The garbage war: A wound that won’t close
There is a lot that shocks you when you read Alexander Clapp’s book “The Garbage War, reports from the world’s landfills”, published by Doma Publications. In each chapter of the book there is something that makes you realize your ignorance about the issue of garbage or revise what you thought you knew about concepts such as recycling and microplastics, the role of powerful countries in the destruction of the environment and the waste problem created in poorer countries.
He writes in the chapter “Plasticisation”: “In the mid-1970s, tiny plastic particles – or “microplastics”, as was the term introduced in 2004 by marine biologist Richard Thompson – were found in fish stomachs. In 1997, an American sailor named Charles Moore, sailing in the Northeast Pacific, noticed that for seven whole days, every five minutes, he saw pieces of plastic near his boat. Two years later, he returned to the area with a huge net. “The moment we picked up that net was revealing,” Moore told me. “Oh, I thought, it’s much more serious than I imagined.” For every pound of plankton Moore caught, there were 6 pounds of plastic. As it turned out, the “great Pacific garbage patch” was three times the size of France and was one of at least five major oceanic eddies sucking up trash from the planet’s ocean currents; from what Moore told me, based on data he has published in a number of academic journals, the total mass of plastic is such that “humanity would need at least 70.000 years to remove it from the oceans.”
“There is no more room to store all this plastic. It has to somehow disappear. The easiest is to burn it and make it look like an accident. And this is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon.”
And it continued. In 2006, so-called “plastic-freezing” rocks – clusters of volcanic rock, shells and coral with molten plastic – began to be discovered off the coast of Hawaii. In 2009, plastic was found in samples of melted ice from Antarctica. Four years later, plastic was found floating in space. Five years later, plastic was discovered in the most extreme remote spot on Earth: a camera captured a plastic bag swimming 10,000 metres below the sea surface in the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on the planet. In 2019, microplastics were found near the summit of Mount Everest. Three years later it was observed that the microplastics had now penetrated the bodies of their creators and were circulating in the blood of three out of four people, leading scientists to speculate that the average person – the person holding this book, for example – probably consumes on a weekly basis an amount of plastic equivalent to a credit card.”
And a little further: “From the petrochemical industry’s point of view, promoting recycling was a means to an end: to produce even more plastic. Every week humanity produces new things equal to its weight, and of these it is estimated that, on a global basis, only 1% is still in use six months after purchase. Our consumption habits resulting from the production and use of such goods and services now account for more than half of our total carbon emissions. Every day humanity throws away 1.5 billion plastic cups, nearly 115 million kilograms of clothing, 220 million aluminium cans, 3 million car tyres.
For every person there is currently just over a tonne of discarded plastic – scattered on land, buried in the earth or strayed into the sea, and it is almost certain that most of this plastic will remain on the planet for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years after us. In the oceans alone, there are 21,000 pieces of plastic for every human being – supermarket bags and plastic rings from six-packs of beer and bottle tops. By 2050 their total mass will exceed the weight of all the fish on the planet and is expected to double every six years. Meanwhile, in the one minute it took you to read this paragraph, another 1 million plastic bottles were thrown in the trash, and another cartload of plastic has ended up in the seas.”
In the chapter “The Garbage Man” he writes: “This waste (tons of dirty imported plastic), which is too bulky to be buried in a landfill and too cheap to even attempt to recycle, is eventually burned as “fuel” in hundreds of Indonesian factories making tofu and crackers. It’s an environmental bombshell, the effects of which have become increasingly apparent over the past 20 years: it’s unthinkably dangerous to burn plastic Doritos bags to cook one of your country’s staple foods. And it’s also hard to find a more glaring example of the flattening global onslaught of plastic: it’s so much that they’re clearing entire forests in far-off Indonesia to fit it in, and so hard to get rid of that the only solution is to burn it.”
The garbage war rages unchecked today. In his book, in a bold and daring way, Alexander Clapp reports what he found in his fieldwork across five continents – from Central America and Africa to the Aegean and Indonesia – looking for the places and people who ultimately pick up our waste: toxic waste, e-waste, scrap metal, plastics. He talks to workers and politicians, scientists and waste brokers, shipowners and activists, exploring the unsung world of global waste trafficking and the ferocious economic interests that govern it.
Alexander Clapp is a writer and journalist based in Athens. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. He is the recipient of the Whiting Nonfiction Grant, the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, the Robert B. Silvers Reporting Grant, and the Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award, among others. He has also received the Alistair Horne Fellowship from Oxford and the Berggruen Fellowship.
– What motivated you to start researching the global trade in waste? What inspired you to write “The War on Garbage?”
It was 2020, when I was travelling by bus in Romania. I looked out the window and saw something unusual: huge mounds of stacked plastic trash in the countryside were creating dirty towers. I asked where they had come from, who had dumped them there. The officials in charge in Bucharest told me that they did not come from Romania. They had arrived by sea from France and Germany. The aim was to burn them in dozens of cement factories scattered in the Romanian countryside. Interestingly, the cement factories are owned by French and German companies.
