Waste Wars

Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish

By: Alexander Clapp

Narrated by: Greg Lockett

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

'A mind-altering and unforgettable read' Adam Tooze

A globe-trotting investigation into the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.

Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. The millions of tonnes of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars, cons and cover ups across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. And few people have any idea they're happening.

Roaming across five continents, Alexander Clapp delves deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists in the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour. He reveals how most of our trash actually lives a secret second life, getting shipped, smuggled or dumped from one country onto another, 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 has spawned a massive global black market, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If our astonishing wastefulness reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the hidden business of trash say about our world today?

©2025 Alexander Clapp (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

Waste Wars is the Star Wars of trash, a witty and brave account of Alexander Clapp's journey into the underbelly of modern life. You'll meet garbage-spotting drones, journalists who register pet fish as waste brokers, and go on a hunt for the El Dorado of poison. As Clapp explains, we live in a world where our ability to create garbage has surpassed Earth's ability to generate life. The consequences are terrifying, but Clapp's great book somehow leaves you awe-inspired by the sheer outrageousness of the human ingenuity that has created this toxic mess (Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST)

Briskly paced and filled with colorful and dubious characters worthy of the true crime book it is, Waste Wars inverts the standard story of extractive capitalism to focus on the globalized trillion-dollar waste disposal industry that each year moves billions of tons of toxic garbage from the Global North to the Global South. A quintessential story of deviant globalization, Waste Wars depicts the United States as an empire of plastic, one that deployed disposable mass consumerism as a way to beat the Soviets in the Cold War, only to extend it down to the present day into a structure of globalized overconsumption and wanton disposal that threatens to devour the entire planet, with the poor countries and peoples of the Global South as its first victims (Nils Gilman, author of DEVIANT GLOBALIZATION)

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 an infuriating, eye-opening and spell-binding account of the globally uneven and unjust politics of trash. Clapp shows how the rubbish the affluent people of rich countries produce travels to poorer countries for processing, creating mountains of toxic waste in the global South, or whirlpools of plastic in our oceans. A must-read for those concerned with the health and hygiene not only of the planet, but also of the people who populate it! (Laleh Khalili, author of SINEWS OF WAR AND TRADE)