Book review: The toxic truth behind the West’s deluded recycling myth

People are familiar with the concept of recycling. We separate our domestic rubbish into coloured bins. Then, once a week we place these bins outside our front doors for collection. 

When the contents are collected, we take the bins back in, and the process starts all over again.

Recently we started bringing our plastic bottles and cans to the machines at the supermarkets. 

We carefully empty our bags, collect our refund and then, armed with the satisfaction of being a “good citizen” we head inside the supermarket to spend our reward.

Through our willingness to parse our rubbish and to collect our refunds we feel we can hold our heads high as we think we are playing our part in keeping the world clean.

But are we?

Waste Wars is a new book by Alexander Clapp. He has spent several years travelling the world researching the topic of rubbish for this book. 

Award-winning journalist

He has previously been awarded a Pulitzer Breakthrough Journalism Award and holds fellowships at Oxford and Los Angeles.

The book’s subtitle, “Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish” sets the scene for the real story of what happens that plastic bottle you held in your hand (for 15 minutes) and then thought you had disposed of properly.

Waste Wars is a book that will make you angry because you believe that once you empty your bins and return your plastic bottle, that you have played your part in saving the world.

As Clapp takes you around the world, (from the Caribbean to Africa, to Pakistan and on to Indonesia) you realise that we have all been duped. 

The only careful part about our waste disposal operation is that the truth is carefully kept from us.

Clapp diligently builds a picture for the reader. He starts with the explosion of consumerism waste after the Second World War. 

He explains how this rubbish and industrial toxic waste became a problem in the USA by the early 1960s. 

It became troublesome to dispose of it at home. 

Companies, even cities, began to export their rubbish, toxic waste, and sewage to the Caribbean and anywhere else they could find to accept it.

Eventually, Greenpeace activists and concerned scientists lobbied the US government to do something about waste disposal. 

The government in turn imposed fees on the disposal of the waste across the USA. This did not have the desired effect of reducing the creation of waste. 

Instead companies and even arms of the government outsourced their “problem” to dictators and wealthy land owners in poorer countries for 20% of the cost of disposal at home.

With the advent of satellite tracking, and some enforcing of international law, the problem of illegal toxic waste disposal, as it existed in the last century, has been somewhat curtailed. 

But the original solution of exporting from the wealthy northern hemisphere economies to the poverty stricken southern countries remains intact. 

Over the last 30 years, billions of tons of used electrical goods and plastics have made the journey from the rich north to the poor south.

Do you ever wonder what happened your first Gameboy, or mobile phone? There is a good chance it ended up in Ghana, in a district of Accra, the capital city, called Agbogbloshie. 

This is where millions of tons of electronics goods go to die.

The swamp at Agbogbloshie was first turned into a dump when the British ruled Ghana. But Agbogbloshie, only truly became a wasteland when used electronics began to arrive 30 years ago.

All electronics enter Ghana as secondhand products that are expected to be sold on for use. In reality less than 30% of it works. 

The residents of the slums of Agbogbloshie (who earn $3 a day) have developed a highly organised system for stripping everything from copper to cobalt from the electronics.

Whatever is left — plastic casings and other useless materials — is burned. The burning takes place each evening. 

The next morning, the recovered minerals and metals are sold on and the process starts again. 

However, the average life span of residents of Agbogbloshie is less than 50 years.

Having explained what happens to our old electronic goods, Clapp goes on to explain what happens to the cargo ships that carry this waste around the world. 

Ship-breaking is another dangerous, toxic, and secret business. Each year thousands of ships from bulk carriers to 14-storey cruise ships are broken up.

The ship-breaking yards that do this dirty business are scattered along a line that stretches from Bangladesh to Turkey. Again the workers are poorly paid, poorly trained, and have short life spans.

Clapp focuses on Aliaga, a town on the Turkish Aegean Sea, to explain this story. 

There are 22 ship-breaking yards around the Aliaga, and the instance of cancer there is the highest in Turkey. Work conditions are appalling and accidents are frequent.

All these ship-breaking yards have an EU certificate. This means that they are recognised as reaching a certain standard of recycling and greenness. 

The “industry” boasts that the steel recovered gets reused all over the world. However, all the ship yards are notified in advance of inspection.

This means that the workers get new uniforms and the burning of toxins by night is banned for a short while. As one ex-worker told Clapp: “Europe exploits Turkey, and Turkey exploits us.”

Clapp turns to Indonesia for the final section of his book, focusing on the disposal of plastic. 

In 1991 the president of Coca-Cola said this of Indonesia: “When I think of Indonesia, a country on the equator with 180 million people, a median age of 18, and a Moslem ban on alcohol, I know what heaven feels like.”

The story of Indonesia is similar to Africa and Turkey; mountains of plastic, worker exploitation, and the burning of toxic waste. 

Indonesia no longer permits the importation of plastic waste, but that presents no problem to the importers. Much of the plastic arrives hidden in containers that are supposed to be full of waste paper.

The process of washing and cutting tons of plastic in secluded villages across Indonesia leads to the run-off of microplastic and toxins into the rivers.

As a result, four of the 20 must polluted rivers in the world are in Indonesia.

Clapp tells us that it is now estimated that the weight of plastic floating in the sea — everything from plastic bags, to fishing nets to microplastic — is greater than the combined weight of all the fish in the ocean.

'Waste Wars' is a wake-up call for everyone. Our rubbish does not go away once it is collected. 

The only effective solutions are to reduce the use of plastics, and spend money on proper recycling of toxic waste and electronics.

The economically wealthy northern countries will not deal adequately with this problem as long as it can be dumped on the developing world.

We all need to stop pretending that everything will be fine.

It will not be, because, as Alexander Clapp tells us, “[we] are currently living in a world in which the human ability to create garbage — or eventual garbage — has surpassed Earth’s ability to regenerate life”.