What do you think happens to your trash after you throw it away? What about your recyclables?
If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t really think about it. Maybe that’s because you find trash gross, or maybe it’s because you want to believe that you’re doing your part by throwing things away, and that there’s a robust system in place that takes care of them in a responsible way once you do.
Well, it turns out there are literally mountains of questions about what happens to our trash, and journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis set out to answer them.
In his book “Wasteland,” Franklin-Wallis travels to the rancid landfills and cavernous garbage incinerators of the Global South. Along the way, he exposes the rampant fraud that plagues the multi-billion dollar garbage market, and proposes a radical reframing for how we think about waste — which, for many of us, starts with actually thinking about it in the first place.
Full conversation
OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS: The book opens on Ghazipur, which is one of the largest landfills in India - it's outside New Delhi - and the locals sometimes call it Mount Everest. Covers, I think, about 20,000 football fields. And there's an entire town essentially on this landfill - around the base of this landfill - filled with people who make a living collecting the waste and sorting it and taking out the things of value. So, that's scrap metal, wire, plastics. So it's kind of both a place and kind of a miniature economy.
And those landfills are all over the global south. Malaysia, a lot of African countries. As you can imagine, they're not pretty. They smell. They're incredibly dangerous. They shift underneath your feet - people fall and die quite often. They often catch fire.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. So, related to all this, I've also heard you say, "The story of waste is the story of the growth of China." Tell us what that sentence means.
FRANKLIN-WALLIS: Yeah, that's right. So, for a long time - for the last decade of the 20th century, and for the first couple of decades of this one - a lot of our waste was being shipped overseas, and, predominantly, to China. So, there's an estimate that about 50% of all plastic waste produced at one time was being exported to China. And China was using that to reprocess it and drive its huge manufacturing industry.
Now, in about 2018, the Chinese government got a little bit sick of this situation, and they shut their doors. They said, right, we're not taking any of this. We're sick of being the world's garbage can. We don't want it. And the result is that basically, the entire interwaste industry worldwide went into meltdown, a bunch of big businesses went bankrupt. And we're kind of still seeing the fallout from that today.
And that's really what started me on this journey, kind of understanding, oh, hang on a minute, how did this happen? How did we become so reliant on exporting our waste to the other side of the world where - by the way, it turns out - a lot of it wasn't being recycled? A lot of it was being burned or being sorted through by children or some poor people in dreadful conditions.
So, really exposing that is why I set out on this journey and a large part of the reason why I wrote this book.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So is it fair to say, not to fixate on that on the situation in China too much, but while we were able in the west to sell our waste to China while they were willing to buy it - and that was a fairly robust exchange - it was sort of masking some of these more entrenched problems. And then once that trade with China went away, the full scope of the problem became clear. Is that an accurate characterization?
FRANKLIN-WALLIS: For sure. I think the biggest thing that came to light, after China shut its doors to the world's plastic and recycling in 2018, is the realization of how little recycling is actually being recycled.
We talk about recycling, we talk about national recycling rates, for example. And I'm - as you can probably tell from the accent - here in the UK. Our national recycling rate is up 43%.
Recycling rates are essentially a lie. They're a con. You count the things as recycled as soon as they enter the door of the recycling factory. But, in this specific case, only half of what was being reported as being recycled was actually being recycled, right, so that the actual recycling rate was half.
So, the honest - and, you know, when you're thinking about loading things on container ships and sending them to China - we have no idea how much of that has been recycled. So, the whole thing has been built on these obfuscations and misdirections going back decades.
And, what's happened now, is that we're really starting to grapple with this issue that we've swept under the carpet or dumped in a landfill, and really, really trying to understand: how big is this problem? The answer is it's pretty huge.
DINGMAN: Well, speaking of dishonest conversations, this brings us to the real bombshell in the book - not to give it away, but it is such a bombshell - which is that 97%, you report, of global waste is actually industrial waste and not individual waste.
FRANKLIN-WALLIS: Yeah, I'm really glad that you said that because it is the big - I joke about it as being like the murder mystery twist in the book.
DINGMAN: It feels that way when you're reading it.
FRANKLIN-WALLIS: Yeah, the vast majority of our waste is not the stuff that you and I throw away at home, it's the stuff that is made in the production of our goods. You think about the iPhone that you hold in your head, you don't think about the tons and tons and tons of mining waste that's been dug out of a Bolivian mountainside or a Congolese jungle in order to get at the metals. You don't think about all of the trees that have been felled to make the cardboard box, right?
So, we have this system that's designed to make us forget that, because if you understand the true cost of the things we're buying, it would blow your mind. You'd be horrified. So, it's really important, for me, for people to understand that when we talk about waste, the majority of it has already happened.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be having a discussion about what we throw away. We throw away about 2 billion tons of consumer waste every year. That's a lot of stuff.
DINGMAN: Yeah, but the question, to me, in that murder mystery twist is - and that seems so maddening in the context of everything that we're talking about is - if I've understood correctly, the infrastructure to successfully recycle a lot of this waste that is been created - not all of it, but a lot of it - does exist.
It's just that there is not systemic investment in ensuring that that recycling is taking place. It's like a problem with a solution. The solution just has a price tag, right?
FRANKLIN-WALLIS: You're exactly right. I'm so glad that you said that. Because - I'm gonna get a little bit nerdy here and use an economics term - an economist would call it (waste) an externality, that means the cost is borne by someone else. Right?
If you make a bottle and you sell it to someone, it's like the cost of disposing with it is with that guy who's just bought your product. Right? And, you know, companies don't want to pay more than they have to. So, it ends up being a socialized cost, it ends up falling on the taxpayer.
And the thing that people always ask me at the end of every book event that I do - or the end of every interview - they say, "well, you know, what can I do?" And I say, "well, buy less." And they kind of look at me downcast because it doesn't sound like much fun, right?
And my mission is to kind of convince people that that's actually a more satisfying way of living. Because I said, buy less but buy better. Buy less sounds like no fun at all right? It sounds aesthetic. It sounds like you're like a monk living in a monastery somewhere.
Buy better, you're like, oh, hang on a minute, that's something we should all aspire to, right? And fundamentally, for me, that's not just about having things that are better made. What you end up with, is you end up with a more healthy, more satisfying relationship with things.
I often think of my old neighbor, Alan, he's a guy who's big into classic cars, and he had a really nice Jaguar. He used to be out in his driveway every Sunday morning, waxing and polishing his car, took beautiful care of it.
And I always think, if we took care of our things in the way that Alan took care of his car, we would all just be happier. You know, the planet would be cleaner, the oceans wouldn't have so much plastic in it. But also we'd just be living better lives as people.
DINGMAN: A note of optimism from Oliver Franklin-Wallis to close out the conversation. Oliver Franklin-Wallis is the author of “Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future.” Oliver, thank you so much for this conversation.
FRANKLIN-WALLIS: Thank you for having me. It's been fun.
