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• Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash Little, Brown and Company (New York, NY), 2025

1. Waste wars : the wild afterlife of your trash LCCN 2024941719 Type of material Book Personal name Clapp, Alexander author Main title Waste wars : the wild afterlife of your trash / Alexander Clapp. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2025. Description viii, 390 pages maps 24 cm Physical format maps ISBN 9780316459020 hardcover epub CALL NUMBER HD9975.A2 C53 2025 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Pulitzer Center website - https://pulitzercenter.org/people/alexander-clapp

  Alexander Clapp
  GRANTEE

  Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. He has written about the Balkans and Eastern Europe for, among other publications, The London Review of Books, The New Left Review, and The American Interest.

  His book Waste Wars will be published in 2025.

• Berggruen Institute website - https://berggruen.org/people/alexander-clapp

  Journalist, 2022-2023 Berggruen Fellow
  Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. He writes about the Balkans for publications such as the London Review of Books, The Economist and New Left Review. He is a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award and a Robert B. Silvers Foundation Grantee. His 2020 article on Europe’s largest heroin bust for The New Republic was awarded a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Prize and is currently being turned into a documentary by the BBC.

  At the Berggruen Institute, Clapp plans to research the international garbage trade for a book he is writing for Little, Brown. The book explains how the global waste trade began, how it destroys the earth, and details the geopolitical rivalries it has brewed between states of the North and South.

• audible - https://www.audible.com/blog/interview-alexander-clapp-waste-wars

  Talking trash with Alexander Clapp
  The author of "Waste Wars" wastes no time when it comes to exposing the dirty little secrets of the international trash trade, finding hope beneath it all.

  Haley Hill
  February 19, 2025
  Talking trash with Alexander Clapp
  Have you ever wondered where the garbage you discard really goes at the end of the day? Then hitch a ride with Alexander Clapp as he explores the strangely mobile afterlife of trash in Waste Wars. Here, the American journalist takes a second look at the fuming truths he uncovered while pursuing rancid bits of rubbish on their way from community waste bins to towering dump heaps in Turkey, Guatemala, Ghana, and beyond—offering insights into how we can clean up our act by ultimately reimagining our relationship with recyclables.

  Haley Hill: Was there a turning point in your own relationship to trash that inspired you to write this audiobook?

  Alexander Clapp: It must have been six years ago. I was on a bus, traveling through Romania, when I looked out the window and saw fields piled to the knee with plastic waste. I later learned that much of it had been hustled in from Germany and France, and that its fate was to be torched in cement factories, or to rot for the rest of time in the Romanian countryside.

  I couldn't make sense of it. Romania, a poor country, boasted Europe's most dysfunctional waste management system. And yet here it was on the receiving end of vast quantities of trash from the other half of the continent, from the rich countries that liked to brag about their environmental records. How was this happening?

  The more I dug into the problem, the more sinister and hypocritical was the picture that emerged. This wasn't just a European phenomenon. It was a colossal, global one. For 40 years now, the stuff discarded by citizens of one half of the planet—and by Americans more than anyone—has come with a filthy little secret: Its fate is often to end up thousands of miles away, in those countries that can least afford to take it.

  What do you wish more Americans knew about the trash trade?

  If something seems too good to be true, that's because it probably is. Our garbage doesn't magically vanish or seamlessly slip back into production streams. Someone pays the price for our lives of extraordinary convenience. And here's the thing about the waste trade. It's not the trash that heads to a local landfill that travels across the planet and often inflicts great harm on unsuspecting populations and environments. No. It's typically the stuff we put in the recycling bin that we believe is helping the planet. This is the stuff that gets shipped away. The ability of many of these materials—plastic, Styrofoam, Tetra Pak—to be functionally recycled is dubious at best. What is irrefutable is that, upon arrival in developing countries, these materials leave behind noxious masses of toxins and contaminants and air pollution and microsynthetics, the aggregate effects of which we are only just now beginning to understand.

