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

Product Information

At other times, the British healthcare system has caused me as much suffering as the pain itself. I have muddled through years of appointments and tests, dealt with physicians ranging from the uninterested to the incapable. Rarely have I felt like more than a list of symptoms, or a name to cross off a waiting list. I found a better therapist, privately. If I had waited for an NHS appointment, I might not be here now – and, well, a year or so later, here I am, writing this story. 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? Compelling, smart, fair, often funny, always interesting, and just very important' Mary Roach, author of Stiff

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? 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. 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? An incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts’ Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland It’s funny: a few months earlier, that interaction might have sent me into another spiral. But, to my surprise, in the weeks after the appointment, something inside me lifted. I finally accepted that, as well-meaning as the medical professionals might be, they were no longer really trying to make me better. Not better in the way that I intended. To them, I was a lost cause. The sensation was not of failure, but of closure.

Table of Contents

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. Superb. Oliver Franklin-Wallis' deep dive into our wasteful ways and dirty histories turns up a story that gleams with insight and promise. An urgent and vividly told exploration of the underside of modern life, Wasteland also reveals what a better future could look like. You'll never see trash the same way again' -- David Farrier, author of Footprints 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.'

I was recommended this book by a friend and took the plunge. Expectation were high as the author has won multiple awards. I was dissappointed to find that he had just parroted disproven myths about plastics. Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.DAVIS: In this book, you cover the entire world – dumps in New Delhi, e-waste making land in Ghana, toxic plastic dumping in Southeast Asia. Is there any particular community or person that is really seared into your mind as far as the problem being so egregious? The chapters of this book are like a personal tour of different kinds of waste: landfills, recycling (especially plastics), fashion/textiles, food waste, electronic waste, industrial waste, etc. The author is a journalist, and this book often reads a bit like a news piece, but in more detail and depth. It has a first-person feel to it, documenting the interactions the author has with workers that are directly involved in many of the trades that manage our waste. I think this makes the writing more engaging, but I was also nagged by the suspicion that maybe the book didn't include many voices of other experts that might be studying the problem of waste at a higher level.

Then there was the medication. Having addiction in the family, I refused to even consider opioids, so was instead prescribed anti-inflammatories and put on to the NHS’s pathway of neurological pain drugs: amitriptyline, an antidepressant often also used to treat nerve pain; pregabalin; and later, gabapentin, an epilepsy medication that I later discovered is popular in British prisons because it can enhance the high from other substances. Getting prescribed the correct drugs was a painful process too. For example, amitriptyline did nothing for the stabbing that by then had settled in my inner elbow, but did make me so drowsy I would fall asleep during the day; when I asked to change medication, the GP practice explained that, because the effect of these drugs can be slow, I was expected to endure them for at least several weeks before being prescribed something new. (This strategy is unintentionally cruel and clinically misguided, given that studies show that the longer a person is in pain, the harder it is to get rid of.) I eventually persuaded the doctors to skip that step – crying down the phone will do that – but, even then, the stronger medication didn’t dull the pain, either. All I knew was that, in my early 30s, I had suddenly become a person who owned a pillbox and a medication schedule Wasteland is that story. It’s my attempt to explore what happens to our stuff after we throw it “away”– the places it goes, and the people who deal with it when it gets there. It’s a story that took me around the UK, to the USA, India, and Ghana; a story that took me from the inside of dumpsters to mountainous landfills, super-sewers to ghost towns, via the largest nuclear waste store in Europe. The Revival is currently a non-profit, and each collection is small-scale and handmade. It sells its designs in pop-up shops in and around Accra. At the moment, the operation is tiny, and can account for only a fraction of the goods arriving in Kantamanto. “We realized that there’s so much waste, and that there is not enough demand for it,” he says. Pain is like a memory, a path reinforced every time we walk down it. As such, it’s quite possible that writing this is an act of self-harm. It’s not just that it hurts to write, although it does; it’s that when I started thinking about this piece, reading around it, even jotting down notes, I felt the pain in my forearms flare up again, and for a month or two I considered calling it off. My physiotherapist would call that “avoidance”. I would call it “learning from experience”, given that it was writing that got me here in the first place. I always thought of the thrift store as a comforting place. Somewhere I could reliably and conscientiously take unwanted clothing to be resold and re-worn, or as the fashion industry has recently rebranded it, re- loved. In the process, charities do great things with the profits from reselling them: supporting troops. Saving pets. Curing cancer. But, like many of us, I never knew the full story.Oliver Franklin-Wallis: ‘In August, I will have been in pain for three years.’ Photograph: Martin Pope/The Guardian He says we should lobby for bag bans when all 30 life cycle studies show that that would increase CO2, fossil fuel use, waste and overall harm. Despite its prevalence, we understand relatively little about what causes some pain to become chronic. Certain risk factors make one more susceptible: biological sex (women are more likely to report chronic pain), genetics, smoking, depression, poverty. But the exact chemical and neurological conditions that cause pain to linger are still the matter of intense study. What seems certain is that something causes the pain circuitry in the body to become oversensitised, inferring pain even if no damage has occurred. In some cases, even the lightest touch can trigger a pain response; for patients with this condition, allodynia, it can be agony just to get dressed. The pain isn’t gone – it may never be gone; I know that. But, for now, it doesn’t have control. I still have so many questions that remain unanswered. But I’ve learned that even if I can’t rid myself of pain, I can at least ease the suffering.

FRANKLIN-WALLIS: Waste is a huge problem around the Global South. We see some of the waste as something that's kind of almost solved. But actually globally, the recycling rate is only about 20%. We’re talking about billions of people who don't have formal waste management that you or I would take for granted. At times, the British healthcare system has caused me as much suffering as the pain itself.’ Illustration: Timo Lenzen/The Guardian 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. Yayra and Kwamena have been shopping at Kantamanto for so long that they seem to know everyone. Traders holler in delight as they arrive, offering warm greetings and hugs.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.' 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.’