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

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

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

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An incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts’ Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland My generation and the generation older than me have too much stuff, and it isn’t stuff wanted by our children and grandchildren–the heirloom good china, silverplate, figurines, and embroidered linens aren’t modern enough. My quilt friends despair because no one wants their “outdated” quilts that are the wrong color or style. The thrift stores will soon be deluged with our stuff. And not all of that stuff finds new homes. The Revival is currently a non-profit, and each collection is small-scale and handmade. It sells its designs in pop-up shops in and around Accra. At the moment, the operation is tiny, and can account for only a fraction of the goods arriving in Kantamanto. “We realized that there’s so much waste, and that there is not enough demand for it,” he says.

He says we should lobby for bag bans when all 30 life cycle studies show that that would increase CO2, fossil fuel use, waste and overall harm. 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? Wasteland” is heavy on facts, many of them interesting and sobering. Twenty thousand plastic bottles are sold around the world every second. The world produced 2bn tonnes of solid waste in 2016, a figure that will rise to 3.3bn tonnes by 2050. But the piles of numbers can occasionally be a strain. At such moments, readers may find themselves agreeing that waste is “not the most appealing subject” for a book, as the author himself admits near the beginning of his. An incredible journey… full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts’– Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler To The WorldThis is an incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts. My relationship with garbage is never going to be the same' -- Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler to the World Meanwhile, I was burning through my book advance by paying for physiotherapy, and buying a new posture-correct office setup. I started wearing a wrist brace, then an elbow brace; my cupboard filled with various physiotherapy tools. FlexBars, resistance bands, knobbly massage wands – from her curious glances, I think the delivery woman thought I was buying up a dungeon’s worth of sex toys. None of them worked.

Despite its prevalence, we understand relatively little about what causes some pain to become chronic. Certain risk factors make one more susceptible: biological sex (women are more likely to report chronic pain), genetics, smoking, depression, poverty. But the exact chemical and neurological conditions that cause pain to linger are still the matter of intense study. What seems certain is that something causes the pain circuitry in the body to become oversensitised, inferring pain even if no damage has occurred. In some cases, even the lightest touch can trigger a pain response; for patients with this condition, allodynia, it can be agony just to get dressed. He says they don't biodegrade when there are many studies showing that they do - just Google "biodegrade polyethylene" for example to see studies for yourself. DAVIS: In this book, you cover the entire world – dumps in New Delhi, e-waste making land in Ghana, toxic plastic dumping in Southeast Asia. Is there any particular community or person that is really seared into your mind as far as the problem being so egregious?

BookBrowse Review

There are stories in all our discarded things: who made them, what they meant to a person before they were thrown away. In the end, it all ends up in the same place - the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass.'

Just as everything we consume comes from somewhere on earth, so too everything we produce must go somewhere on earth - even if we don't want to think about it. This book compels us to. A fascinating, deeply researched and hugely important expose of what happens to the stuff we no longer want, and the social and environmental cost of dealing with it. Revelatory, thoughtful and honest about our complex relationship with waste.' -- Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century We are living in a waste crisis. Sewage flooding our rivers, plastics in ours oceans, rivers, bodies; rubbish shipped abroad and inflicted on the world’s poor. Why? Why do we think so much about where stuff comes from, but almost never about where it goes after we’re done?We make a lot of waste. Perhaps less than some, but because of our standard of living, more than most of the world. And a lot of that waste is in landfills, preserved for decades, and in dumps across the world. He talks about BPA in plastics when that's a tiny amount in 1% of plastics and found to be at a safe level. Does that mean we shouldn’t resell our stuff and try to extend the life of things wherever possible? “Honestly, I’m not sure,” writes Franklin-Wallis. His willingness to accept that “the answer is complex, the ethics unclear” is refreshing. We would do well to heed his call to “recognise that our decisions about waste can have unseen consequences for people and places thousands of miles away” and to stop treating our waste, and the people who deal with it, as a dirty secret “to be hidden away”. Compelling, smart, fair, often funny, always interesting, and just very important' Mary Roach, author of Stiff Oliver Franklin-Wallis: ‘In August, I will have been in pain for three years.’ Photograph: Martin Pope/The Guardian

The pain isn’t gone – it may never be gone; I know that. But, for now, it doesn’t have control. I still have so many questions that remain unanswered. But I’ve learned that even if I can’t rid myself of pain, I can at least ease the suffering. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. Wasteland is that story. It’s my attempt to explore what happens to our stuff after we throw it “away”– the places it goes, and the people who deal with it when it gets there. It’s a story that took me around the UK, to the USA, India, and Ghana; a story that took me from the inside of dumpsters to mountainous landfills, super-sewers to ghost towns, via the largest nuclear waste store in Europe. Wise, honest and unsparing, Wasteland will open your eyes to the reality of our throwaway society' -- Henry Mance, author of How to Love Animals With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash.Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.



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