  What, if anything, did you learn in your research for this title that made you feel hopeful?

  It doesn't have to be this way. The trash trade may now be a trillion dollar business, but it's also a relatively recent phenomenon, which began only in the closing years of the Cold War. There was a time, not so very long ago, when we didn't do this: externalize our consumption footprints while holding distant countries responsible for processing our waste. There was a time not so long ago when we didn't package everything in plastic! The more we understand the origins and dimensions of the problem—that the narrative we've been told about a lot of recycling often isn't true—the more we might begin to redress the situation.

  What advice do you have for listeners who are looking to be more mindful about their waste?

  Avoid plastic at all costs while keeping in mind that our plastic epidemic will not be solved through individual morality alone. We must offload our plastic waste onto the southern half of the planet not merely because we consume far too much of it, but because plastic is much too easy and profitable to manufacture in the first place. This is a problem that must be solved at its source: drastically curbing plastic production itself through globe-spanning legislation.

Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

Alexander Clapp. Little, Brown, $30 (400p)

ISBN 978-0-316-45902-0

Journalist Clapp debuts with a rollicking deep dive into the absurdities and intricacies of the global trash trade. In the 1970s, Western countries began exporting their toxic waste to developing nations; Clapp chronicles how, despite these nations having since banded together to end the toxic waste trade, it has continued to flourish under the guise of recycling. In Ghana, Clapp visits Agbogbloshie, a town where discarded electronics "donated" by Westerners are stripped for parts in hazardous and back-breaking work (which is actually for the Westerners' benefit--it prevents scammers from accessing their information). In Turkey, Clapp meets with the family of a young man who perished in the shipbreaking trade, which strips old cruise ships for parts (the steel contributes to Turkey's construction trade, a key source of power for President Erdogan's rule). In Indonesia, Clapp discusses how the country's robust paper recycling program was forced by a complex series of machinations to take on U.S. plastic waste, and profiles farmers who've turned to trading plastic, which is burned as fuel. Clapp can veer into a provocatively melodramatic tone ("I had flown to Indonesia to witness the lunatic phenomenon of 'trash towns'"), but he also plainly states the cruel ironies facing his interviewees (one Agbogbloshie worker engaged in the dangerous trade of burning e-waste tells Clapp, "I pray to God every day to stop the burning. But for now I need it"). It's a stirring and dogged investigation. (Feb.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 6 Jan. 2025, p. 63. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300406/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8dfdfc18. Accessed 29 June 2025.

Waste Wars. By Alexander Clapp. Little, Brown; 400 pages; $32. John Murray; £25

What happens to that single-use plastic bottle after you, a conscientious citizen, place it in a recycling bin? Most people, if they think about it at all, assume it really will be recycled , probably at a facility not far away. Much more likely is that the bin is only the departure point on a long journey to the other side of the world, where that bottle will, at best, be washed, dried, sorted by material, turned into pellets and then reconstituted into something flimsier, such as packaging.

Consider that a victory. If it is packaging itself that has been chucked, it will probably end up as a filthy form of fuel, powering the production of cement or even tofu . Or it may go all the way just to sit in Asia or Africa, blighting the landscape, clogging rivers, entering the ocean, being swallowed by marine life—and perhaps finding its way, via the global fish trade, back into your home and even into your body . It is recycling, but not as people traditionally think of it.

The broad facts of the fiction of recycling are no secret. But Alexander Clapp, a journalist (who has contributed to 1843 , The Economist's sister publication), does something engrossing, if not entirely appealing, in his book. He follows rubbish, travelling to some of the world's most unpleasant places to chronicle the effects of consumption: villages in Indonesia buried under mountains of Western plastic, a ship-breaking yard in Turkey where men tear apart the toxic hulls of American cruise ships with hand tools, a fetid slum in Ghana where migrants extract valuable metals from the rich world's discarded computers and mobile phones.

