We at Don’t Waste Durham like to pick up our heads from time to time and take a satellite view of the world of waste, to see what we’re doing long range and to remember why we’re doing it. We have a sense of where waste goes, how the waste management system works—and doesn’t work—and when claims about recyclability are authentic, or are well-intended but come short of the goal, or are simply greenwashing.
A new book, Wasteland by journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis, offers just such a broader perspective, taking us on an eye-opening journey into the world of waste—where it goes, what happens to it, and what it all means for our health and the environment. The picture is often grim, but we are not without options in how we respond.
Open dumping in Nepal. (Photo courtesy Sylwia Bartazel)
“Satellite view” is an inept metaphor for the perspective Franklin-Wallis provides us. His boots are on the ground, across the world: commercial recycling and composting facilities and a radioactive waste repository in his native Great Britain; the Kantamanka second-hand clothing market in Accra, Ghana; the Ghazipur dump in New Delhi, a mountain of trash regularly picked over by natives at great risk to themselves; and more.
Franklin-Wallis also takes us on a journey through the many components of the waste universe: landfilling, incineration, wastewater treatment, food waste diversion and composting, second-hand textile donation and resale, electronic waste management, nuclear waste management, and industrial waste generation from mining operations and other sources. The narrative is well-researched and footnoted, and it’s as comprehensive as you can hope for in just short of 400 pages. It’s also deeply personal, in his interviews with waste professionals and activists around the world, and in his own efforts to reduce his footprint.
Open dumping is ubiquitous
In his introduction, the author leads with an overpowering fact that informs the rest of the book: a third of the world's solid waste is disposed of in open dumps or burned in the open air. Those “environmentally unsafe” facilities, as the World Bank describes them, are largely in under-developed nations. Yet before we condescendingly wag our fingers at those nations’ for their lack of our engineered and regulated waste management infrastructure, let’s remember that we in the developed world generate much of that waste, and that most of us don’t care where it goes. Out of sight, out of mind is still the rule.
We assuage our guilt about our hyper-consumptive lifestyle by putting recyclables in the bin, or donating clothing we no longer want to thrift shops and charities, or putting plastic bags and other plastic films in the designated bins at grocery stores. We do all this without thinking much about whether these items get to where we assume they are going.
Another not-so-fun fact: In the United States—the most wasteful nation in the world—the average person generates 4.4 pounds of waste per day (data from the World Bank as of 2016). That figure represents an increasing amount over the years despite all the recycling, composting, and donating of second-hand materials that we’ve tried to establish as a way of life.
Indeed, it is the Sysiphean endeavor to extract value from our discarded stuff that flavors Franklin-Wallis’s narrative throughout the book. To some extent, he reports, the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality carries over to recycling. We assuage our guilt about our hyper-consumptive lifestyle by putting recyclables in the bin, or donating clothing we no longer want to thrift shops and charities, or putting plastic bags and other plastic films in the designated bins at grocery stores. We do all this without thinking much about whether these items get to where we assume they are going—i.e., to someplace where at least some of the value of these items will be recovered.
Textile bales ready for shipment. (Photo courtesy Rais Industries)
If we were to look, Franklin-Wallis suggests, we might not like what we see. Take the second-hand clothing market. The fashion industry, it turns out, is a waste apocalypse. “The fundamental job of any clothing company,” Franklin-Wallis writes, “is not to dress you, it is to make you want more clothes.” The craze for fast-fashion is particularly sinister in this regard, generating lower-quality clothing that’s made to be left in the drawer or discarded or donated within a couple of years. Charities retain the higher-quality good stuff to sell for themselves, while the fast-fashion goods are baled up for resale elsewhere, often overseas to African or sub-Asian countries.
In places like Accra’s Kantamanka market, the re-sellers hope that the bales contain enough good-quality stuff to make the economics work. Often, they do not. Up to 40% of these items end up in a landfill, and in Accra’s case, the one engineered landfill was so overwhelmed by discarded clothing that the material is now being sent some distance from the city to be dumped. Another unfortunate consequence of these market dynamics is that the enormous influx of second-hand clothing from the United States and other wealthy nations decimates the textile-making industries in these recipient nations, causing economic hardship.
Plastics recycling in question
Items in other categories fare no better—and, yes, we’re talking about plastics. There’s reason to believe, for example, that the plastic film you return to select grocery stores is not going to recyclers. Watchdog groups have attached radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to some plastic film items and found that many of them end up in landfills. It’s also worth noting that, since Wasteland was published, the registry consumers can use to identify stores in their neighborhoods that take plastic film was discontinued last November, apparently due to lack of interest.
Bales of plastic bottles in Singapore. (Photo courtesy Nick Fewings)
For plastics generally, the recycling rate has never been greater than about 10%. The plastics industry has vigorously promoted recycling as the solution to the plastic waste problem, but recent evidence suggests that the industry has long known that recycling would never live up to this promise.
Which brings us to a central point in Wasteland: Makers of consumer products have historically attempted to lay our waste problems at the feet of consumers. Through the vigorous promotion of recycling and the funding of front groups like Keep America Beautiful, Franklin-Wallis writes, U.S. industry wants us as buyers to take the lead in responsible waste management—while we keep buying. Meanwhile, in the shadows, corporations and their lobbies work aggressively to block laws that would place more responsibility for waste management on producers—which, by the way, generate a significant portion of our waste before their products ever make it to the shelves in our stores.
Paper/cardboard bales in Mexico. (Photo courtesy Alfonso Navarro)
Since the middle of the last century, marketing gurus have promoted and extolled the single-use, throw-away society. As Franklin-Wallis points out, U.S. industry has not needed much prodding. The plastics industry stands out here: If we as consumers just make the effort to recycle our plastic packaging and products, plastics companies can make and sell more stuff. Fortunately, a growing number of communities are not buying this line. Unfortunately, many state legislatures—including North Carolina’s—have been successfully captured by the plastics industry and have legally preempted local efforts to regulate things like plastic bags.
Keep recycling, but rethink consumption
What should we take away from all this? Don’t Waste Durham doesn’t suggest that we stop recycling, despite the recycling industry's flaws and intensive resource use. From an environmental justice standpoint at the very least, the more waste we Durhamites can divert from the Sampson County Landfill, the less we burden the surrounding, low-income community with the facility’s pollution.
We are the demand side, and if we can “demand” with more discrimination—whether by buying less or by buying smarter—we can reduce our own generation of waste and get companies to respond with more responsible production practices.
We also urge people to continue giving their outdated or unused clothing to charity, and we encourage people to reuse and repurpose items where possible. Reuse is, of course, Don’t Waste Durham’s core mission. Through programs like Boomerang Bag and Green To Go, we aim to reduce our community’s impact on the environment and human health and to support a sustainable and more equitable local economy.
But more than that: Because so much waste is generated from the processes that make what we want, we suggest taking a longer look at what we buy and whether we really need all the stuff that we think we do.
It’s not all on us. Corporations need to play their part, and we need to support legislation that compels them to do so. But we are the demand side, and if we can “demand” with more discrimination—whether by buying less or by buying smarter—we can reduce our own generation of waste and get companies to respond with more responsible production practices.
Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future, was published in 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. Headline banner photo: waste dump in Nicaragua, courtesy Hermes Rivera.