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

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after newsletter promotion For a while, I could barely do the dishes. My heavily pregnant wife had to do most of the jobs At some point in my pain journey – I forget where now – I was introduced to the distinction between “pain” and “suffering”. Pain is acute sensation, dictated by nociceptors and nerve pathways. Pain is verbs: stabbing, burning, aching. Suffering denotes everything else caused by that pain: avoidance, anxiety, loneliness, depression. If pain is what our nerves tell us, suffering is how our minds react. I found a better therapist, privately. If I had waited for an NHS appointment, I might not be here now – and, well, a year or so later, here I am, writing this story. Chronic pain – any pain that persists for longer than three months – is a vast and growing public health problem. The numbers are unclear (unlike cancer, there is no national register). By some estimates, between a quarter and a third of the UK population live with ongoing pain; for those who are 75 or over, that figure rises to more than half. About 3 million people in the UK live with chronic “primary” pain – that which has no identifiable physical cause. For those with this condition, myself included, pain is no longer a symptom: it is the disease itself. Pain flare‑ups would happen seemingly at random, and last days or weeks at a time Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops. Philippa Nuttall writes on the environment and climate and is based in Brussels.

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 book compels us to. A fascinating, deeply researched and hugely important expose of what happens to the stuff we no longer want, and the social and environmental cost of dealing with it. Revelatory, thoughtful and honest about our complex relationship with waste.' -- Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century An incredible journey… full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts’– Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler To The World It starts out informative and entertaining, but the end of the book, I was soberly concerned and almost hopeless. What can I as a private citizen do? My generation and the generation older than me have too much stuff, and it isn’t stuff wanted by our children and grandchildren–the heirloom good china, silverplate, figurines, and embroidered linens aren’t modern enough. My quilt friends despair because no one wants their “outdated” quilts that are the wrong color or style. The thrift stores will soon be deluged with our stuff. And not all of that stuff finds new homes.

At times, the British healthcare system has caused me as much suffering as the pain itself.’ Illustration: Timo Lenzen/The Guardian Franklin-Wallis, features editor at British GQ, is interested in what happens to things after we throw them away, although the story inevitably becomes intertwined with his personal attempts to reduce his own output. The author chronicles his treks through sewer systems and visits to recycling plants, staggered by the size of the waste problem even while finding some reasons for optimism in changing social attitudes and practices. However, as he shows, most solutions seem to generate further problems. For example, he believed that using tote bags instead of plastic was environmentally responsible, until he learned that totes come with a sizable footprint. For decades, wealthy countries exported their waste to poorer countries, and although the practice has diminished, there is a painful legacy. Writing about his trips to India and Ghana, he shows us that they have waste problems of their own, many so massive they might be impossible to overcome. The most common ways to dispose of waste are to burn it, bury it, dump it into the ocean, or simply let it pile up. Of course, these “solutions” merely turn it into a problem for someone else. Franklin-Wallis wishes he could offer a sweeping solution, but he sees no easy fixes. He proposes legislation to require greater transparency from companies, which is a good idea but does not get to the core issue of waste being caused by overproduction, which in turn is tied to overconsumption. “The conclusion that I come to is laughably simple,” he writes. “Buy less stuff. I recognize that this is not the most original idea, but there’s something liberating in it.” Is this sort of individual action the remedy? It’s an essential part, perhaps, but it’s not a satisfying answer. Nevertheless, the author gives readers much to ponder. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. The Revival is currently a non-profit, and each collection is small-scale and handmade. It sells its designs in pop-up shops in and around Accra. At the moment, the operation is tiny, and can account for only a fraction of the goods arriving in Kantamanto. “We realized that there’s so much waste, and that there is not enough demand for it,” he says.

He says we should lobby for bag bans when all 30 life cycle studies show that that would increase CO2, fossil fuel use, waste and overall harm. Oliver Franklin-Wallis: ‘In August, I will have been in pain for three years.’ Photograph: Martin Pope/The Guardian DAVIS: In this book, you cover the entire world – dumps in New Delhi, e-waste making land in Ghana, toxic plastic dumping in Southeast Asia. Is there any particular community or person that is really seared into your mind as far as the problem being so egregious? An incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts' Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy — and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away?Wasteland” is heavy on facts, many of them interesting and sobering. Twenty thousand plastic bottles are sold around the world every second. The world produced 2bn tonnes of solid waste in 2016, a figure that will rise to 3.3bn tonnes by 2050. But the piles of numbers can occasionally be a strain. At such moments, readers may find themselves agreeing that waste is “not the most appealing subject” for a book, as the author himself admits near the beginning of his.

