by Adele A. Wilby
In a recent article, ‘What are Microplastics Doing to Our Bodies’, Nina Agrawal reveals how researchers in a leading laboratory in New Mexico are studying the accumulation of anthropogenic microplastics in our bodies. Although present in many organs in the body, microplastic levels are, according to the research, increasing, especially in our brains. As crucially important as the research findings and the consequences for human health might be, a serious spinoff from the research is the source of the plastic samples used by the researchers, items such as toothbrushes, chunks of fishing nets and a Pokémon card. But these plastic specimens were not from the laboratory waste bags but derived from the trash collected during a cleaning up of a beach in Hawaii. Clearly these plastic items had either washed ashore from rubbish dumped into the ocean or perhaps some illegal fly tipping close to the beach. Either way, it was trash inadequately disposed of.
As we are all aware, waste on the beach is not a new phenomenon, but it is symptomatic of a much larger and wider issue that is, or should be, a cause of real concern to everyone: the disposal of the astronomical levels of trash produced by industry and the consumer society. Alexander Clapp addresses this crucial issue in his book Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish.
Clapp’s exposé is not a bearer of good news for humanity or the planet. He effectively creates in the reader’s imagination a dystopian planetary landscape of mountains of rubbish, polluted seas, of play fields of ash and roads of colourful microplastics as he narrates how human beings are far better at creating waste than our ability to dispose of it effectively. To gauge some idea of the enormity of the problem of waste disposal facing humanity, Clapp draws on a 2020 Nature publication. To quote him, ‘the total mass of the world’s human-made objects … equal the entire biomass of the planet itself. That is to say, the weight of everything created by our hands – skyscrapers, automobiles, iPads, plastic straws – was on the verge of exceeding that of all the trees and all the plants, all animals and all humans, indeed the mass of all living things put together’. For sure, a serious issue to reflect on and one that is difficult to imagine improving in the foreseeable future.
Clapp’s study of waste disposal is structured in four parts, each providing a comprehensive exposition of four wastes: toxic waste, e-waste, shipping waste and plastic waste. The book has various depths which include a veiled criticism of capitalism, over production and the consumer society that it has created, but this does not undermine his argument: he presents copious amounts of information to support such a critique and he has travelled the globe to witness for himself just how the different forms of waste are being disposed of and the impact this has on people and societies. Inevitably issues of serious environmental concern are woven into his argument. The central theme of the book, however, is the ‘geopolitics off garbage’ that allows the wealthy northern countries to move the trash accumulated within national borders to dumps in poorer countries. Irony lies in the fact that in many countries where raw materials were plundered, transported and transformed by wealthy northern countries only for them to be returned to the country of origin in the form of piles of trash, polluting and transforming the environment, impacting on people’s health, society, economies and contributing to climate change.
Any self-satisfaction we might feel when we diligently dump our rubbish in the right coloured bin for recycling or disposing of our no-longer wanted, outdated or broken gadgets in the right place is challenged by Clapp’s revelation that such behaviour is just the start of the long process of waste disposal, and frequently ends in places we never anticipated. Out of sight, out of mind is not enough in our understanding of what happens to our rubbish: our recycling practices are only the tip of the iceberg of waste disposal. Clapp cites the case where activists and journalists in Europe deposited GPS chips in rubbish. A plastic bag dumped in a recycling bin outside Tesco’s supermarket in London was routed eighty miles away to Harwich, then on to Netherlands by ship, to Poland by truck before reaching its destination in an industrial yard full of European garbage, two thousand miles away in Turkey.
