Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. He writes about the Balkans for publications such as the London Review of Books, The Economist and New Left Review. He is a recipient of a Whiting Nonfiction Grant, the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award and a Robert B. Silvers Foundation Grantee. His 2020 article on Europe’s largest heroin bust for The New Republic was awarded a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Prize. He has also received the Alistair Horne Fellowship at Oxford and a Berggruen Fellowship in Los Angeles. His work is currently being turned into a documentary by the BBC.

Clapp wrote the book Waste Wars: A Journey Through the World of Globalized Trash (I can’t recommend it enough) on the international garbage trade. Much of what the world has thrown away for the past forty years—plastic water bottles, cell phones, rubber tires — has had a highly profitable and environmentally devastating second life, getting bartered, trafficked, and offloaded to the poorest places on Earth. Waste Wars is an exposé of this business: how it began, how it destroys the environment, and—most importantly—the international rivalries it has brewed and continues to brew between the “developed” and “developing” worlds.