Waste Wars: How the Global North’s Garbage Industry Is Poisoning the Global South
Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars is an exceptionally frightening and depressing book. Strangely, it is also very inspiring. It inspires in two ways. First, one is awestruck at the journalistic brio and thoroughness Clapp brings to bear on a task he undertook, that of describing the state of garbage in today’s world and of telling us how we got here.
Second, one is inspired by the tantalising possibilities he points to that should help mankind flip a seemingly hopeless situation of being overwhelmed by waste into one of mastering the problem and finding neat, wholesome and sustainable ways to overcome it. There is a wealth of information that makes condensing this book difficult. But this review will focus on some of the big themes that emerge. This will include broad patterns over time, some geographical and geopolitical considerations and those based on the nature of the waste being produced and disposed.
Often these overlap. One clear pattern is that as soon as the pesticide industry emerged and the dangers of its safe disposal were understood, something that Rachael Carson drew the world’s attention to, the manufacturers began cleaning up their backyard. Environmental laws were put in place and mechanisms to monitor compliance were set up. But there was a crucial lapse. The laws only applied to the US and later to some other parts of the Global North.
For the rest of the world, the Global South, the default assumption was that they would receive all the waste that an ever-burgeoning industrial world generated. Soon USAID began despatching large stockpiles of waste to India, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Haiti. The place did not matter so long as it was far from the US.
Also Read | India’s environmental pioneers: The forgotten story
An industry established itself around waste. It involved collecting the worst pollutants—often the residue of legal chemicals, including old asbestos, cyanide-laced waste, PCBs, hydraulic fluids, and infectious hospital waste—and then exporting them to poor countries. Where possible, it was disguised as international aid. In a short-time this grew into a billion-dollar business. Third world debt and development went hand in hand.
A village of waste
Right wing governments in Latin America depended on the US for military aid. Waste was then forced on them. Even the Soviet Union, ostensibly against exploitation by capitalism, became an imperial power, exporting waste to Benin, a client state. The oil crisis of 1973 was an inflection point. Many nations became debtor nations, borrowing money to buy oil. They could no longer afford to buy new steel or aluminium and were forced to turn to scrap metal from Europe. This was given to them as foreign aid. In these cases, waste was no longer waste; it was a tool for development.
The gaps between the clean North and the dirty South continued to widen. The most dispiriting part of this saga of horrors is the tale of “waste villages” in East Java. Here a native paper production industry was established decades ago, exploiting the local abundance of bamboo. Once all the bamboo was cut, the compulsions to keep the mills going meant scouring the world for new raw material. The US and Netherlands stepped in, selling their waste paper to Indonesia. Anne Leonard, who alerted the world to planned obsolescence, traced some of this waste from Seattle to Java. The flattened waste paper that reached the mills contained a lot of plastic sheets as well. They could not be returned and so they began to be spread on rice fields in Java. Soon all the paddies disappeared; fields of gray plastic replaced them.
The hot tropical sun dried them. The natives soon discovered a use for them, as fuel. The dried plastic was burned, not in the very high temperatures that rendered the toxins in them neutral, but in ordinary kilns and stoves. Worse, they were used as fuel to make tofu and crackers, two items of food the villagers began to sell to other parts of Java. The food was contaminated by the toxins, but nobody cared. The business was so profitable villages began to elect “trash chiefs” to ensure fair distribution of the fuel among all the families in the village. Klapp describes the state of those villages: the soil is barren, the animals are dead or dying, the water tables are contaminated and the rivers and streams are the most toxic in the world.
Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish
Alexander Clapp
John Murray, London
Rs.799
But the citizens of this wasteland are happy. Do you want us to return to rice cultivation? they ask. Not when burning free plastic is the closest to printing one’s own money, Clapp observes. Turkey figures often in Clapp’s narrative. It lay on the fringe of the fertile crescent, considered the cradle of civilisation and one of the most beautiful places on earth. Until 2018, when the Chinese ban on plastic imports took effect. Looking for other sites to dump rubbish the Global North found parts of Latin America, Africa, India, south east Asia and two places in their own backyard, Greece and Turkey. Turkey’s construction boom was helped by cheap imports of US and European scrap steel and aluminium.
The metals were recycled and some of it sent back to the US. Why? Because the dirty job of recycling often contaminated scrap was outsourced. Later, the manufacturing of white goods itself was exported so all the pollution took place on foreign lands. Once used, the stuff was shipped back to destinations in the third world. The planning and implementation were perfect, often guided by USAID and the World Bank.
