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

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It is an unflinching account of the best and worst of us, related through the things we choose to discard. It is in the land defiled to extract the rare metals, in the forests cut down and discarded to make the packaging, in the toxic chemicals discharged into rivers to manufacture the plastics inside. However, it also gave me a grain of hope that not only regular people but also decision makers and big corporations are finally starting to take some steps in the right direction. At Sellafield, an ageing nuclear facility in north-west England; Ghazipur landfill, a 65-metre-high mountain of 14 million tonnes of garbage outside the Indian capital, Delhi; and Kantamanto, the largest second-hand clothes market in Ghana, Franklin-Wallis observes and questions.

It probably was nothing sexual at that age but I still remember the thrill of seeing all those naked women. 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? The sooner we get that we need to fit in with nature and stop dominating it, but manage it in a way that is sympathetic to the natural processes, the better. After months of investigating, the enormity of the waste issue, “begins to take a spiritual toll” on Franklin-Wallis (as he notes in the acknowledgements, he suffers from a chronic pain condition which affected the writing of the book).Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices, and the impact is vast: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces more cobalt than the country’s mines each year. Perhaps in an effort to bring waste workers out of the shadows, Franklin-Wallis introduces everyone he meets by describing their hairstyle and clothing. In the end, it all ends up in the same place - the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass. But I enjoyed the whole book, written with journalistic flair, combining on-the-ground reporting with fascinating data and a crash course in the history of waste, which is really the history of mankind. What’s worse, a lot of the time these actions are not always even better than the behaviors they replace.

With his investigative chops and contagious curiosity, Oliver Franklin-Wallis has cracked wide a dozen hidden, jaw-dropping worlds. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. This is a fascinating and comprehensive tour of the second half of that equation – the tossed-out usually gets a thousandth the attention of the not-yet-purchased, but Oliver Franklin-Wallis does his best to redress that balance, in a book that wills you see the world quite differently than you did before.At Ellington sanitary landfill in Northumberland, waste manager “Victoria – ‘Vic’ – wears a peroxide-blonde bob and a leopard-print blouse under her high-vis jacket”, while Sue, a gleaner (people who take a second harvest from a crop) in Kent is all “straw-blonde hair, lemon-yellow blouse”. 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. Much of the plastic we think we're recycling ends up in landfills or dumped in developing countries. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the workings of the modern world and concerned about its future.

My sister, being both older and a tattle-tale, threatened to tell if I didn't stop looking at those disgusting pictures.It’s an ethos…People don’t understand that we are part of nature and that this (composting) is a natural cycle. With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash.