Review of Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp

First drawn to Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by an excerpt of the first few chapters, I was excited to see my library already had a copy. Alexander Clapp has literally journeyed around the world to investigate where trash from the US, Canada, Europe, etc., goes (hint: both exactly where and nowhere that you would expect). In so doing, he unravels a decades-spanning story of globalization and neocolonialism that is both depressing and predictable. Waste Wars, while far from perfect in its framing and storytelling, is nonetheless packed full of important information for anyone wanting a better grounding not just in the current state of the global waste trade but how we got here.

Clapp takes a spatial rather than chronological approach to organization, and this largely serves him well. Part 1 explores the export to and dumping of toxic waste in Central America and other tropical destinations. Part 2 focuses on the reclamation of e-waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, and the tertiary industries that have sprung up around it. Part 3 discusses shipbreaking, especially in Türkiye. Finally, Part 4 looks at the proliferation of plastic waste and where it goes since China’s 2017 import ban. In each of these parts, Clapp breaks the issue down through several short chapters where he arrives at a destination, speaks to various locals, and provides background information and quotes from other sources.

I was slightly surprised by how short each chapter is! It’s seldom that I criticize the pacing of a nonfiction book, yet that is my major concern with Waste Wars. I personally would have preferred the chapters to be unified into longer, slightly more coherent explorations of each place, industry, etc. As it is, reading the book feels like we’re jumping back and forth among various related topics within a single place: let’s talk about reclaiming e-waste, then we’re talking about browser boys, then back to the e-waste, and around and around we go. As such, while this book is absolutely saturated with fascinating ideas, it’s sometimes hard to feel like I’m getting the full picture.

If you can get past this and Clapp’s equally frenetic prosody, then you’ll learn a lot from this book. I pride myself in already knowing a fair amount about the globalization of our waste, especially when it comes to plastic, but there is so much in here that was new to me! Probably one of the most important main ideas is simply how the export of trash from developed countries is an inversion of the colonial import of resources to those countries. In this way, Waste Wars really underscores the neocolonialism happening around the world in the last fifty years. It isn’t just that we’re continuing to exploit, say, African countries for their raw materials (though that is still happening)—we are strong-arming them into accepting raw deals for our junk, most of which is toxic and harmful to human health as well as larger ecosystems.

When I say “we” I mean our governments but also the companies and entrepreneurs who see these markets as opportunities or create them wholesale in those countries when the market is shut down at home, as was the case in China. Clapp is well aware that hanging responsibility for sustainability on an individual consumer is an unrealistic shibboleth, and he rightly attributes that responsibility to the producers of these materials. At the same time, however, he gently points out that we consumers inhabit a very unusual, very privileged moment in space and time. We don’t have to think about where our plastic goes as we blithely toss it, often unwashed and therefore contaminated, into our poorly sorted recycling. Many of us are increasingly aware that plastic is a problem, yet that problem is distant and indistinct, much as global warming was for us in the nineties. Clapp is somewhat successful in counteracting this bias, though I think the videos and pictures I’ve seen are a little more effective for how they showcase the scale of devastation that’s happening.

Waste Wars is a valuable contribution to the topic of globalized waste. It can feel overwhelming at times and make you want to crawl under a blanket and ignore the problem. As with any nonfiction book about such topics, however, I think it’s important instead to frame our reaction through the lens of “knowledge is power.” When we’re ignorant, we are definitely part of the problem. Less ignorant, we’re still part of the problem (because you can’t escape from these systems)—but we now have opportunities to find ways to leverage those who have power to change things. That can mean individual choices, yes, but it can also mean political action, organization, and rallying around related causes.