Ghana is another horror story. It was at one point the world’s largest recipient of electrical and electronic waste. In the capital is a slum, Agbogbloshie, where gangs of young Ghanian boys work on the western world’s electrical and electronic detritus. Some burn wires to extract the copper in them; some dissolve them in acid. Others dismantle phones and hard disks for all the minerals that can be harvested from them. Smaller teams of smart boys profit from them without soiling their hands. They scour the phones and hard disks for photographs of pretty white women. They then use them to scam older white men and to appeal for donations.
They do not always find victims but when they do life is good for the contributions they elicit are always in Dollars or Euros. Some knowledge of how to use the Internet and English goes a long way. Much cyber crime springs from these African slums. Don’t blame the locals, says Clapp. Blame the callousness of the West and their carelessness in handing over unerased laptops and phones that are still in working condition to waste merchants. Across much of the equator gathering, sorting and burning trash has become the default occupation of humanity, not farming.
Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars is an exceptionally frightening and depressing book. Strangely, it is also very inspiring.
| Photo Credit:
By Special Arrangement
Some development projects in poor nations involve financing provided by rich ones. Roads have been laid in Somalia that lead nowhere. The tarmac was laid to hide the toxic material buried under the roads.
The idea of Trumpism
There is a pristine lake in remote Central America that was filled with extremely toxic liquid. This is the closest one can get to the perfect crime, Clapp notes. The surroundings are ruined for many years to come. The US would install and uninstall governments in the “banana republics” based solely on the willingness of the rulers to accept garbage. Waste ash, falsely labelled fertilizer, generated in Philadelphia once travelled in a thrice renamed ship, across three oceans, five continents with three stopped at ports in 20 countries before dumping the whole load in Haiti, its original destination.
The delay was to ensure the installation of a pliable set of officials there. Kosovo, one of the youngest nations in the world has an economy almost entirely dependent on waste recycling, done mostly by poor Roma people, descendants of migrants from India. No less than 60,000 tons of steel from the 9/11 attacks on New York, were used for construction in India. They were exported from the US because they were contaminated and Indian laws did not stop the deal. Five tiny nations, all tax havens, (Liberia, Malta, Panama, Marshall Islands and the Bahamas) own the bulk of the 1,20,000 bulk cargo carriers, oil tankers and container ships that ply the seas of the world.
The ship breaking industry, marked by lax laws and little enforcement, is both dangerous and profitable and is concentrated in places from Turkey to Chittagong. Alang, in India. in one of the biggest and dirtiest ship breaking yards in the world. The US, the world’s largest generator of hazardous materials, has not yet signed the Basel Convention, the rules of which forbid illegal exports of dangerous material. So, all the fine words in declarations and speeches are just rhetoric.
The truth about waste was out there. Clapp has gone around the globe, observed and described it. He should be applauded and thanked for a unique job well done. Clapp’s talent for the cutting phrase, the arresting analogy, and the eye-catching description leads to multiple descriptions of the same or similar phenomena but is rewarding since it means fine prose throughout the book. He does sound breathless at times: He has been breathing so much foul air.
One thing the book teaches us is that Trumpism is much older than Trump. Trumpism is the idea that white Westerners are exceptional and that nothing should be allowed to prevent them from having their way. So, an Ayn Rand like selfishness guides the actions of the rich nations. The poor and the weak have no rights or claims; they can be and are treated like vermin. An extreme callousness propels the privileged and the wretched of the earth have to accept this situation as normal and given.
Also Read | Linnaeus’ taxonomy and the roots of scientific bias
Clapp’s book should be treated as a belated wake up call. If we brush these issues under the carpet the twin monsters of climate change and mass extinction of species will, in due course, swallow us. It is not that all production of pesticides or chemicals is bad or that recycling is not an option. It is that rather than invest in the procedures and processes that would neutralise the damage waste does, preferably close to the places that produce them, the cheaper option of transporting waste to the most powerless and miserable parts of the world is what is almost always done. This troubles Clapp and he wants the situation remedied.
We should awaken the better angels of our nature and subdue the political and business interests that ensure the perpetuation of a greed-and-profit-motive led world. Then a set of decent, clean, practical and fair solutions should be put in place. Kerala, which is making progress towards setting up workable, decentralised and community driven systems aimed at achieving zero waste, and the rest of India, can take this as a warning and an encouragement.
Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey told us this story in 2018, from an India-centric point, when they collaborated to produce Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India. Clapp updates us with a far more frightening picture with the focus on the Global South. He offers us some cheer with tantalising glimpses of how this situation can be flipped. The knowhow and the money are available. What is missing are governments pushing the right policies and technologies and civic minded citizens rooting for change.
If you were not a post-colonialist, this book will turn you into one.
