“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.”
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962 – quoted Alexander Clapp, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, Little, Brown and Company, 2025, p 274.
“Like laundered cash, traveling trash is increasingly camouflaging its national origins by getting rerouted through “waste heavens” like Poland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Even notorious financial lairs themselves are emerging as garbage magnets. Dubai is currently constructing the biggest plastic waste incinerator in the Middle East, a billion-dollar enterprise that will burn the equivalent of a thousand dump trucks of trash a day, much if it arriving from neighboring Gulf states. The region that got stupefyingly rich off oil may soon be keeping its lights on with torched water bottles and yogurt cups, a process that is categorically worse for the planet than burning coal, even as it gets euphemized by investment groups like BlackRock as a “circular economy.” (If plastic possesses a single environmental benefit, it is that it is sequestered carbon; burning it release all that carbon into the atmosphere, in addition to a host of toxic additives.) And when it comes to organized crime, whose ties with certain systems of domestic waste management have never been much of a secret, the business of international waste movement has never appeared more attractive.
“You have groups getting out of the drug and weapons trade and entering the waste one. The risk is so much lower, the reward so much bigger,” Joseph Poux, who oversees Interpol’s efforts to track illegal waste shipments, told me. “With drugs, you have to find a supplier and you have to get it to the right people. With waste, there’s no shortage—and the supply is free,” p 335.
Alexander Clapp, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, Little, Brown and Company, 2025.
Talk about learning more than you want to know! This book is a (I want to say killer but will settle for ‘disturbing to the max’.)
Read more about plastics, disposing [get rid of by throwing away or giving or selling to someone else] of plastics on pages 261-267.
Thank You for reading, JoAnnLordahl.com
[My apologies: Reading, Writing currently consumes most of my dwindling energy.]
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