\n<\/p>\n
Your Garbage Has a \u2018Wild Afterlife\u2019 on the International Black Market<\/p>\n
Alexander Clapp, author of new nonfiction book Waste Wars, tracks the worldwide black market trade of our garbage<\/p>\n
By Brianne Kane edited by Andrea Gawrylewski<\/span><\/p>\n Sorting your trash and recycling is common practice: break down the cardboard boxes, separate the compostable material and plastics and put them into the correct containers, put the trash on the curb, and you\u2019re done. But what happens next is where the story gets interesting. A billion-dollar industry exists around moving countless tons of waste from wealthy countries to poorer ones. For two years journalist Alexander Clapp lived out of a backpack and visited the smelliest parts of the most beautiful places on Earth\u2014looking for hidden dump sites in the Venezuelan jungle and scaling mountains of trash in Ghana\u2014for his new book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. He tracks the massive scope of waste management, from top-level international relations to underground whisper networks, and reveals the dirty underbelly of what happens to our trash.<\/p>\n Scientific American spoke with Clapp about the people who break apart and sort our trash all over the world, the growth of the global waste economy and the future of waste management.<\/p>\n [An edited transcript of the interview follows.]<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n Can you tell me where our exported garbage and not-quite-recyclable goods end up?<\/p>\n It would depend what type of trash we\u2019re talking about, when we\u2019re talking about it or from which country it\u2019s being discarded. But a lot of global trash over the last 30 to 40 years has been going to poor countries under the guise that it\u2019s being recycled. That trash will get broken down, or someone will attempt to make some use out of it\u2014to extract some profit from it\u2014and that\u2019s an extremely dangerous and often lethal process where all sorts of contaminants and forever chemicals enter local ecosystems. They go into the air, they go into the water, and they do huge amounts of damage\u2014damage to, disproportionately, the most vulnerable populations in the world.<\/p>\n Why would one country ever, under any circumstances, buy the garbage from another country? Is someone getting scammed, or is there a legitimate reason to buy boatloads of biological, technological or toxic waste?<\/p>\n That is one of the reasons why I got interested in this topic. We send our waste to the very countries that cannot handle their own domestic waste outputs. I think the dichotomy that\u2019s worth keeping in mind with the waste trade is that it\u2019s not necessarily rich countries versus poor countries; within poor countries, you have importers who are actually buying the waste for pennies, and they are very much part of the problem. The most important thing to understand about the waste trade is that in the 1980s many poor countries felt that they had no option other than to import waste from the so-called global north. They were heavily indebted; they were desperate for factories, ports, industry of any kind. And so I think there\u2019s a really insipid, disturbing history of how and why the waste trade began.<\/p>\n Which leads to the question\u2014how much money is actually involved in this global waste economy?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say it costs $140 to put a ton of old plastic in a landfill. A waste broker would actually have to pay the landfill in order to bury that plastic. But what if instead you could sell that plastic to an importer in Malaysia for a few dollars? Then you\u2019re not paying $140; you\u2019re actually making $2 or $3. That said, a lot of the waste trade, by nature, is operating underground. If you\u2019re sending waste to another country, you\u2019re not calling it trash on any export document\u2014you\u2019re calling it recyclable material. One thing that I hope my book encourages or leads people to question is how much of our waste is actually moving around the world.<\/p>\n What are you most interested in regarding the future of this waste economy and of waste management on a global scale?<\/p>\n I think what\u2019s really interesting about the global waste trade is that in many ways it\u2019s like the global drug trade. You see organized crime groups that are getting more and more involved in the waste trade because, frankly, the supply of this stuff is endless. The punishment if you get caught moving waste is negligible. I think the future of waste export and waste movement is organized crime. I think they\u2019re going to see this as a monumentally lucrative opportunity.<\/p>\n What was the most shocking story you uncovered while researching for this book?<\/p>\n The most shocking story probably was with the cruise ship-dismantling industry in T\u00fcrkiye. On the Aegean coast of T\u00fcrkiye, there\u2019s a [town] called Aliağa where American cruise ship companies disproportionately send a lot of their ships to be dismantled. And you would think that the process of deconstructing a cruise ship would be mechanically refined, but it’s actually kind of this maniacal process done almost entirely by hand where you have armies of helmeted men filing into these cruise ships and breaking this stuff up. One thing that I found was that most of the men who get recruited into doing this work have little idea of what they\u2019re doing. They\u2019ve never seen the ocean before. They were recruited from the middle of T\u00fcrkiye and given a week\u2019s worth of training. It\u2019s absolutely excruciating.<\/p>\n What was the most surprisingly common occurrence across all of your research?<\/p>\n In terms of the most common story that I would hear, it\u2019s the extent to which in poor countries trash, and especially plastic, is just regarded as another commodity. Generally [the people I encountered didn\u2019t] think about this stuff as a potentially toxic substance. That was shocking to me. In places such as Java and [other parts of] Indonesia, hundreds of tons of Western plastic are imported every week and used as fuel in tofu factories, and then that tofu gets exported around the world’s most populous island [Java]. I was just struck by how kind of pedestrian it seems to just burn plastic in places to get rid of it or to find some use for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Your Garbage Has a \u2018Wild Afterlife\u2019 on the International Black Market Alexander Clapp, author of new nonfiction book Waste Wars, tracks the worldwide black market trade of our garbage By Brianne Kane edited by Andrea Gawrylewski Sorting your trash and recycling is common practice: break down the cardboard boxes, separate the compostable material and plastics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[3718,706,3719,531,306,1142,3717,1610,1714],"class_list":{"0":"post-10658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-afterlife","9":"tag-black","10":"tag-garbage","11":"tag-international","12":"tag-market","13":"tag-tracks","14":"tag-wars","15":"tag-waste","16":"tag-wild"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n