Waste Wars

The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

By: Alexander Clapp

Narrated by: Greg Lockett

A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.

Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.

Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell listeners what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world.

Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage—the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away—has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?

©2025 Alexander Clapp (P)2025 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

“In the seconds it has taken you to scan the few lines of this blurb, tens of thousands of plastic bottles have been discarded. Pause to consider that awesome fact for a moment and they are followed by tens of thousands more. One million per minute, every minute, every hour of every day. We are burying our planet in trash, which thanks to the plastic revolution will outlive us by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Where does all this waste go? The fact that this shocking disaster is largely invisible in the rich world is no accident. As Alexander Clapp shows, it is the result of a ghastly form of globalization that dumps the garbage of the rich on the poor. A mind-altering and unforgettable read, Clapp has written an essential and deeply disturbing book.”—Adam Tooze, author of Crashed

“Superb reporting that definitively answers the question we really never ask: where on earth does all that stuff go when we're done with it? This majestic account will transform the way you look at trash—and hopefully it will spur some real change at the highest levels.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

"Waste Wars is perhaps the most comprehensive indictment of consumer capitalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Fearless as he travels to some of the least appealing places on earth, Alexander Clapp lifts the heavy stones of green washing to reveal the literal and moral filth that Western societies have been dumping on their poorer cousins in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for decades. Always engagingly written with jaw-dropping anthropological detail, Clapp introduces us to courageous tragic characters compelled to clean up the mess of Western material avarice from the bizarre electronic slums of Ghana to the deathyards breaking up ships in Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. If you wish to know how the world really works, read this book."—Misha Glenny, author of McMafia

Humanity with its head in the sand.

A must read to understand how humans are making the whole world toxic with no end in sight.

Eye-opening studies of where our waste goes.

After we put our recycling in the collection bin, we tend to forget about it and assume that if will be handled responsibly. Unfortunately, that is not always true. This book gives in-depth, first-hand information about the end-point of plastic, electronic and other "recyclable" materials (including ships!). However, the book could use some heavy editing, as the author frequently goes too far down a rabbit hole.