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

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Both shocking and hopeful, Wasteland is the timely and ultimately human story at the heart of an urgent global issue. An urgent, probing and endlessly interesting investigation into our staggering wastefulness and the environmental crisis this is creating right under our noses. Yet despite its grim revelations, the book offers hope—for we can’t begin to make things right until we understand the nuanced realities of what is wrong. 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?

Franklin-Wallis achieves the difficult feat of making an ostensibly mundane topic feel urgent, and the compassionate profiles effectively humanize a problem that’s massive in scope. Learnt a lot about how the myriad different forms of waste will live on long after we are gone, and no, it's just not plastics we are talking about here.One man who wondered just what happened to the rubbish he and his family were creating was Oliver Franklin-Wallis, who decided to follow his nose for a story.

He looks at it as a sympathetic person from the first world, and tries to say that consumerism and skewed international relations are to blame for the waste-led environmental crisis in the poorer and third world countries.The only thing this book really did for me, aside from extinguish the last of my hope that our children might lead long and happy lives, was reinforce my opposition to nuclear power.

You have to admire Franklin-Wallis’s constitution as he visits a giant recycling plant in Essex, an energy-from-waste plant in Avonmouth and a sewage plant in Isleworth before venturing to India to scale the Ghazipur landfill mountain and endure the delights of one of Kanpur’s tanneries – notoriously grim and visceral places. Also, this book drives home the point of how the ever growing problem of trash is derived from overconsumption.Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 18, 2023. He does very well contextualizing waste and why we waste and how very often the world is set up to force us to be wasteful.

Since I deal with the transfer and treatment of waste daily because of my job, I personally found it an interesting and informative read. Its strongest parts are when Franklin-Wallis walks with those contributing to, or affected by, the failures, injustices and complexities of dealing with waste . Franklin-Wallis does a bang-up job of highlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly of the waste "management" across the world. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years.The question is, is it already too late to keep the earth habitable for future generations of humans?