribes do specific jobs, from sorting and distributing waste, dismantling phones or washing machines, to stripping copper or burning the leftover cases and motherboards. There are also the ‘browser boys’ who specialise in extracting personal details from old tech and using it to scam people.
The tone of the book tilts from history towards anthropology here, with Clapp visiting homes and markets, watching people at work in the scrap workshops. At one point he accompanies a browser boy on a visit to a shaman to conduct a ritual that will help him with a successful scam. He is stringing along a guy called Todd in Pennsylvania.
We also visit villages in Indonesia where European recycling is burned to power food factories, and another long chapter of the book looks into ship-breaking in Turkey. It’s some of the most dangerous work in the world – four people died in two different incidents while taking apart the cruise ship the Carnival Inspiration. Clapp meets the family of one of these men, and from their story unpacks the reasons why ship-breaking came to Turkey, who controls it, and who makes money from it.
There are no solutions in Waste Wars. The book lifts the lid on the world’s rubbish and lets readers take a long hard look. But it’s not hard for readers to draw some conclusions – we’re better off not generating waste in the first place. We can’t recycle our way out of the plastics crisis. The world needs to deal with trash much more locally, pushing back on the old colonial assumption that somebody else will take it away. And perhaps the biggest message from Waste Wars – we need to be asking many more questions about where our rubbish goes.
- You can get Waste Wars from Earthbound Books
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