"Waste Wars" also contains jaw-dropping but forgotten stories, such as that of the Khian Sea, a vessel carrying a season's worth of ash from garbage incinerators in Philadelphia, which set sail for the Bahamas in 1986. The ship and its toxic cargo were denied entry, forcing the crew to look for alternative dumping sites. After 27 months of being turned away from every conceivable port, it arrived in Asia with an empty hold. The captain admitted years later to dumping the ash in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Mr Clapp's aim is not just to display his ample reporting chops, but to trace the rise of a controversial form of globalisation: the growth of the global trade in waste. As Western countries put in place stricter environmental regulation, the job of disposing of their waste fell to poorer ones. Take the ostensibly green European Union : in 2021 it produced 16m tonnes of plastic waste, less than half of which was recycled within its borders.

Some exports are well-meaning and welcomed. Used electronics arrived in Ghana as donations to bring people online. China imported plastic waste to use as feedstock. Turkey turned imported scrap metal into highways and skyscrapers. Some of the steel from New York's twin towers, shipped to India as scrap metal, now holds up several buildings, including a college and textile showroom. But too many transactions are exploitative and even dishonest. Shipments of supposedly recyclable paper have turned out to be full of dirty plastic. Diapers soiled by American infants have arrived in batches of supposedly recyclable plastics to stink up the outskirts of Beijing.

The Basel Convention, which came into effect in 1992, dealt with the shipment of hazardous waste but left plenty of loopholes. Poor countries have been trying to stop the flood ever since. In 2017 China, which then received half the world's plastic waste bound for recycling, banned its import. Much of that waste travelled to South-East Asia instead. Similar bans in Thailand and Indonesia went into effect this year, fuelled by environmental concerns. If they are enforced, the garbage will find its way somewhere else, such as Malaysia, another big recipient of plastic.

Trash talk

What is to be done? In a world where humans produce their own weight in new plastic annually, there are no easy solutions. After hundreds of pages describing the problem, Mr Clapp is light on prescriptions. He suggests making rich-world companies financially liable for "the fate of that which they insist on overproducing". He points the finger of blame at globalisation, weak international co-operation and Western overproduction.

There are problems with this. The first is that tightening regulation in the West will only make countries more likely to find workarounds involving poor ones . Global action is also probably a non-starter at a time when long-standing alliances are being tested. As America withdraws from the Paris Agreement (again) and guts the Environmental Protection Agency, the idea that it would impose measures to prevent the export of waste or require firms to do more for the environment globally is unrealistic. Meanwhile, Mr Clapp barely mentions China's role as a manufacturing power, as though importing Western waste absolves it of its own sins of overproducing cheap goods. To portray China as a faultless victim is wrong.

At times Mr Clapp's rhetoric sounds suspiciously like a call for de-growth. It is all very well to tell Americans to be less wasteful. But try telling that to the hundreds of millions of Asians emerging from poverty and buying consumer goods for the first time. The West has spent centuries lecturing the East on what is good for it. "Don't be like us," however well-intentioned, rings the same discordant note.

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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"What really happens to everything you recycle." The Economist, 20 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A831940041/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9e5105ee. Accessed 29 June 2025.

Clapp, Alexander WASTE WARS Little, Brown (NonFiction None) $32.00 2, 25 ISBN: 9780316459020

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' novelOur 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.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Clapp, Alexander: WASTE WARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A825128371/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4948bc57. Accessed 29 June 2025.

Waste Wars: Thewnd Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp, Little, Brown and Company, 2025; 400 pages; $32.00

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of globalization, where an assembly plant shipping to the world from Texas relies on materials mined and components made in dozens of countries thousands of miles away. In terms of quantity alone, this commercial strategy has been enormously successful: Alexander Clapp, an investigative journalist based in Greece, reckons that the stuff we manufacture each week--from gum wrappers to Styrofoam cups to aircraft carriers--weighs as much in total as the entire human population. Yet only one percent of that stuff, it is estimated, is in use six months after it is purchased. What happens to the rest of it?

