Oliver Franklin-Wallis (Simon & Schuster)
FROM sewers overflowing with human excrement to the crisis created by the fast-fashion industry, waste is everywhere. This makes by Oliver Franklin-Wallis all the more pressing at present.
Franklin-Wallis specialises in long, narrative tales in his day job as features editor of the UK magazine GQ. In Wasteland, he tackles all elements of the effects of waste, from cities in India and Ghana to the banks of the river Thames in London. His eye for detail, honed over years of non-fiction writing, turns the abstract into the immediate – and the alarming.
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The solid waste, or garbage, industry contributes 5 per cent to global greenhouse emissions, he writes, more than shipping or aviation. A third of what we throw away is less than 12 months old. “The modern economy is built on trash,” writes Franklin-Wallis.
Many people try to minimise their impact. The author writes of washing yogurt containers and tearing the plastic windows off cardboard sandwich boxes so they can be recycled. Yet it is often all for naught because, as he explains, much of the waste produced in high-income countries, including recycling, ends up in landfill, probably in another country.
Part of what makes Wasteland so powerful is that it doesn’t chide, unlike some books about the environment. Nor is it a shouty manifesto. Its strongest parts are when Franklin-Wallis walks with those contributing to, or affected by, the failures, injustices and complexities of dealing with waste.
It is through these vignettes that we understand the real impact of, say, fast fashion. A lot of unwanted charity shop clothing is shipped to Africa, Ghana in particular. We meet the Ghanaian municipal waste official who answers questions despite clearly fearing the author is yet another journalist out for quick quotes about the Western predilection for seasonal wardrobe changes, while doing nothing to help change those habits.
Then there is the tearful head of a local charitable foundation, who explains that the spines of women, and the cartilage in their necks, begin to deteriorate within just two months of starting to carry bundles of clothes weighing 55 kilograms on their heads to stalls in Ghana’s Kantamanto Market.
Amazing skills are developed in waste industries, too. Take the waste-pickers atop the mountain of rubbish at Ghazipur landfill site in New Delhi, India. They can quickly tell into which category (of 87 at the site) any one item belongs. That is out of a staggering 92,500 tonnes of fresh garbage added daily.
The book doesn’t simply cover the stuff we throw in our bins. Chapters on sewerage systems with grand historical sweeps contrast with pointed, first-person visits to new projects designed to alleviate the burden on our water systems.
There is also a section on the least bad way of disposing of nuclear waste from the Sellafield plant in the UK while waiting for the government to fund a more permanent solution – in a building called the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, or Thorp.
This example might leave things all too visible, but discarding stuff and then forgetting about it is generally easy in the West. Between 1960 and 2010, the amount the average person in the US threw away tripled. Clearly the attitude of those in high-income nations is “out of sight, out of mind”.
But Franklin-Wallis ensures we are unable to look away from the impact of the endless production of waste – particularly on people. Wasteland isn’t a comfortable read, but it is an important one.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
