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.