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Waste Wars
Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish
Brief Description
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...
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See moreA riveting investigation into the dark underbelly of the global trash trade - a dirty, multi-billion-dollar industry that almost no one knows exists.
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Description
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, and 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 theatre, a different commodity is being smuggled or imported or bartered. Sometimes there is a winner; sometimes there is a loser. And in each theatre, 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?
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781399803137
Publisher: John Murray Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 27 February 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: John Murray Publishers Ltd
Illustration: 6 maps
Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 30.0mm
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 232.0mm
Weight: 460g
Pages: 400
About the Author
Alexander Clapp is a journalist and writer based in Greece. His reporting has appeared in publications including the New York Times, The Economist, the London Review of Books, and The Guardian Long Read. Clapp is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, among them a Whiting Nonfiction Grant, Matthew Power Literary Reporting Prize, Robert B. Silvers Reporting Grant, and a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award. He has also received the Alistair Horne Fellowship at Oxford and a Berggruen Fellowship in Los Angeles.
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Waste Wars
'Jaw-dropping' The Economist 'A mind-altering and unforgettable read' Adam Tooze 'If you wish to know how the world really works, read this book' Misha Glenny A globe-trotting investigation into the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. The millions of tonnes of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste...Paperback$2999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks
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