Waste disposal, as Clapp describes it in this powerfully written book, is also a globalized enterprise. A plastic water bottle discarded in a recycling bin in Seattle may wind up in a landfill in Malaysia or an incinerator in Turkey. Because of the high costs of labor and land, and because landfills and incinerators are highly regulated in developed countries, it is often cheaper to ship waste halfway around the world to a poor country than to bury it near where it is produced or consumed. In an ironic reversal, former colonies of the "Global South" whose resources historically flowed out to the industrial North are now importing the discarded products of that exploitive commerce.

Clapp's book is filled with statistics on the monumental scale of the waste disposal problem: 50 million metric tons of discarded electronics annually "the equivalent of 125,000 jumbo jets;" "half of the plastic deposited into recycling bins across the world went to China" until 2018, when it banned the importation of trash; Turkey, the world's largest importer of scrap iron, imported 25 million tons of waste metal "in 2021 alone." But the most revealing passages in the book are those that illuminate the human costs of the waste trade--its effects on individuals and communities that are exposed to life-shortening toxins while making it possible for the dark side of our consumer economy to remain largely out of sight to the rest of the world.

Clapp's investigation takes him to the slums of Accra, Ghana, where legions of young men dismantle obsolete computers, discarded cell phones, and other electrical appliances to salvage the copper and scarce metals for resale back to manufacturers. He visits ship-breaking yards on the Aegean coast of Turkey, manned by poorly-paid workers from the hinterlands who risk their lives cutting apart decommissioned cruise ships the size of city blocks. And in Indonesia, he interviews residents of remote villages whose primary income is derived by reselling unusable plastic packaging materials, shipped from Europe and North America, as fuel for local factories.

The globalization of waste that we see here not only raises questions of economic justice, hut is also distressingly counterproductive, particularly in the case of the single-use plastics--grocery packaging and fast-food containers--that are "nothing less than garbage on purchase." Unlike copper, steel, and other metals, they resist easy recycling, ending up polluting the air and seas of distant nations. "As long as plastic keeps getting physically diverted by those who consume it the most," laments Clapp, "the farther from public concern--and political action--it is likely to remain."

Laurence A. Marschall is professor of physics emeritus at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
http://naturalhistorymag.com/
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Marschall, Laurence A. "Waste Wars: Thewnd Afterlife of Your Trash." Natural History, vol. 133, no. 4, Apr. 2025, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A838619313/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b2ed5539. Accessed 29 June 2025.

In ''Waste Wars,'' Alexander Clapp shows us in depressing detail just what our Big Junk industry is doing to the rest of the world.

WASTE WARS: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, by Alexander Clapp

Here's a way to while away a Sunday: Open up ''Waste Wars'' -- the journalist Alexander Clapp's inquisitorial takedown of the global garbage industry -- to any page, and read aloud a line or two chosen at random. Like the sortes Virgilianae of the Romans, it's a kind of divination game -- only here, it's all already come true, and the objective is to see how many rounds you can stand before succumbing to the all-pervading horror.

From the introduction: ''You are currently living in a world in which the human ability to create garbage'' has ''surpassed Earth's ability to generate life.''

Describing conditions in a trash village in Ghana: ''Indeed, parts of the Korle Lagoon landscape have been burning longer than many of Agbogbloshie's residents have been alive.''

Quoting an Interpol official: ''You have groups getting out of the drug and weapons trade and entering the waste one. The risk is so much lower, the reward so much bigger.''

According to Clapp, global trade and global finance -- even much of the emerging ''green'' economy of the global North -- are floating on an awesome sea of castoff dreck.

Dispiriting premise notwithstanding, ''Waste Wars'' does manage to live up to the adventurous ring of its subtitle; trash's afterlife is wild indeed. Readers follow the author on a whirlwind tour to discover what, exactly, happens to the things we chuck in the bin, haul to the dump or sell to the scrapyard. The answer: nothing good.

