“Waste Wars” by Alexander Clapp
Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. The millions of tonnes of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars, cons and cover ups across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. And few people have any idea they’re happening.
Roaming across five continents, Alexander Clapp delves deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists in the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour. He reveals how most of our trash actually lives a secret second life, getting shipped, smuggled or dumped from one country onto another, with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world.
Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage has spawned a massive global black market, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. The book is published by Hachette India.
Read an extract from the book on Moneycontrol.
Alexander Clapp is a journalist and writer based in Greece. His reporting has appeared in publications including Guardian Long Read, The New Republic, the New York Times, New Left Review, The Economist and The Baffler. Clapp is the recipient of numerous journalism awards. In 2017 he was named a Balkan Fellow for Journalist Excellence and won a European Union Migration Media Award. In 2018 he won a Matthew Power Literary Reporting Prize. In 2019 he won a Robert B. Silvers Reporting Grant. In 2021 he won a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award. His award-winning piece, “The Vampire Ship,” published in the September 2020 issue of The New Republic, has been optioned for a forthcoming documentary series.
30 May 2025
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