Clapp sounds the alarm ... Despite such depressing conclusions, reading Waste Wars isn’t depressing. Clapp is a lively writer, and his deeply researched book deftly combines history and global economics with stories of real people and tangible details of modern life. You will never look at plastic bags the same way.
Dispiriting premise notwithstanding, Waste Wars does manage to live up to the adventurous ring of its subtitle; trash’s afterlife is wild indeed. Readers follow the author on a whirlwind tour to discover what, exactly, happens to the things we chuck in the bin ... Serves up a stirring picture of the deliberate and surprisingly profitable despoliation of one half of the planet by the other ...
There are moments, in Clapp’s book, of great sweep and humanity, and even a few of surprising levity. But these must be looked for, bobbing forlorn amid the computer parts and zip-lock bags stretching clear to the horizon.
A colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world ... The biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem ... Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.
Clapp has performed an important and courageous service by exposing the workings of this furtive activity to sunlight. One can take the view that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with moving trash across borders to manage it; but it is hard to see much upside from the way the trade has evolved.
Little, Brown has given Waste Wars a bright cover, maybe to telegraph the abundant humor and humanity of Clapp’s prose. And yet. You can absorb only so much polychlorinated biphenyl and polybrominated diphenyl ether before you realize you’re being poisoned. As indictments of globalism go, the trash trade is almost too perfect: too stupefyingly myopic; too ceaseless, vast, and sad.
Although Clapp makes a strong case for the unfair and all too symbolic fact of the powerless working in unhealthy conditions to recycle or bury the rubbish of the powerful, it leads him down a number of dead ends ... Somewhat undermines the exposé element of the book.
