Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander ClappMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Waste Wars might be a tough pill to swallow for all the Captain Planet kids who grew up saving Earth with every recycled bottle. Yeowch. Clapp smartly untangles the financial boondoggle that are the waste and recycling industries, leaving us with a straight line of reverse-colonialsim: instead of extracting resources from poorer countries, the wealthy take advantage of poverty and need to offload their garbage. We've made dumps of Indonesia and Ghana and Turkey. Clapp describes companies who choose fractions of slivers of profit over sustainability, African ghettos literally on fire with burning e-waste and plastic that, from the very start, could never have been truly recycled. Side jaunts into large-scale phishing operations in Western Africa and Turkish politics can feel slightly extraneous, but, despite its often dour subject matter, Waste Wars succeeds in being both informative and entertaining.
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