The reader cannot help but feel some outrage when reading Clapp’s expositions and this is particularly the case in Part One where he focuses on attempts to dispose of toxic waste from the United States to the poorer countries. This is essentially a historical chapter that exposes the political and economic dynamics behind strategies to find final resting places for toxic waste during the 1980s. Guatemala, is a case in point. Already designated as the ‘serial’ recipient of US waste dumping by the 1990s, things took a turn in 1992 when plans were afoot to build a new port along the island’s coast at Cocoli which was to ‘receive something from the US’: toxic sewage sludge. Rumours, people witnessing activity in the area, and allegations of toxic waste dumping by the US were rife, until the local press disclosed the main beneficiary of the plans would be millions of dollars for the elected president of Guatemala. The project was swiftly aborted but failed to convince the people that somewhere, somehow, toxic waste has been deposited in Guatemala.
Guatemala was not the only country targeted for the nefarious, secret dumping of hazardous waste. ‘Old toxins’, Clapp tells us, ‘Were sent to peripheries where little else had any reason to go’. Thus, abandoned mines, beaches, jungle ravines in Haiti, Congo and Morocco, war zones were all sites for hazardous waste dumping. Likewise, cows in Nigeria dying of fumes from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); in Freetown, Sierra Leone, residents complaining to their government of ‘choking and involuntary tears’ all point to the presence of toxic waste secretly dumped in those areas.
The list of countries that either received or were impacted from toxic waste disposal is extensive, revealing the reach of the trade from wealthy countries to the poorer countries, and indeed the people involved in enabling such activity. In many of these cases, the evidence of toxic waste dumping is inconclusive but as Clapp comments, the cause for most concern with the hazardous waste trade is ‘not what we do know. It’s what we don’t know’.
The reader will be surprised to learn the trade in hazardous waste of that era was carried out legally: the export of toxic waste was not a crime, until the Basel Convention of 1989. By 1994 the movement of hazardous waste from developed countries to developing countries was outlawed, but different strategies for continuing the waste trade came into being. Nations started to definitionally manipulate the Convention. ‘Waste’ and a ‘resource’ were, in Clapp’s analysis, deliberately muddled in the 1990s allowing for deception to be a part of the waste disposal industry. ’Waste’ was not to be dumped in poorer nations, but it was designated for ‘reuse’. There was, he says, ‘an illusion’ that the Basel Convention had been brought the waste trade within the confines of international regulation. Instead, the 1990s were accompanied by what he refers to as a decade when ‘waste export exploded’. But it was not toxic waste only that became the issue, instead it was the waste produced within the confines of everybody’s home: the single-use items going to villages in Vietnam; broken TVs going to slums in Nigeria to mention a few. According to Clapp, ‘of the world’s fifty largest dumpsites, all are to be found in developing nations, informally employing many millions.
The trash of wealthy nations finding its way to lands with limited or no history of handling waste creating employment might give people in wealthier nations fuzzy feelings of well-being of noble action, but that would be a huge mistake. By manipulating language, the transport of trash to poorer countries avoids sanctions. In the post-Cold War era the waste trade is exchanging ‘recyclable’ material, a legitimate practice. But for Clapp, the invocation of ‘recycling’ waste is a ‘deliberate deception foisted on residents of rich countries who were led to believe that being a prodigious consumer was compatible with being a planetary steward’. Thus, according to Clapp, the waste industry has not only survived, but it has also ‘metastasized. It has democratized’ the metaphorical ‘metastasized’ suggesting that global waste industry continues to be involved in moving deadly waste and ‘democratized’ highlights the diversity of practices and people involved in the industry, and the different types of waste now being transported in shiploads to the poorer countries: mobile phones, iPads, computers, TV sets, broken fans, air-conditioners and all the other mod-cons no longer of value or use to consumers in the wealthy northern countries.
The disposal of modern waste is graphically narrated in Part Two of the book, a section that poignantly highlights the illusion of wealthy westerners sending their ‘reusable’ e-tech waste from different companies to a poorer country for ‘use’. The exploitation and health risks to the people who shuck, dismantle and strip the gadgets of every valuable element and then finally burn the remaining skeletons in bonfires sending plume of green and black smoke pillowing into the air, polluting the environment, is alarming.
