Waste Wars : Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish - Alexander Clapp

Waste Wars

Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish

By: Alexander Clapp

Paperback | 25 February 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $34.99

$31.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $7.94 with

 or 

Available: 25th February 2025

Preorder. Will ship when available.

A riveting investigation into the dark underbelly of the global trash trade - a dirty, multi-billion-dollar industry that almost no one knows exists.

The total mass of the world's manmade materials has recently come to equal the entire biomass of the earth. This means we are living in a world where man's ability to create garbage, or eventual garbage, has surpassed the earth's ability to create life. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing, and disputes about what to do with the tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged in just about every country on earth. Some are border skirmishes, fought to move trash out of one place and dump it into another. Others are waged across thousands of miles.

But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening. For every story about how a commodity gets hustled through world supply chains for consumption, there exists another untold story about how it gets discarded for renewal - or for eternity. Some trash gets tossed onto roadsides. Some gets burned for fuel. Some gets buried underground. But most of it lives a hot potato second life, getting bartered, sold, re-sold, smuggled, salvaged, re-purposed from one country or mafia or corporation

to another, with devastating consequences for millions of people.

Waste Wars tells the stories of five trash conflicts being waged in different corners of the world right now. They are representative but rich strands in the story of our planet's runaway garbage pandemic. In each theater, a different commodity is being smuggled or imported or bartered. Sometimes there is a winner; sometimes there is a loser. And in each theater a different political dilemma - from global inequality to the pitfalls of green politics - is presenting itself through the seemingly pedestrian medium of trash. A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, Waste Wars exposes the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade in which almost everyone in the world unknowingly engages and asks: If the handling of its trash reveals deeper truths about a particular society, what does the global business of trash say about our world today?

More in Social Impact of Environmental Issues

The One-Straw Revolution : An Introduction to Natural Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka
Spell Of The Sensuous: Perceptions : Perceptions - David Abram
Everything is Water : A river-walking journey - Simon Cleary
Catastrophe Ethics : How to Be Good in a World Gone Bad - Travis Rieder
Irrational Exuberance : Revised and Expanded Third Edition - Robert J. Shiller
The Politics of Permaculture : FireWorks - Terry Leahy

RRP $43.99

$31.25

29%
OFF
The Wooleen Way : Renewing an Australian Resource - David Pollock

RRP $37.99

$33.90

11%
OFF
Summertime : Reflections on a vanishing future - Danielle Celermajer
Aesthetics of Weather - Madalina Diaconu

RRP $170.00

$125.75

26%
OFF
Climate Security - Ashok Swain

$244.95

Climate Security - Ashok Swain

$93.25

Lawn : Object Lessons - Giovanni Aloi

$36.74