Worldwide Wasteland: When Trash Became the New Cash Crop

 

Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the Global North, we are consumers. Some of us wonder, where does all our waste go? We may falsely believe it is properly recycled to be re-used. And that is why we don't see mountains of garbage outside our cities.
But reading a book like Waste Wars changes our perception. Most of our waste is actually exported to developing countries in the Global South, where it gets incinerated or dumped into the local environment. Very little of it is actually recycled. Ghana, Kenya, Turkey, Guatemala, Indonesia... All these countries literally have mountains of garbage that people get paid to sort through and scrounge for the rare earth elements that actually can be recycled. The rest is steel, electronic, or plastic residue that pollutes the local soil or water supply. And amazingly, some farmers now view "trash rotating" as a new cash crop that is even more profitable than growing staples like rice.
Much of this design lies on the shoulders of the U.S., who refused to ratify the Basel Convention in 1989. This is a U.N. treaty that regulates the movement and disposal of hazardous waste across country boundaries. I'd never heard of a waste broker before reading this book. Evidently these are the people doing backdoor deals in our country to ship waste out at a price lower than it would cost to process it here. Government approved, of course.
The thing about rare earth metals is they are rarely rare. They just require so much hazardous digging that the Global North doesn't want to do it. Environmental regulations intimidate mining companies from operating in countries like ours, and rightfully so. The problem is that the Global South, being relatively poor, cannot afford to ignore these "lucrative" offers to process our waste. On top of resource recovery, it creates jobs, just like mining. No matter how hazardous these jobs are, people will do them. Most striking is the shipbreaking industry, where people risk their lives to dismantle old steel-bearing cruise ships and gargantuan barges that are no longer operational.
At the center of this design is a horrible international exchange rivaling slavery or post-colonial debt. For years the Global South worked hard to liberate themselves from the military strangleholds of the North. In exchange for freedom from colonialism, "the lands that had once offered wood, latex, and cotton to European capitals were to be flipped into dumping grounds for the synthetic proxies of those same materials- the plastic, rubber, and nylon that were to prove the material hallmarks of a US led world (254)". Much like the climate disaster, stress is being unfairly placed on parts of the world that are not responsible for creating this waste in the first place.
It's our duty as consumers to be more aware of the things we buy, to realize how much of it cannot actually be recycled, and to stop buying things that aren't necessary. Rather than relying on the myth of recycling, this is the best way to heal the planet from excessive garbage. Especially when it comes to plastic, which in some parts of the world has totally infiltrated environmental systems.

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