France and Germany are not just dumping huge quantities of plastic in Romania. It’s not just that they are burning it and leaving behind huge amounts of toxic pollution. Something even more insidious is happening. This process allows them to claim that all this plastic is being recycled, that they are benefiting the environment.
The more I thought about what I had seen in Romania, the more I realised that this story is indicative of the way Europe works. One half of the continent, the richer half, the one that admires itself for its environmental sensitivity, is dumping its garbage on the other half, the poorer half. As Greeks know very well, it is precisely this half of the continent that often receives lessons in ethics from countries like Germany on responsible environmental management.
My book focuses on problems like this: which societies should take care of other people’s garbage and why? It looks at the issue through a global lens. What I saw in Romania was only the tip of the iceberg. For the last forty years, huge amounts of European and American waste have been loaded onto ships and transported for profit to the poorest countries in the world, countries that often cannot even manage their own waste. I wanted to understand how this phenomenon started. Who thought it was a good idea? And why – despite the fact that we have known for years that sending our garbage to poor countries is disastrous – did it never stop?
Why did it stop?
I am not an environmentalist. What I write about Greece usually focuses on politics, crime or corruption. But that’s exactly what the international waste trade is: a story of politics, crime and corruption.
– How do you see the issue of waste as connected to broader issues of environmental justice and global inequality?
Waste is – by definition – something no one wants. Getting rid of it is expensive. It accumulates quickly. They smell. They are often toxic. So where does it end up? Who should live next door to them? These are questions that get to the heart of debates around injustice and inequality. Let’s look at the case of Athens. Where does much of the city’s waste go? To the west, in Ano Liosia – an area inhabited, not coincidentally, by Roma and Pontian communities, who suffer severe social exclusion and discrimination from the rest of Greek society.
Now, let’s look at this on a global scale. Whether it’s toxic chemicals being dumped in Nigeria, old electronics being shipped to Ghana or containers full of plastic arriving in Malaysia, the world’s richest countries have made it a business to send their waste to distant places where they will never have to see it again and where desperate communities are forced to suffer the consequences.
– You mention in the book that a significant amount of waste is ultimately not recycled. Can you explain what actually happens to the plastic and electronic waste that we think is recycled?
Much of the plastic is not recycled because, quite simply, it cannot be recycled effectively. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is basic economics: it costs much more to try to “resurrect” old plastic than to produce new plastic. And that’s something that will probably never change.
For many years, rich countries didn’t even have to address the myths and problems of plastic recycling. That’s because, to a large extent, they exported the problem. The European Union, for example, sent half of its “plastic for recycling” to poorer countries, with most of it ending up in China. What happened when it got there? Some of it was actually turned into new plastic. But a very large portion was burned or simply dumped in the countryside.
In 2018, China announced to the international community that it would accept no more plastic. This industry was too polluting. The world’s richest countries suddenly found themselves struggling to find a solution. Then two trends emerged. The first is that countries like the UK or Germany simply found new places to send their old plastics and continued to claim that they were being recycled. The biggest recipient of European plastic waste today is Turkey. And if you are a Greek who cares about the plastics in the Aegean Sea or the air quality in your country, that should worry you. The fate of the plastic that Western Europe sends to Turkey is no different from what has been happening in China for thirty years. Many quantities end up in rivers or burned in Aegean ports like Izmir.
This is the one trend that has emerged since 2018. The other may be even worse. I mentioned earlier the area west of Athens. An interesting phenomenon worth watching are the stories of “recycling centers” in places like Aspropyrgos that are folding into flames. This happens at least once a month, sometimes more often. Sometimes the situation is so bad you can smell the burning plastic all the way to the center of Athens The phenomenon is seen elsewhere as well. This morning, for example, a “recycling” plant in Lesbos caught fire. But Aspropyrgos remains the most indicative spot.
Why does this happen again and again? Most of the time it’s not an accident. Someone deliberately sets fire. There is no more room to store all that plastic. It has to disappear somehow. The easiest way is to burn it and make it look like an accident. And this is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon. It happens in Bulgaria, Indonesia, Wisconsin – everywhere.
– Mention the term “garbage imperialism”. How does this concept relate to the legacy of Western industrialization?
There is a long and complicated history here. Let’s start with the obvious: the very countries that are now the final recipients of vast quantities of Western waste were, until relatively recently, under the control of Western states. In the 1950s and ’60s, many of them managed to shake off Western imperialism. They dreamed of industrializing, of building infrastructure, of becoming self-sufficient economies. And yet, by the 1980s, many of them had in fact become the recipients of Western industrialisation and consumerism. Countries that were once full of hope ended up essentially becoming the dustbins of their former colonial masters.
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Why did this happen? The main reason is debt. In the 1980s, one of the easiest ways for poor countries to secure immediate cash was to agree to accept and “manage” toxic chemical waste from rich countries. Many Latin American and African leaders resisted this. “Africa has rejected all forms of external sovereignty,” declared Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi in 1988. “We do not want this sovereignty to return by the back door in the form of ‘wasteocracy’.” But many in the West thought the terms of this exchange were perfectly reasonable. “I’ve always thought that the sparsely populated countries of Africa are hopelessly under-polluted,” said Lawrence Summers, chief economist at the World Bank, at the time.
