After reading Waste Wars, you will feel quite differently about throwing away a plastic bag or an old mobile phone, let alone an unwanted computer. Where do you think they end up? Alexander Clapp has some pretty alarming answers. His book is full of disturbing descriptions of the routes that waste has taken, mainly from the rich world to the poor. The more difficult an item is to – genuinely – recycle, the greater the likelihood is that it will end up somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

As rich countries became more sensitive to environmental damage, they encouraged recycling. Some rubbish, of course, can easily be returned to the earth: nobody worries much about unwanted cabbage leaves. But products have become infinitely more complex as technology has raced ahead, and the amount of plastic used in constructing them has vastly increased. This means that a large amount of rubbish is here to stay. Burning plastic, reports Clapp, is more environmentally damaging than burning coal. After all, plastic is basically ‘sequestered carbon’.

Concern about where the rubbish of the rich ends up is not new. In 1960 Vance Packard wrote The Waste Makers, and two years later Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring drew attention to the exploding use of lethal toxins that ended up on farms and in rivers. Partly because of Carson’s book, in 1972 the United States legislated to ban a large array of chemicals. As Clapp points out, the legislation turned the USA into ‘a country that, legally speaking, was full of thousands of tons of toxic materials that could no longer be used’. In the decade after the act was passed, highly dangerous chemicals worth over $500 million were shipped south. 

That was just the beginning. Around the same time, brothers Jack and Charles Colbert began buying up recently banned chemicals and selling them to governments across the developing world as ‘good products’. By the early 1980s, they had earned $180 million from buyers in over a hundred nations. Years later, Jack Colbert was asked if he regretted the trade. ‘Let me ask you a question,’ he replied. ‘So now you have 2,000 tons of pesticide that’s been produced in America, OK, still on sale in the rest of the world … Do you want it to be buried in America or do you want it to be sold to a Third World country?’ 

By the late 1980s, the waste exporting business had moved on from banned chemicals to the residue of legal chemicals. Rich countries were spending large sums to ship hazardous waste into developing countries and, because of the high price tag associated with disposing of it domestically, saving money while doing so. A lot of cash went into bribes, either to high-ranking officials or to the countries themselves: in 1989, one company offered Sudan $300 million (worth around $765 million today) to take incinerated US rubbish. For several developing countries, the practice proved a rare reliable source of national income. Without many factories, roads or ports, these countries were hard pressed to build an economy and invest in their citizens. However, they did often have large tracts of empty land – perfect places on which to dump toxic waste. Many of those tracts went unrecorded. The ‘most alarming aspect of the hazardous waste trade’, argues Clapp, is ‘not what we do know. It’s what we don’t.’ 

In Clapp’s impressively wide search for examples (sometimes he is armed with a Geiger counter to measure radiation), he goes to Guatemala. There, he meets a wildlife conservationist who recalls the moment in 1991 when he witnessed the arrival of three trucks with Mexican number plates and, on their doors, the international symbol for radioactive material. He was adamant they were carrying hazardous waste, but no one believed him. Clapp is unable to find definite answers to the questions of what the trucks were carrying and where it went. Dumping toxic waste into a natural lagoon would amount to a ‘multimillion-dollar exchange in which all evidence of wrongdoing buried itself – literally’: the perfect crime. Guatemalans will never know the truth.

Wealthy countries send waste to developing countries in forms other than rubbish, too. A large quantity of old electronics, purportedly in working order, arrive with the backing of such institutions as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund. Clapp followed their trail to the port city of Tema in Ghana. There he found a makeshift market: steel cargo containers still emblazoned with the names of shipping companies had been sawn in half to form the stalls. Each contained masses of old electronics, all for sale. Most had clearly been shipped in bulk, not as waste to be dumped but as products to be purchased by Ghanaians. However, studies show that at least a quarter of these items don’t work – and within three years of their arrival in West Africa, most of those that did work no longer do so.  

There are plenty more of what Clapp calls ‘e-waste entrepôts’. Israel exports its unwanted electronics – some 130,000 tons annually – to the West Bank. It costs ten times less to smuggle a van of broken TVs and laptops over the Green Line to a Palestinian scrapyard than it does to process a ton of electronic waste in Israel. The cost of sorting the usable and torching the junk is considerable: in 2022, rates of cancer in Palestinian scrap villages were four times higher than those of other towns in the West Bank.

Not all of the world’s waste systems are bad. Nearly 90 per cent of the world’s steel is recycled and one third of our global steel output comes from metal that has been thrown away. Compared to starting from scratch, producing steel in this way saves energy and releases far less carbon dioxide. As the price of steel has risen along with pressure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, countries are increasingly hoarding scrap and banning the export of second-hand steel. But plastic is a different matter. As global use has grown, developed countries have increasingly tried to export their plastic waste. For a while, large amounts of it showed up in Eastern Europe. Then, in the mid-1990s, China became the biggest destination for Western plastic waste – until 2018, when China stopped accepting imports. Instead, it now makes its own plastic, which is cheaper than recycling. 

Waste Wars offers no reassuring plan to reduce plastic waste. For the wealthier parts of the world, the strategy has thus far been to dump the rubbish on the poor, sometimes paying – but often not – those who suffer as a result. As Clapp points out, ‘as long as plastic keeps getting physically diverted by those who consume it the most, the farther from public concern – and political action – it is likely to remain’. But that diversion won’t last forever. The fiction of the petrochemical industry’s unproblematic disposal of its waste is wearing thin. Clapp suggests that the costs of dumping plastic will eventually rise to reflect the damage this all-too-durable material is causing. It is hard to imagine that the costs of using plastic, that wonderful 20th-century material, will survive exposure of the true price we pay to get rid of it.