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

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Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? All joking aside, this is a super complex topic with no quick fix or clear roadmap to outline how we can, collectively, turn a corner, but it's easy to see that our growing waste problem will have an immense impact on the world for many, many, MANY generations to come. His writing has appeared in GQ, WIRED, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist, The Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Men’s Health, and many other publications.

For me, the most interesting (and infuriating) chapters were the ones on plastics and the illusion of recycling, which is mostly about clearing our consciences and generating more sales for multinational corporations.However, a fair warning is warranted, this book will almost guaranteed make you feel like a total shit. planned obsolescence: “We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.

The author doesn't mention any nudie magazines, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to have been thrilled by such a find. Western waste electronics were being dumped on the world’s poor, who were reaping the toxic consequences. Companies, he argues, should be forced to reveal the waste footprint of their goods; problem materials should be “designed out” to make all products recyclable, biodegradable or both; greenwashing – when a firm makes false boasts about its sustainability – should be illegal; and “a fully and equitably funded waste system” created to make businesses pay to remove their waste wherever it ends up, “whether that be in the Thames or a Ghanaian gutter”. But this book offers some (maybe prohibitively expensive) solutions, and that is delightful in itself! It might be burned, buried, reconstituted or sent on an expedition to new lands, where it might be burned, buried or reconstituted.

These chapters roughly track these topics: Landfills and dumps, recycling (consumer recycling), exporting garbage to Third World countries, sewage and water pollution, gleaning and dumpster diving, composting, industrial water pollution, electronic waste, and nuclear waste.

Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 18, 2023. For people that have thought about waste, the book still felt like it was a problem that would not reach our backyards. About the Author Oliver Franklin-Wallis is an award-winning magazine journalist and currently the features editor of British GQ.Also the unsettling consequences of fast fashion (the difficulty of recycling results in gas-trapped, explosive Ghanaian landfills). Perhaps in an effort to bring waste workers out of the shadows, Franklin-Wallis introduces everyone he meets by describing their hairstyle and clothing. It is demoralizing and exhausting knowing this problem exists and is a threat yet being unable to do anything about it on the personal level. It’s thought that 25 percent of all clothing made is never sold" but instead thrown away by the companies.