The toxic chemicals were just the beginning. By the 1990s, countries across Asia and Africa had become the recipients of every kind of waste – from broken electronics and worn tyres to old plastic. Literally every form of trash imaginable.
– What role do organized crime and illegal networks play in the global waste trade?
They play a very important role. One only has to look at what is happening in the Mediterranean, where various Italian criminal organizations are actively involved in the trafficking of battery acids south from Bavaria to Campania, the export of plastic waste by ship to Tunisia, or the smuggling of toxic chemicals to Albania. It is not exactly ‘waste’ in the strict sense. The movement of waste is a key part of their business model. And why wouldn’t it be? When it comes to garbage, the “supply” is inexhaustible and the legal consequences are negligible. “For us, garbage is gold,” a Naples mobster told an investigator in 2008.
I believe, however, that it is important not to overstate the role of organised crime. Why? Because much of the waste trade is perfectly legal. You don’t have to be a Naples mobster to make money from it. Virtually anyone can get into the garbage “business.”
– Can you describe your experience at Agbogbloshie – what you saw, what you smelled, what the atmosphere was like – and how it affected you personally?
Whew. Where to begin? Agbogbloshie is a shocking, depressing, almost hellish place. It’s a slum in the centre of Accra, the capital of Ghana, that receives thousands of tons of damaged, broken electronics every day. Most of these old cell phones and laptops arrive in Ghana as “used equipment” from Europe or the United States. Supposedly to be reused. Predictably, many of them don’t even work. However, they can still be dismantled and stripped of their valuable components.
This is where Agbogbloshie comes into play. It’s where all these electronics end up to be “disassembled”. It’s an embellished word that in practice means that old phones and laptops are burned, their plastic melted, and what’s left is collected: the copper wires, the silicon wafers. In Agbogbloshie, every conceivable material – TV screens, refrigerator insulation, even old wigs – is used as kindling for these fires, which burn non-stop, day and night.
The air is thick, full of black smoke. The men are missing fingers and toes. Children cough and spit blood. You see surreal scenes: cows chewing PVC wires for their last meal before being taken to the slaughterhouse; lagoons covered in so much plastic it takes a few minutes to realise they are places with water; brooding men sitting in circles smashing the last of the iPhones with sledgehammers.
– Your book focuses largely on Ghana, but you mention other examples, such as shipbreaking in Turkey or battery recycling in Latin America. How do these industries highlight the international dimension of waste and the exploitation of labour?
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Let’s take the example of ship dismantling in Turkey. It is something that should be of concern to Greeks, because it is a prime example of a waste export industry that benefits a small class of Greeks – the shipping elite – and which, by extension, affects how that elite exercises its power within Greek society.
On the Turkish coast of the Aegean is a horribly industrialised city called Aliyaga. It is one of only four places in the world – the others are in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India – where ships are sent for dismantling. All kinds of ships: cruise ships, cargo ships, tankers, passenger ferries. Statistically, this is the most dangerous job in the world – worse than mining. Of course, this is also true in Turkey. In Aliaga you meet Turks from the interior of Anatolia, people who had never seen the sea in their lives until they arrived there at 18. They were given a flamethrower and put inside a 15-storey American cruise ship, instructing them to start tearing it apart with their hands. They are paid far too little for this job. And some, as you can imagine, will never return alive to the interior of Anatolia. In towns like Zara or Shivas there are cemeteries where young men who were killed breaking up American cruise ships or Norwegian trucks are buried.
It is now worth asking: why isn’t this work being done just a few miles away, in Greece – a country whose shipping elite controls a disproportionately large chunk of global shipping and which is consistently ranked among the world’s biggest ship “garbage collectors” every year? The answer is simple. In Greece, a member state of the European Union, the environmental and labour risks involved in ship dismantling would never be considered acceptable. It is an extremely dangerous and polluting process. Greece and other European countries can reap the benefits of the global shipping industry, but the risks should be transferred to other, more desperate regions – in this case, almost ironically, just a hundred kilometres away, on the Turkish Aegean coast.
– What was the most shocking or unexpected discovery you made about waste management on an international level?
Waste management is a huge, chaotic world. The companies that produce the products we buy – Apple, Coca Cola, Zara – are constantly engaging in dirty practices. Let me explain: the law requires them to be somewhat transparent about their exploitation. When you look inside an H&M shirt, there is a little label that says “Made in Bangladesh” or something similar. Consumer protection laws and transparency regulations require this. Of course, we still have a long way to go – this legislation is still too vague – but at least some progress has been made over the years. There is a degree of accountability.
But what about the stuff that gets thrown away? There is no transparency or accountability about where they end up, who is obliged to manage them, who pays the price – environmentally and sanitarily – for their disposal. This is what makes rubbish such a fascinating and infuriating subject for me. Someone is making money from our consumption habits. And someone else is making money by passing the consequences of those habits on to the poorest people in the poorest countries on the planet. And that should outrage us.
Alexander Clapp’s book “The Garbage War, Correspondences from the World’s Landfills” is published by Doma Publications, translated by Despina Kanellopoulou.
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