Nevertheless, Clapp informs us that from amidst the dangerous and dirty work of e-waste disposal in slums such as Agbogbloshie on the outskirts of Accra in Ghana are human stories of hope. The workers involved in this hazardous unhealthy work do so harbouring a hope that they will return to their ancient farmlands in the northern part of Ghana. They are paid a salary equivalent to a public-sector worker in Ghana and many of the workers consider the slum they live in as a ‘work camp’ in the unlikely event that their dream of returning home will be realised. As Clapp points out, the waste disposal practices add to climate change, and it is climate change that has impacted on farming making it unprofitable and eventually driving the people to leave their farms for urban areas where a never-ending supply of e-waste offers greater prospects of long-term employment.
Rare minerals and information are extracted from the endless supplies of e-waste to poor countries, but there is one type of waste disposal that has a long history: scrap metal. In Part Three, Clapp makes known his aversion to a form of scrap waste disposal when he comments, ‘all sorts of unpleasantries are built into the global waste trade. But let me present you with one of the most obscene ones’ and here he is referring to the less well-known industry of ‘shipbreaking’.
The writ of the Basel Convention of 1989 crafted to stop the movement of toxic waste, Clapp reveals, failed to include the disposal of retired ships which he describes as ‘literal tubs brimming with hazardous materials, ranging from asbestos to polychlorinated biphenyls to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to heavy metals to paints infused with arsenic’. Retired naval ships, ferries, luxury liners, cargo ships, tankers are dispensed to the work yards of the dismantlers where they are ‘gutted and cut up like slaughterhouse cattle’ and ‘approximately two thousand experienced dismantlers can make a tanker the length of three football fields disappear in four months’. This vast industry takes place in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Turkey. Moreover, he says, ‘hazardous waste movement is exactly what shipbreaking has always been and will always be’, the ‘profit-driven transfer of toxic vessels from the ports of the wealthier countries to…” semi-peripheral” ones that possess the structural means for receiving volumes of scrap…’.
Clapp’s engaging study ends with a subject that any author who takes waste disposal as a central and serious issue would find impossible to avoid and one of the major sources of waste today – plastic. In Part Four Clapp confronts this troubling issue. To do so, he travelled to Indonesia ‘to witness the lunatic phenomenon of the ‘’trash towns”: villages nestled deep within the volcanic highlands of Java drowning in flows of European and American plastic waste’ where ‘trash layered their streets in waves. It sat in piles that rose higher than the houses. Children played in it’. But this section is not only about the ‘trash towns’ in Indonesia. In this wide-ranging section Clapp explores the early introduction of plastic and how social needs were invented to encourage the production and consumption of plastic. Plastic itself is the transformation of fossil fuel waste: the greater the use of fossil-fuels the greater the need to ‘recycle’ the waste. When reputational disaster struck the mass production of plastics in the 1980s the idea of ‘recyclability’ was mooted and that too has become a disingenuous concept. Still, Clapp points out, ‘plastic recycling, even if it were to be safe would still never address the engine driving our global trash crisis. This is our unsustainable level of production’.
Recent figures indicate that plastic waste in the US has skyrocketed from 60 pounds per person per year in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. Indeed, for every human being their exists 21,000 pieces of plastic in the ocean. By the 1990s China was America’s biggest recipient of its shiploads of rubbish along with most of the foreign plastic, until 2017 when it put a ban on plastic waste importation. In the present day, rather than taking in other’s rubbish, China is one of the major contributors to oceanic plastic pollution on Earth, alongside India and Indonesia.
Clapp’s book is packed with information on the global waste trade industry which he refers to as a ‘crime’. He succeeds in highlighting the seriousness of the issue of the disposal of different forms of global waste and the power relations, social inequalities, the networks of ‘grifters and hustlers’, and the environmental damage that the industry involves. For readers unfamiliar with the extent, complexity and seriousness of the issue, the book is a revelation, evoking reflection on the trajectory of human societies if solutions to the ravenous consumerism and effective, legal and safe solutions to the disposal of interminable supplies of waste remains elusive. Clapp’s compelling book is to be read.