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

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There is an ungodly amount of information that there is no way to totally absorb but like I think very necessary. Everything you need to know (or have suspicions of) about planned obsolescence - initially modelled into the design of tvs, cars, in the 50’s - now an ingrained process. Again and again, we are scouring the innards of the Earth and filling the empty void with our waste. When the epilogue gently suggests we consume less and be more thoughtful about our waste - I’ve been doing all that for thirty years. For most of us, it’s a simple case of making our very modern problem – having far too much stuff – someone else’s.

It also made think more about things I can reuse or try to repair and it made me glad I started composting this last year. For a topic that most of us rarely give much thought to, he captured my attention from start to finish.The Green Transition Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. One piece of electronic equipment can contain as many as sixty elements - not only commodities like iron, copper, aluminum, but a host of rare earth metals including cobalt, neodymium, and tantalum, which are used in everything from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. More than 480 billion plastic bottles are sold worldwide every year—approximately 20,000 every second" and "four trillion plastic cigarette filters".

In Wasteland, Oliver Franklin-Walls offers us a behind the scenes guide to the processing plants, rubbish tips and refuse mountains that lurk in our back yards; the thundering machinery and skilled workers who strive tirelessly to relieve us of the spoils of our own profligacy.About the Author Oliver Franklin-Wallis is an award-winning magazine journalist and currently the features editor of British GQ. This is an excellent book that discusses the various forms of trash that humankind has created, and how we deal with it today. What’s worse, a lot of the time these actions are not always even better than the behaviors they replace.

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? Since I deal with the transfer and treatment of waste daily because of my job, I personally found it an interesting and informative read. The sooner we get that we need to fit in with nature and stop dominating it, but manage it in a way that is sympathetic to the natural processes, the better.Rather than sharing my observations about this account, the following passages and quotes from the book may best illustrate my thoughts and the concerns that the author has stirred in this reader. Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. I've been fascinated by what people throw away ever since and when I saw this book, I immediately added it. While it's maybe not the cutest topic, it was fascinating to learn about and it's impossible to ignore in the age of increasing climate crisis. It might be burned, buried, reconstituted or sent on an expedition to new lands, where it might be burned, buried or reconstituted.

Copperhead’s job involves sorting through nappy-strewn rubbish and the potentially lethal task of draining the acid out of old car batteries.For me, the most interesting (and infuriating) chapters were the ones on plastics and the illusion of recycling, which is mostly about clearing our consciences and generating more sales for multinational corporations. At Ellington sanitary landfill in Northumberland, waste manager “Victoria – ‘Vic’ – wears a peroxide-blonde bob and a leopard-print blouse under her high-vis jacket”, while Sue, a gleaner (people who take a second harvest from a crop) in Kent is all “straw-blonde hair, lemon-yellow blouse”. From the mountainous landfills of New Delhi to Britain's overflowing sewers, from hollowed-out mining towns in the USA to Ghana's flooded second-hand markets, we meet the people on the frontline of our waste crisis - both those being exploited, and those determined to make a difference. With his investigative chops and contagious curiosity, Oliver Franklin-Wallis has cracked wide a dozen hidden, jaw-dropping worlds. As Franklin-Wallis also addresses the successes and limitations of recycling, Wasteland is an all-encompassing journey into what we throw away.