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

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By that Christmas, the pain had become constant and excruciating. From my elbows and hands, it radiated into my shoulder joint. My strength left me. Pretty soon I could barely open doors; changing gears hurt, so I stopped driving. One morning, when I tried to pour my three-year-old a glass of apple juice, I found I could no longer unscrew the lid.

We are living in a waste crisis. Sewage flooding our rivers, plastics in ours oceans, rivers, bodies; rubbish shipped abroad and inflicted on the world’s poor. Why? Why do we think so much about where stuff comes from, but almost never about where it goes after we’re done? I don’t recall the exact details of the rest of the conversation because of my emotional response to what happened next. At some point, after condescendingly explaining that “all pain is psychological”, the consultant made a joke: “If you really want the pain to go away, I could give you a hammer, and you could take it to your big toe.” I think he was making a point about attention. All I heard was a medical professional, inside a pain clinic, making a self-harm joke towards someone who had been recently suicidal. Incensed, I confronted him about it and complained formally to the hospital. He later apologised, but the damage was done. If buying less stuff is a major way to fight waste, how do we buy less stuff? And if we buy less stuff, what does that do to jobs and the economy? At some point in my pain journey – I forget where now – I was introduced to the distinction between “pain” and “suffering”. Pain is acute sensation, dictated by nociceptors and nerve pathways. Pain is verbs: stabbing, burning, aching. Suffering denotes everything else caused by that pain: avoidance, anxiety, loneliness, depression. If pain is what our nerves tell us, suffering is how our minds react.A fascinating, deeply researched and hugely important expose of what happens to the stuff we no longer want, and the social and environmental cost of dealing with it' Gaia Vince With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash. Does that mean we shouldn’t resell our stuff and try to extend the life of things wherever possible? “Honestly, I’m not sure,” writes Franklin-Wallis. His willingness to accept that “the answer is complex, the ethics unclear” is refreshing. We would do well to heed his call to “recognise that our decisions about waste can have unseen consequences for people and places thousands of miles away” and to stop treating our waste, and the people who deal with it, as a dirty secret “to be hidden away”.

In much of the developed world, waste is out of sight and out of mind. But what happens to our trash can have dire implications for everyone. There are stories in all our discarded things: who made them, what they meant to a person before they were thrown away. In the end, it all ends up in the same place – the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass.’Franklin-Wallis, features editor at British GQ, is interested in what happens to things after we throw them away, although the story inevitably becomes intertwined with his personal attempts to reduce his own output. The author chronicles his treks through sewer systems and visits to recycling plants, staggered by the size of the waste problem even while finding some reasons for optimism in changing social attitudes and practices. However, as he shows, most solutions seem to generate further problems. For example, he believed that using tote bags instead of plastic was environmentally responsible, until he learned that totes come with a sizable footprint. For decades, wealthy countries exported their waste to poorer countries, and although the practice has diminished, there is a painful legacy. Writing about his trips to India and Ghana, he shows us that they have waste problems of their own, many so massive they might be impossible to overcome. The most common ways to dispose of waste are to burn it, bury it, dump it into the ocean, or simply let it pile up. Of course, these “solutions” merely turn it into a problem for someone else. Franklin-Wallis wishes he could offer a sweeping solution, but he sees no easy fixes. He proposes legislation to require greater transparency from companies, which is a good idea but does not get to the core issue of waste being caused by overproduction, which in turn is tied to overconsumption. “The conclusion that I come to is laughably simple,” he writes. “Buy less stuff. I recognize that this is not the most original idea, but there’s something liberating in it.” Is this sort of individual action the remedy? It’s an essential part, perhaps, but it’s not a satisfying answer. Nevertheless, the author gives readers much to ponder. An incredible journey… full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts’– Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler To The World Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops. Philippa Nuttall writes on the environment and climate and is based in Brussels. It starts out informative and entertaining, but the end of the book, I was soberly concerned and almost hopeless. What can I as a private citizen do?

Wasteland begins on the personal level, looking at recycling and composting and food waste, the things we can sort of control. And then, it moves on to sanitation and health care, industrial and manufacturing waste and pollution of water, air and soil, forever chemicals, and finally nuclear waste. He has written about art fraudsters and deep-sea explorers, reported from Liberia on the ebola virus, chronicled the fractious race to build a hyperloop, and profiled countless startup founders, scientists, film directors and celebrities.An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy— and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away?