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BOOK REVIEW

The real cost of  the world’s rubbish

A new book reveals the dirty truth about what we chuck in the bin, says Stuart Watkins. What is to be done?

 

Every day, we throw our rubbish away. But as Rachel Salvidge notes in the Literary Review, there is no such thing as “away”. Our rubbish is moved from one spot on Earth to another, where it is either buried or transformed, whether through burning or recycling. “One person’s ‘away’ is another’s ‘here’.” 

And where does it go? In his book Wasteland, Oliver Franklin-Wallis lets us in on “the dirty truth”. He “journeys to some of humanity’s least fragrant locations to literally wade among our rubbish, discovering how it got there and exploring its  effects on the lives of the people charged with  dealing with it”.

His book is “heavy on facts, many of them interesting and sobering”, says The Economist. Twenty thousand plastic bottles are sold around the world every second. The world produced two billion tonnes of solid waste in 2016, an amount that will rise to 3.3 billion tonnes by 2050. An Indian landfill Franklin-Wallis visits is piled almost as high as the Qutub Minar, a well-known minaret in Delhi. 

He also visits towering mountains of toxic waste from mines, defunct nuclear power plants and rivers in Africa choked with microparticles from discarded clothing. Our rubbish, as the author says, is often deposited “on the margins, and on the marginalised”: shipped by wealthier countries to poorer ones, where the poor pick over it to scrape a living. 

When we think of waste management we tend to think of plastic bottles and discarded fast-fashion clothes, but fixing the “vast and seemingly intractable problem” of consumers’ rubbish would be a simple task compared with taking care of commercial and industrial waste, says Salvidge. The scale of that problem is unimaginable, not least because quantities are not systematically recorded. 

“IN THE UK 48% OF RUBBISH WAS BURNED IN 2021, A 435% RISE IN 20 YEARS. ”

In 1987, the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 97% of all waste is produced by industries, not households, Franklin-Wallis tells us. That figure is “outdated, vague and impossible to verify”. Nevertheless, it is clear that the volumes of waste produced are gargantuan. Canada alone,  we are told, produces 35.5 million tonnes of  household waste and 1.12 billion tonnes of industrial waste per year. Whatever the global figure is, it is  clear that “mankind is wreaking awesome damage” on the planet. 

A GLOBAL TREATY ON PLASTIC POLLUTION

It all makes for pretty uncomfortable reading, says Chris Stokel-Walker in New Scientist. And there’s  not much in the way of a happy ending. Solutions are hard to find. Attempts are being made to improve waste and recycling laws, and 175 nations have agreed to develop a global treaty on plastic pollution, but  such efforts move at a snail’s pace while the rubbish keeps piling up. People wash their yogurt containers and tear the plastic windows off cardboard sandwich boxes so they can be recycled, yet much of it ends up in landfill anyway. 

And the modern economy upon which we rely is itself “built on trash”. A third of what we throw  away is less than 12 months old. And the people  and places that take it off our hands have often built whole microeconomies on the back of it. 

There may be no easy answers, but Franklin-Wallis does provide a useful “public service” by fact-checking dubious claims, says Rose George in The Spectator. Only a tenth of the donations of old clothes that charity shops receive are sold through their outlets, for example; the rest, much of which is “unusable, stained tat”, is sent overseas, whether it’s wanted or not (countries that have tried to stop the flow have faced US “bullying” in the form of trade sanctions). 

We’re told to buy T-shirts made of recycled plastic, but clothing made from blends of that and organic fabrics are typically less recyclable that those made from a single fibre. The most common label put on our packaging indicates that it is not recyclable, and in the UK 48% of our rubbish was burned in 2021, an increase of 435% in 20 years. No one has figured out what to do with plastic. Companies continually make promises that they fail to keep.

So what is to be done? “It’s complicated” is a refrain throughout the book, as Salvidge notes. But the ultimate and most powerful action, according to Franklin-Wallis, is “laughably simple: buy less stuff”. Clamping down on corporate “greenwashing” would help too. 

Nevertheless, there’s also a case for “tighter, smarter regulation”, says the Financial Times. “Individual litterbugs” have for too long been blamed for a “packaging waste problem caused by companies that have successfully dodged full responsibility after decades of lavishly funded lobbying effort”. Franklin-Wallis has at least succeeded in outlining the size of the challenge, says The Economist, and his book “should prompt serious discussion in boardrooms and parliaments”.

However, Wasteland is worth reading for more than such practical consideration, or for the mountains of grim facts. “Waste is monstrous to look at because it is a mirror,” says Franklin-Wallis. That’s what makes his book “so captivating”, says Salvidge. “It is an unflinching account of the best and worst of us, related through the things we choose to discard.”

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Simon & Schuster UK, £20