Waste Wars

A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.
                                                                                          
Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they’re happening.

Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell readers what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often 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 — the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away — has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?

• “In the seconds it has taken you to scan the few lines of this blurb, tens of thousands of plastic bottles have been discarded. Pause to consider that awesome fact for a moment and they are followed by tens of thousands more. One million per minute, every minute, every hour of every day. We are burying our planet in trash, which thanks to the plastic revolution will outlive us by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Where does all this waste go? The fact that this shocking disaster is largely invisible in the rich world is no accident. As Alexander Clapp shows, it is the result of a ghastly form of globalization that dumps the garbage of the rich on the poor. A mind-altering and unforgettable read, Clapp has written an essential and deeply disturbing book.”
  Adam Tooze, author of Crashed
• “Superb reporting that definitively answers the question we really never ask: where on earth does all that stuff go when we're done with it? This majestic account will transform the way you look at trash—and hopefully it will spur some real change at the highest levels.”
  Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
• "Waste Wars is perhaps the most comprehensive indictment of consumer capitalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Fearless as he travels to some of the least appealing places on earth, Alexander Clapp lifts the heavy stones of green washing to reveal the literal and moral filth that Western societies have been dumping on their poorer cousins in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for decades. Always engagingly written with jaw-dropping anthropological detail, Clapp introduces us to courageous tragic characters compelled to clean up the mess of Western material avarice from the bizarre electronic slums of Ghana to the deathyards breaking up ships in Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. If you wish to know how the world really works, read this book."
  Misha Glenny, author of McMafia
• “Waste Wars is an infuriating, eye-opening and spell-binding account of the globally uneven and unjust politics of trash. Clapp shows how the rubbish the affluent people of rich countries produce travels to poorer countries for processing, creating mountains of toxic waste in the global South, or whirlpools of plastic in our oceans. A must-read for those concerned with the health and hygiene not only of the planet, but also of the people who populate it!”
  Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade
• "Waste Wars cracks open standard recycling rhetoric to expose the toxic truths within. No study of global inequality is complete without the information in this excellent book."
  Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
• "Since its inception centuries ago, the global economy has consisted of complex commodity chains: extracting, transporting, manufacturing, distributing, profiting. Only very recently in historical times have we added the ‘downstream’ chains, dumping the resultant consumer waste — somewhere, somehow. In rich countries, we pay high municipal fees for the removal of our refuse. We may even feel good about sorting to recycle it. Does this do any good? If the news is really so bad, better that someone as sober and courageous as Alexander Clapp delivers it to us."
  Georgi Derluguian, author of Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus
• “Briskly paced and filled with colorful and dubious characters worthy of the true crime book it is, Waste Wars inverts the standard story of extractive capitalism to focus on the globalized trillion-dollar waste disposal industry that each year moves billions of tons of toxic garbage from the Global North to the Global South. A quintessential story of deviant globalization, Waste Wars depicts the United States as an empire of plastic, one that deployed disposable mass consumerism as a way to beat the Soviets in the Cold War, only to extend it down to the present day into a structure of globalized overconsumption and wanton disposal that threatens to devour the entire planet, with the poor countries and peoples of the Global South as its first victims.”
  Nils Gilman, author of Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century
• “Waste Wars is the Star Wars of trash, a witty and brave account of Alexander Clapp’s journey into the underbelly of modern life. You’ll meet garbage-spotting drones, journalists who register pet fish as waste brokers, and go on a hunt for the El Dorado of poison. As Clapp explains, we live in a world where our ability to create garbage has surpassed Earth’s ability to generate life. The consequences are terrifying, but Clapp’s great book somehow leaves you awe-inspired by the sheer outrageousness of the human ingenuity that has created this toxic mess.”
  Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First
• “Journalist Clapp debuts with a rollicking deep dive into the absurdities and intricacies of the global trash trade… Clapp chronicles how, despite these nations having since banded together to end the toxic waste trade, it has continued to flourish under the guise of recycling… It’s a stirring and dogged investigation.”
  Publishers Weekly
• "A fascinating and darkly revealing dive into the world’s garbage."
  Kirkus Reviews
• “Citing astounding statistics on the growth of waste and weaving in wrenching stories of people whose lives have been upended by garbage from far away, Clapp shines a spotlight on a subject that needs to be addressed.”
  Booklist
• "Alexander Clapp traveled across continents, jungles and trash heaps to bring to life the real, multi-billion-dollar story of what happens to our garbage. Clapp presents a frank, and frankly gross, examination of who is making money off what we throw away… this 400-page microhistory will be fun, funky and, of course, leave no dumpster undived.”
  Scientific American, 10 Most Anticipated Microhistories for 2025
• "Clapp's important and courageous book explores the environmental damage unleashed by the west's offloading of its trash." 
  Financial Times
• "Abundant humor and humanity"
  Harper's
• "Clapp is a lively writer, and his deeply researched book deftly combines history and global economics with stories of real people and tangible details of modern life. You will never look at plastic bags the same way."
  The Washington Post
• "Clapp’s concern is less about the global effect, though he acknowledges the widespread pollution and effects on climate change, than the inequalities of distribution of the rubbish itself. In a sense it’s a kind of critique of capitalist consumption and its economic disparities made by looking not at the buying power but throwing away power of the wealthy. It’s a book about how the global north dumps on the global south."
  The Guardian
• "Out of sight, out of mind. Waste Wars, however, puts the picture very much into your mind, and it's hard to imagine any reasonably affluent Western reader—and compared with the people in the places where the rubbish ends up, every Western reader is 'affluent'—reading this book and not having their conceptions of the world fundamentally changed."
  The Daily Telegraph
• “Based on astounding on-the-ground reporting across the globe, Waste Wars shines a spotlight on how plastic travels from rich countries to poor, where it is not recycled but dumped or burned.”
  The Hill
• "I’ve read books that have made me tearful, nauseous and aroused, but never one that made me actually feel the acrid taste of burning plastic at the back of my throat."
  The Sunday Times
• "Extensively researched and delivered with great energy and humanity—you can almost smell the rot from Clapp’s writing and it doesn’t come from the bottom of a rubbish skip but the heart of our consumer economies."
  Irish Independent
• "The author has interviewed people all over the world and the stories he has to tell are extraordinary—and shocking.... The trillion-dollar waste-disposal industry is exposed in all its awfulness."
  Country Life
• "Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world."
  The Atlantic
• "Alexander Clapp does something engrossing, if not entirely appealing, in his book. He follows rubbish, travelling to some of the world’s most unpleasant places to chronicle the effects of consumption... jaw-dropping... Mr Clapp’s aim is not just to display his ample reporting chops, but to trace the rise of a controversial form of globalisation: the growth of the global trade in waste. As Western countries put in place stricter environmental regulation, the job of disposing of their waste fell to poorer ones."
  The Economist