A fascinating, deeply researched and hugely important expose of what happens to the stuff we no longer want, and the social and environmental cost of dealing with it' Gaia Vince With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash. An incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts’ Oliver Bullough, author of MoneylandThere are stories in all our discarded things: who made them, what they meant to a person before they were thrown away. In the end, it all ends up in the same place – the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass.’ It’s funny: a few months earlier, that interaction might have sent me into another spiral. But, to my surprise, in the weeks after the appointment, something inside me lifted. I finally accepted that, as well-meaning as the medical professionals might be, they were no longer really trying to make me better. Not better in the way that I intended. To them, I was a lost cause. The sensation was not of failure, but of closure. There are stories in all our discarded things: who made them, what they meant to a person before they were thrown away. In the end, it all ends up in the same place - the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass.' This is an incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts. My relationship with garbage is never going to be the same' -- Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler to the World The chapters of this book are like a personal tour of different kinds of waste: landfills, recycling (especially plastics), fashion/textiles, food waste, electronic waste, industrial waste, etc. The author is a journalist, and this book often reads a bit like a news piece, but in more detail and depth. It has a first-person feel to it, documenting the interactions the author has with workers that are directly involved in many of the trades that manage our waste. I think this makes the writing more engaging, but I was also nagged by the suspicion that maybe the book didn't include many voices of other experts that might be studying the problem of waste at a higher level.

Although pain is frustratingly subjective, it is, at least for the most part, relatively predictable. You spill a hot cup of tea, and the moment the liquid scalds your skin, damaged cells release chemicals that activate nociceptors – a body-wide network of pain detectors – in the surrounding tissue. Those nociceptors transmit a signal through the nervous system: an alert is fired to your spinal cord, triggering a reflex reaction (removing your hand from the hot object). At the same time, another signal passes to your brain so it can work out how bad the damage is, and therefore how much it needs to hurt to discourage you from doing it again. Pain researchers commonly compare that moment to a gate being opened: the worse the injury, the wider the opening. The problem arises when, in some cases, the gate stays open. The pain becomes chronic. Does that mean we shouldn’t resell our stuff and try to extend the life of things wherever possible? “Honestly, I’m not sure,” writes Franklin-Wallis. His willingness to accept that “the answer is complex, the ethics unclear” is refreshing. We would do well to heed his call to “recognise that our decisions about waste can have unseen consequences for people and places thousands of miles away” and to stop treating our waste, and the people who deal with it, as a dirty secret “to be hidden away”. In August, I will have been hurting for three years. For most of that time, I have held on to hope: the hope that I was just the right scan, the right referral, away from the person who would diagnose the thing. The person who would fix it – fix me – and make my life the way it was before.

Summary

We are living in a waste crisis. Sewage flooding our rivers, plastics in ours oceans, rivers, bodies; rubbish shipped abroad and inflicted on the world’s poor. Why? Why do we think so much about where stuff comes from, but almost never about where it goes after we’re done? I always thought of the thrift store as a comforting place. Somewhere I could reliably and conscientiously take unwanted clothing to be resold and re-worn, or as the fashion industry has recently rebranded it, re- loved. In the process, charities do great things with the profits from reselling them: supporting troops. Saving pets. Curing cancer. But, like many of us, I never knew the full story. And so, I started responding to some flare-ups by hurting myself. Not in a life-threatening way – I never drew blood – but enough to distract me from my everyday hurt with a newer, more visceral one. I’ll be clear: I was stupid. I was expressing the anger I felt at my body for betraying me; it was some way of controlling the uncontrollable. I didn’t tell anyone else what I was doing, and took care not to make it obvious – until one evening my wife noticed that I had large bruises covering my thighs. We argued. I told her I would stop. I didn’t.