P. Vijaya Kumar, a retired college teacher of English, is based in Thiruvananthapuram.
Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars is an exceptionally frightening and depressing book. Strangely, it is also very inspiring. It inspires in two ways. First, one is awestruck at the journalistic brio and thoroughness Clapp brings to bear on a task he undertook, that of describing the state of garbage in today’s world and of telling us how we got here.
Second, one is inspired by the tantalising possibilities he points to that should help mankind flip a seemingly hopeless situation of being overwhelmed by waste into one of mastering the problem and finding neat, wholesome and sustainable ways to overcome it. There is a wealth of information that makes condensing this book difficult. But this review will focus on some of the big themes that emerge. This will include broad patterns over time, some geographical and geopolitical considerations and those based on the nature of the waste being produced and disposed.
Often these overlap. One clear pattern is that as soon as the pesticide industry emerged and the dangers of its safe disposal were understood, something that Rachael Carson drew the world’s attention to, the manufacturers began cleaning up their backyard. Environmental laws were put in place and mechanisms to monitor compliance were set up. But there was a crucial lapse. The laws only applied to the US and later to some other parts of the Global North.
For the rest of the world, the Global South, the default assumption was that they would receive all the waste that an ever-burgeoning industrial world generated. Soon USAID began despatching large stockpiles of waste to India, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Haiti. The place did not matter so long as it was far from the US.
Also Read | India’s environmental pioneers: The forgotten story
An industry established itself around waste. It involved collecting the worst pollutants—often the residue of legal chemicals, including old asbestos, cyanide-laced waste, PCBs, hydraulic fluids, and infectious hospital waste—and then exporting them to poor countries. Where possible, it was disguised as international aid. In a short-time this grew into a billion-dollar business. Third world debt and development went hand in hand.
A village of waste
Right wing governments in Latin America depended on the US for military aid. Waste was then forced on them. Even the Soviet Union, ostensibly against exploitation by capitalism, became an imperial power, exporting waste to Benin, a client state. The oil crisis of 1973 was an inflection point. Many nations became debtor nations, borrowing money to buy oil. They could no longer afford to buy new steel or aluminium and were forced to turn to scrap metal from Europe. This was given to them as foreign aid. In these cases, waste was no longer waste; it was a tool for development.
The gaps between the clean North and the dirty South continued to widen. The most dispiriting part of this saga of horrors is the tale of “waste villages” in East Java. Here a native paper production industry was established decades ago, exploiting the local abundance of bamboo. Once all the bamboo was cut, the compulsions to keep the mills going meant scouring the world for new raw material. The US and Netherlands stepped in, selling their waste paper to Indonesia. Anne Leonard, who alerted the world to planned obsolescence, traced some of this waste from Seattle to Java. The flattened waste paper that reached the mills contained a lot of plastic sheets as well. They could not be returned and so they began to be spread on rice fields in Java. Soon all the paddies disappeared; fields of gray plastic replaced them.
The hot tropical sun dried them. The natives soon discovered a use for them, as fuel. The dried plastic was burned, not in the very high temperatures that rendered the toxins in them neutral, but in ordinary kilns and stoves. Worse, they were used as fuel to make tofu and crackers, two items of food the villagers began to sell to other parts of Java. The food was contaminated by the toxins, but nobody cared. The business was so profitable villages began to elect “trash chiefs” to ensure fair distribution of the fuel among all the families in the village. Klapp describes the state of those villages: the soil is barren, the animals are dead or dying, the water tables are contaminated and the rivers and streams are the most toxic in the world.
Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish
Alexander Clapp
John Murray, London
Rs.799
But the citizens of this wasteland are happy. Do you want us to return to rice cultivation? they ask. Not when burning free plastic is the closest to printing one’s own money, Clapp observes. Turkey figures often in Clapp’s narrative. It lay on the fringe of the fertile crescent, considered the cradle of civilisation and one of the most beautiful places on earth. Until 2018, when the Chinese ban on plastic imports took effect. Looking for other sites to dump rubbish the Global North found parts of Latin America, Africa, India, south east Asia and two places in their own backyard, Greece and Turkey. Turkey’s construction boom was helped by cheap imports of US and European scrap steel and aluminium.
The metals were recycled and some of it sent back to the US. Why? Because the dirty job of recycling often contaminated scrap was outsourced. Later, the manufacturing of white goods itself was exported so all the pollution took place on foreign lands. Once used, the stuff was shipped back to destinations in the third world. The planning and implementation were perfect, often guided by USAID and the World Bank.
