How the world is being overwhelmed by endless amounts of trash

In the 1999 movie “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” Ann Mullany, the character played by Andie MacDowell, talks to her therapist about what is troubling her, as Alexander Clapp explains in “Waste Wars – The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash” (Little, Brown).  “Garbage,” she says. “All I’ve been thinking about all week is garbage. I mean, we’ve got so much of it. 

“You know, I mean, we have to run out of places to put this stuff, eventually.”

Twenty-five years later on, investigative reporter Clapp’s book reveals just how catastrophic the problem of waste has become. “The global balance sheet of trash today is astronomical,” he writes. “Humans currently manufacture their own weight in new stuff every week, only about one percent of which has been estimated throughout the world to be in use six months after its purchase.”

As Clapp notes, the world now discards 250 million pounds of clothes, 220 aluminum cans and three million tires every day — but it’s plastics causing the most problems. 

In fact, for every human being alive, there exists more than one ton of discarded plastic either on land or in the sea. “In just the minute it took you to read this paragraph, another million plastic bottles have been discarded and another garbage truck full of plastic has entered the seas,” he writes.

Along with 1.5 billion plastic cups tossed each day, there are roughly 21,000 pieces of plastic in the oceans for every person on the planet; a total that will, by 2050, exceed the weight of all the world’s fish combined.

The problem is so embedded in modern life that three in four people on the planet now have microplastics in their blood. “The person reading this book, for example, likely consumes a credit card’s worth of plastic every week,” writes Clapp. And nowhere on the planet remains unaffected. 

Indeed, as far back as 1966 — when marine biologists discovered synthetic particles in the stomachs of newly hatched Laysan albatross chicks northwest of Hawaii — the planet had been engulfed by microplastics.  By the turn of the century, the American yachtsman Charles Moore discovered a Pacific garbage patch that was three times the size of France and by 2009, plastic was found in samples of thawed-out ice from Antarctica. Four years later, it was even found floating in outer space. 

It is everywhere, says Clapp. “Five years after . . . a plastic bag was caught on camera floating 36,000 feet below sea level, in the lowest trough of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place anywhere on Earth.”

To research his book, Clapp spent two years crisscrossing the planet, living out of a backpack as he visited five continents and frequented “only the most hideous and putrefying landfills and ports and slums all those places had to offer,” he writes.

What he discovered — and his book reveals —  was a world engulfed by waste.

In Guatemala, for instance, he found a two-story wire barricade to prevent thousands of tons of trash from entering the Caribbean Sea each month. In India, he saw a garbage mountain near New Delhi that is growing by 30 feet each year and is higher than the 240-foot Taj Mahal.

In Norway, meanwhile, there was a beached whale found dead with more than 30 plastic bags in its stomach, from a variety of countries that were hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away.

Even the Galápagos Islands, one of the few ecosystems in the world that has been spared major human intrusion, is suffering, as Clapp explains. “Researchers from a UK-based environmental watchdog recently concluded that you can now never be more than seventeen inches from a particle of plastic there,” he says.

But it’s not just human consumption causing the problem because, as Clapp explains, one person’s waste is another person’s profit. And while we know the names of the major global corporations that produce so much of what we consume (and dispose of), we know little of the shady outfits that “rinse out the last rancid drops of profit out of waste” without concern for what it is and where it ends up.

“It’s not just that you haven’t heard of many of them. It would be almost impossible to do so,” explains Clapp. “They are postboxes in Anaheim or Hong Kong. They are kinship networks of Nigerians and Indians and Lebanese and Chinese. They work out of slapped-together warehouses in Port Klang or Dar es Salaam.

“Sure, when it comes to most major commodities, such as steel or oil, the market is lorded over by legendary trading houses . . . but when it comes to the biggest commodity of all — everything humanity tosses away — you tend to be dealing with grifters and hustlers,” he writes.

From recycling gangsters in Indonesia to Tanzanian plastic pickers, there exists a huge industry in relocating garbage from the rich to the poor countries of the world. Waste products “often end up in states that not so long ago released themselves from Western imperialism, only to find they have been turned into receptacles of Northern consumerism,” adds Clapp.

In Agbogbloshie, Ghana, for example, there is a thriving market in either repurposing broken electronic devices like cellphones, tablets and televisions that have been shipped from the West — or stripping any valuable minerals from inside them. 

Ghana has become a dumping ground for the world’s electronic waste. “When recycling firms or waste brokers in countries like Canada or Germany ship millions of broken cellphones or ceiling fans to Ghana, it’s probable they may not think they are outsourcing pollution to West Africa,” says Clapp. “They may really believe they’re bestowing the tools of enlightenment and progress upon a poor corner of the world’s poorest continent.”

This trend of sending our trash across national borders and the oceans has become a hugely profitable industry. Waste has evolved “from being your detritus — something you dropped into the nearest bin and never thought about again — to your national export,” he says. 

Indeed, as Clapp reports, the European Anti-Fraud Office estimates illegal waste trafficking to be more profitable than human trafficking, while the United Nations recently concluded that over the last 30 years, the global trade in plastics has actually been 40% greater than previously believed. 

This means that for every two pieces of plastic thought to have been transported around the world since 1992 — the first year such statistics got tracked — there have in fact been three pieces. It is, writes Clapp, “a revelation that turns what was once a trillion-dollar annual business into something more valuable than the global weapons, timber and wheat trades — combined.”

Depressingly, “Waste Wars” reveals a planet drowning in its own trash, driven by shady operatives mostly focused on profit. “At its most innocuous, the global waste trade shifts garbage from the world’s richest countries to those places that can least afford to handle it,” Clapp concludes. “At its most nefarious, the global waste trade is an outright criminal enterprise.”

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Stephen Collopy

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