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

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In the end, it all ends up in the same place – the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass. On the way, we discover the corporate greenwashing that started the recycling movement; the dark truth behind our second-hand donations; and come face to face with the 10,000-year legacy of our nuclear waste. An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy — and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple what really happens to what we throw away? More than 480 billion plastic bottles are sold worldwide every year—approximately 20,000 every second" and "four trillion plastic cigarette filters".

You have to admire Franklin-Wallis’s constitution as he visits a giant recycling plant in Essex, an energy-from-waste plant in Avonmouth and a sewage plant in Isleworth before venturing to India to scale the Ghazipur landfill mountain and endure the delights of one of Kanpur’s tanneries – notoriously grim and visceral places. An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy— and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away? My sister, being both older and a tattle-tale, threatened to tell if I didn't stop looking at those disgusting pictures. Organisations and corporates need to take more ownership of their supply chain and the way they manufacture products.From the very first pages you will realise that this is not only an important topic, but a fascinating one.

Yet Franklin-Wallis learns that by recirculating the highest-quality and highest-value goods in the UK and other rich countries, the “value that we would have exported to – and which traders in places like Kantamanto have relied on to survive – falls”.I suspect that I am like most people, I try to recycle as much as I can, I have general recycling, a box for batteries and defunct electronics, bags for scrunchy and soft plastic and we have one of the hot bins that makes vegetable peelings into fine compost. I want to give this book to everyone in my life - especially people who think caring about where their trash goes isn’t worth the effort. I've been fascinated by what people throw away ever since and when I saw this book, I immediately added it. They can snowball into “fatbergs,” immense fat-white plugs of decomposing putrescence that block entire sewers and cause the system to burst and flood the streets above.

I have been quite hopeless about the current state of Earth's pollution, and this books' findings confirmed them. I don't think the author at all intended for this book to be a gloomy outlook on how we are all f**ked. This deadly radioactive material still has the possibility of harming 300 generations later so what we do with it has to take into account a changing world. We have long been blithely throwing out our waste – tossing it over our shoulders and moving on to the next shiny new thing, with little thought to what happens to the discarded item.This is an excellent book that discusses the various forms of trash that humankind has created, and how we deal with it today.