Wasteland

When I first picked up Oliver Franklin-Wallis' “Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future,” I'll admit I was expecting a dense, depressing read about overflowing landfills and plastic-filled oceans. Important stuff, sure, but not necessarily a page-turner. Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Franklin-Wallis has a gift for bringing urgent global issues vividly to life through masterful storytelling and on-the-ground reporting. He quite literally takes readers through mountains of trash and rivers of sewage, introducing us to the remarkable people fighting on the front lines of the waste crisis in some of the most polluted places on Earth. From garbage “pickers” scraping to survive inside New Delhi's landfills to engineers battling blocked sewers in London, these individuals put a human face on the stark statistics.

And those statistics are stark. Through interviews with experts across the waste management spectrum, Franklin-Wallis meticulously pieces together the full picture of where our massive volumes of waste end up. Spoiler alert: it's often dumped right back on vulnerable communities or simply allowed to accumulate in toxic perpetuity. He reveals the uncomfortable truth that even well-intentioned environmental solutions can backfire, like reusable tote bags requiring more resources to produce than disposable plastic.

While the scale of the problem is decidedly grim, the book balances this with inspiring stories of activists and legislators driving change. But Franklin-Wallis routinely checks his own optimism against the harsh reality that most “solutions” just create new issues down the line. He ultimately concludes the root of the trash dilemma lies with overproduction and overconsumption of goods. His proposed fix is as simple as it is unlikely to occur: we all just need to buy less stuff.

Franklin-Wallis knows this centralized message provides little satisfaction. But paired with the colorful narratives about those creatively tackling waste in their communities, “Wasteland” delivers an abundance of food for thought. The book succeeds in bringing an amorphous global crisis down to the personal level, revealing the uncomfortable role we each play in the waste cycle while empowering readers to become part of the solution.

Comprehensive Look At The World Of Waste. I've seen bits and pieces of some of this in some books, such as Plastic Free by Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, Unraveled by Maxine Bedat, Worn Out by Alyssa Hardy, Pipe Dreams by Chelsea Wald, and Sewer by Jessica Leigh Hester, just to name a few. And I've even lived a version of some of it, having worked at a US nuclear waste disposal facility a couple of times over a period of a couple of years. But this is the first book I've ever found that really covers all aspects of waste from nearly every possible angle. About the only glaring omission, perhaps, is space junk - the orbital debris that causes headaches for new and existing satellites and the International Space Station and could one day cause a *major* problem terrestrially via knocking all satellites out of usability (an issue known as the Kessler Effect, and used quite well in the late Matthew Mather's Cyber Storm trilogy of fiction).

But what Franklin-Wallis *does* cover, he truly does cover in remarkable depth and clarity, using a combination of direct interviews and scholarly research to give both a human face to each particular issue and ground it in its full severity. This books is truly quite eye opening in several different respects, and will likely greatly add to the overall discussion of the topic... assuming enough people read it. Which is, in part, where this review comes in. Go read the book already. :)

The documentation is *maybe* *slightly* low at about 21% of the overall text, but this is actually within the lower bound of "normal" in my experience, and thus not worthy of a star deduction nor even true criticism, I'm simply noting it because I try to make a similar note in most non-fiction reviews.

Overall truly an excellent book full of both reality and hope, and very much recommended.

An enlightening and often frightening and overwhelming book on the complicated global network of our waste industry and its sins of the past, present and future.

Waste out of sight is waste out of mind, as affluent nations buy themselves free of their guilt with their second-hand donations and recycling initiatives. In a novel form of waste colonialism, we're simply pushing our waste onto nations without environmental regulations nor the infrastructure to cleanly deal with it. And while waste should be visible and front and center, it secretly trickles into our underground waters, is emitted into air as toxic particles, or causes death and sickness on the other side of the world.

The only sensible solution for the average person is to consume less. As long as the waste industry is somewhat opaque, you can never be sure if your waste ends up in a landfill, incinerator, or material recycling plant.

Is your city's sewer network connected to the stormwater pipes?
Where does your city's recycled plastic really go?
Where has your country buried it's nuclear waste of the past?