Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters

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They can snowball into “fatbergs,” immense fat-white plugs of decomposing putrescence that block entire sewers and cause the system to burst and flood the streets above. What he learns is often eye-opening, both in terms of the sheer extent of the waste we produce – from plastics, clothing, food and electrical equipment – and the pollution it causes to the land and the air as it breaks down, belching out methane and other pollutants. Why do we think so much about where stuff comes from, but almost never about where it goes after we’re done? For a topic that most of us rarely give much thought to, he captured my attention from start to finish. Again and again, we are scouring the innards of the Earth and filling the empty void with our waste.

Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?

After months of investigating, the enormity of the waste issue, “begins to take a spiritual toll” on Franklin-Wallis (as he notes in the acknowledgements, he suffers from a chronic pain condition which affected the writing of the book). In Wasteland, Oliver Franklin-Walls offers us a behind the scenes guide to the processing plants, rubbish tips and refuse mountains that lurk in our back yards; the thundering machinery and skilled workers who strive tirelessly to relieve us of the spoils of our own profligacy. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. My sister, being both older and a tattle-tale, threatened to tell if I didn't stop looking at those disgusting pictures. I’ve been trying to live more intentionally in regards to the things I purchase, get rid of, and waste.

The only thing this book really did for me, aside from extinguish the last of my hope that our children might lead long and happy lives, was reinforce my opposition to nuclear power. It was interesting, though heartbreaking, to learn of the waste pickers around the world, especially in developing countries who sort through our trash, finding things to use and sell. Everything you need to know (or have suspicions of) about planned obsolescence - initially modelled into the design of tvs, cars, in the 50’s - now an ingrained process. I loved learning where all our trash ends up, be it textiles, food, industrial waste, chemical waste, electronics, packaging, and more. There is an ungodly amount of information that there is no way to totally absorb but like I think very necessary.There are stories in all our discarded things: who made them, what they meant to a person before they were thrown away. Sewage flooding our rivers, plastics in ours oceans, rivers, bodies; rubbish shipped abroad and inflicted on the world’s poor. Much of the plastic we think we're recycling ends up in landfills or dumped in developing countries. An eye-opening account of the global waste crisis—and how our throwaway culture is trashing the planet.

The author talks some about the people he meets in the garbage business, but thankfully that didn't ruin the book for me. Just as everything we consume comes from somewhere on earth, so too everything we produce must go somewhere on earth—even if we don't want to think about it. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions.

I don't think the author at all intended for this book to be a gloomy outlook on how we are all f**ked. It’s thought that 25 percent of all clothing made is never sold" but instead thrown away by the companies.

We are perhaps starting slowly to come full circle, with the growth of the sharing economy and the realisation that we don’t need individual ownership of everything. In Wasteland, Oliver Franklin-Wallis journeys to some of humanity’s least fragrant locations to literally wade among our rubbish, discovering how it got there and exploring its effects on the lives of the people charged with dealing with it. Franklin-Wallis does a bang-up job of highlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly of the waste "management" across the world.

It might be burned, buried, reconstituted or sent on an expedition to new lands, where it might be burned, buried or reconstituted. Just as everything we consume comes from somewhere on earth, so too everything we produce must go somewhere on earth – even if we don't want to think about it. This is an excellent book that discusses the various forms of trash that humankind has created, and how we deal with it today.