Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters

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Just as everything we consume comes from somewhere on earth, so too everything we produce must go somewhere on earth – even if we don't want to think about it. It is also home to some terrifying statistics: the four trillion plastic cigarette filters flicked to the ground and stamped out annually; the 20,000 plastic bottles sold every second; the 2kg of waste produced every day by the average American. On the way, we discover the corporate greenwashing that started the recycling movement; the dark truth behind our second-hand donations; and come face to face with the 10,000-year legacy of our nuclear waste. Do not adjust your magazine, but this really is a positive review… In other hands this book could have been worthy but unreadable. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste.

Among the industrial-scale horrors, Franklin-Wallis finds warm and bright characters whose lives have become inextricably woven into the waste stream. I suspect that I am like most people, I try to recycle as much as I can, I have general recycling, a box for batteries and defunct electronics, bags for scrunchy and soft plastic and we have one of the hot bins that makes vegetable peelings into fine compost. 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. He has appeared on TV, radio and podcasts, including the WIRED podcast, BBC Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, and BBC World Service. These chapters roughly track these topics: Landfills and dumps, recycling (consumer recycling), exporting garbage to Third World countries, sewage and water pollution, gleaning and dumpster diving, composting, industrial water pollution, electronic waste, and nuclear waste.However, it also gave me a grain of hope that not only regular people but also decision makers and big corporations are finally starting to take some steps in the right direction.

What he learns is often eye-opening, both in terms of the sheer extent of the waste we produce – from plastics, clothing, food and electrical equipment – and the pollution it causes to the land and the air as it breaks down, belching out methane and other pollutants. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 18, 2023. There is an ungodly amount of information that there is no way to totally absorb but like I think very necessary.Even though he’s a UK author and many of the examples are from his end of the world, there were still enough general issues mentioned that affect all of us as humans on earth. In Wasteland, he tackles all elements of the effects of waste, from cities in India and Ghana to the banks of the river Thames in London. It might be burned, buried, reconstituted or sent on an expedition to new lands, where it might be burned, buried or reconstituted. Franklin-Wallis achieves the difficult feat of making an ostensibly mundane topic feel urgent, and the compassionate profiles effectively humanize a problem that’s massive in scope. Why do we think so much about where stuff comes from, but almost never about where it goes after we’re done?