About this deal
In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind. Oliver Franklin-Wallis is an award-winning magazine journalist, whose writing has appeared in GQ, WIRED, The Guardian, the New York Times, The Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Economist's 1843 magazine, and many other publications.
I have been quite hopeless about the current state of Earth's pollution, and this books' findings confirmed them. I was particularly impressed to see how many categories he covered under the "waste" umbrella - from garbage and recycling, to sewage and toxic sludge, to nuclear waste - it all "flowed" smoothly together. Waste management plays an important role in modern capitalism, global inequality, post-colonialism and, of course, environmental degradation. I didn't want to get into trouble, or worse, have someone come and throw them in the burn barrel, so I nudged the box down under some broken machinery. I suspect that I am like most people, I try to recycle as much as I can, I have general recycling, a box for batteries and defunct electronics, bags for scrunchy and soft plastic and we have one of the hot bins that makes vegetable peelings into fine compost.
I've been fascinated by what people throw away ever since and when I saw this book, I immediately added it.
There are stories in all our discarded things: who made them, what they meant to a person before they were thrown away. For a topic that most of us rarely give much thought to, he captured my attention from start to finish.And it’s no good saying don’t feel guilty because an individual can’t doom the planet, because by that logic, an individual can’t save the planet either (true, I know) so what is the point of taking any individual action at all?