''Much of what you have been led to believe was getting 'recycled' over the last generation has never been helping the planet,'' Clapp writes; instead, it has simply been shipped to remote corners of the developing world, there to be chemically converted, releasing toxic byproducts, or to languish while slowly poisoning whatever rivers, forests, farms and people happen to be in the way.

From Central America to West Africa, Greece to Indonesia, Clapp serves up a stirring picture of the deliberate and surprisingly profitable despoliation of one half of the planet by the other.

Some of this is not, in a sense, news. That much of what passes for responsible waste disposal constitutes ''a morality performance,'' in Clapp's words, is something of which many of us have been dimly aware, even as we dutifully file our spent water bottles into the proper receptacle.

What does come as a revelation is just how much money is to be made off trash, who makes it and the sheer variety of their means. In Kosovo, scrap metal ''is the economy,'' Clapp writes, the country cannibalizing its own industrial infrastructure to the tune of $40 million per annum; in China, government proxies pay ''plastic traders to take weeklong tours of Southeast Asian nations to scout out potential warehouses to shred and melt old Western plastic.''

Clapp traces the links in an international daisy chain of pliant governments, dubious corporate interests and deluded consumers, all the while keeping in view the very real human stakes: In Turkey, for example, the author meets the family of 30-year-old Oguz Taskin, who burned to death while dismantling an American cruise ship in a gray-market shipyard.

Equally astonishing, if no less depressing, is just how long this whole sordid business has been going on, and how long some people have been trying to stop it. In its closing pages, ''Waste Wars'' quotes a former Kenyan president: ''We do not want external domination to come in through the back door in the form of 'garbage imperialism.''' That was in 1988; by then, refuse had already begun accumulating en masse, a crisis that eventually led the country to pass sub-Saharan Africa's strongest ban on single-use plastic bags.

As an instance of organized, rational resistance to Big Junk, Kenya is not alone, and Clapp documents other noble efforts mounted by local actors the world over. Such attempts, however, face long odds -- as they do in Kenya, where the bag ban has been under assault from (of course) plastic manufacturers, who promise enhanced recycling facilities in exchange for the law's repeal.

Such is the way of all garbage. Insofar as ''Waste Wars'' advances an overall resolution to its eponymous conflict, it is the effective dismantlement of what has been called the ''throwaway society'' born of midcentury America, exported abroad as part of a geopolitical strategy, and by now hard-wired into the hearts and minds of billions.

Uprooting this ideology seems rather a distant prospect -- at least on these shores, where plastic straws, as we have lately been told, are not only functionally superior to their biodegradable counterparts, but must be understood as essential props to patriotism.

There are moments, in Clapp's book, of great sweep and humanity, and even a few of surprising levity. But these must be looked for, bobbing forlorn amid the computer parts and zip-lock bags stretching clear to the horizon. His is not a fun game, nor is it meant to be.

WASTE WARS: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash | By Alexander Clapp | Little, Brown | 390 pp. | $32

Ian Volner writes about architecture, design and urbanism. His most recent book is ''Jorge Pardo: Public Projects and Commissions.''

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: Trash pickers search through a landfill in Bantar Gebang, Indonesia. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) This article appeared in print on page BR12.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Volner, Ian. "Dirty Little Secret." The New York Times Book Review, 20 Apr. 2025, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836223771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=25392340. Accessed 29 June 2025.

"Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 6 Jan. 2025, p. 63. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300406/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8dfdfc18. Accessed 29 June 2025. "What really happens to everything you recycle." The Economist, 20 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A831940041/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9e5105ee. Accessed 29 June 2025. "Clapp, Alexander: WASTE WARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A825128371/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4948bc57. Accessed 29 June 2025. Marschall, Laurence A. "Waste Wars: Thewnd Afterlife of Your Trash." Natural History, vol. 133, no. 4, Apr. 2025, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A838619313/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b2ed5539. Accessed 29 June 2025. Volner, Ian. "Dirty Little Secret." The New York Times Book Review, 20 Apr. 2025, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836223771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=25392340. Accessed 29 June 2025.

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