Ghana is another horror story. It was at one point the world’s largest recipient of electrical and electronic waste. In the capital is a slum, Agbogbloshie, where gangs of young Ghanian boys work on the western world’s electrical and electronic detritus. Some burn wires to extract the copper in them; some dissolve them in acid. Others dismantle phones and hard disks for all the minerals that can be harvested from them. Smaller teams of smart boys profit from them without soiling their hands. They scour the phones and hard disks for photographs of pretty white women. They then use them to scam older white men and to appeal for donations.
They do not always find victims but when they do life is good for the contributions they elicit are always in Dollars or Euros. Some knowledge of how to use the Internet and English goes a long way. Much cyber crime springs from these African slums. Don’t blame the locals, says Clapp. Blame the callousness of the West and their carelessness in handing over unerased laptops and phones that are still in working condition to waste merchants. Across much of the equator gathering, sorting and burning trash has become the default occupation of humanity, not farming.
Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars is an exceptionally frightening and depressing book. Strangely, it is also very inspiring.
| Photo Credit:
By Special Arrangement
Some development projects in poor nations involve financing provided by rich ones. Roads have been laid in Somalia that lead nowhere. The tarmac was laid to hide the toxic material buried under the roads.
The idea of Trumpism
There is a pristine lake in remote Central America that was filled with extremely toxic liquid. This is the closest one can get to the perfect crime, Clapp notes. The surroundings are ruined for many years to come. The US would install and uninstall governments in the “banana republics” based solely on the willingness of the rulers to accept garbage. Waste ash, falsely labelled fertilizer, generated in Philadelphia once travelled in a thrice renamed ship, across three oceans, five continents with three stopped at ports in 20 countries before dumping the whole load in Haiti, its original destination.
The delay was to ensure the installation of a pliable set of officials there. Kosovo, one of the youngest nations in the world has an economy almost entirely dependent on waste recycling, done mostly by poor Roma people, descendants of migrants from India. No less than 60,000 tons of steel from the 9/11 attacks on New York, were used for construction in India. They were exported from the US because they were contaminated and Indian laws did not stop the deal. Five tiny nations, all tax havens, (Liberia, Malta, Panama, Marshall Islands and the Bahamas) own the bulk of the 1,20,000 bulk cargo carriers, oil tankers and container ships that ply the seas of the world.
The ship breaking industry, marked by lax laws and little enforcement, is both dangerous and profitable and is concentrated in places from Turkey to Chittagong. Alang, in India. in one of the biggest and dirtiest ship breaking yards in the world. The US, the world’s largest generator of hazardous materials, has not yet signed the Basel Convention, the rules of which forbid illegal exports of dangerous material. So, all the fine words in declarations and speeches are just rhetoric.
The truth about waste was out there. Clapp has gone around the globe, observed and described it. He should be applauded and thanked for a unique job well done. Clapp’s talent for the cutting phrase, the arresting analogy, and the eye-catching description leads to multiple descriptions of the same or similar phenomena but is rewarding since it means fine prose throughout the book. He does sound breathless at times: He has been breathing so much foul air.
One thing the book teaches us is that Trumpism is much older than Trump. Trumpism is the idea that white Westerners are exceptional and that nothing should be allowed to prevent them from having their way. So, an Ayn Rand like selfishness guides the actions of the rich nations. The poor and the weak have no rights or claims; they can be and are treated like vermin. An extreme callousness propels the privileged and the wretched of the earth have to accept this situation as normal and given.
Also Read | Linnaeus’ taxonomy and the roots of scientific bias
Clapp’s book should be treated as a belated wake up call. If we brush these issues under the carpet the twin monsters of climate change and mass extinction of species will, in due course, swallow us. It is not that all production of pesticides or chemicals is bad or that recycling is not an option. It is that rather than invest in the procedures and processes that would neutralise the damage waste does, preferably close to the places that produce them, the cheaper option of transporting waste to the most powerless and miserable parts of the world is what is almost always done. This troubles Clapp and he wants the situation remedied.
We should awaken the better angels of our nature and subdue the political and business interests that ensure the perpetuation of a greed-and-profit-motive led world. Then a set of decent, clean, practical and fair solutions should be put in place. Kerala, which is making progress towards setting up workable, decentralised and community driven systems aimed at achieving zero waste, and the rest of India, can take this as a warning and an encouragement.
Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey told us this story in 2018, from an India-centric point, when they collaborated to produce Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India. Clapp updates us with a far more frightening picture with the focus on the Global South. He offers us some cheer with tantalising glimpses of how this situation can be flipped. The knowhow and the money are available. What is missing are governments pushing the right policies and technologies and civic minded citizens rooting for change.
If you were not a post-colonialist, this book will turn you into one.
P. Vijaya Kumar, a retired college teacher of English, is based in Thiruvananthapuram.
