Alexander Clapp
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.
809: Alexander Clapp: Waste Wars, how we profit off polluting the world claiming to help them
I found Alex when listeners sent me an opinion piece in the New York Times he wrote, The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie.
Getting to where I take years to fill a load of trash means I’ve researched waste a lot, so based on the headline, I thought, “yeah, I’ve read this story before. I’ll skim it so I can say I read it and then move on to important things.” Instead, I was fascinated and found plenty new. I had to read his book, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, which came out last month. I can’t recommend it enough.
Whatever you know about waste and pollution, the book shares more and it’s relevant to your life if you value liberty, freedom, justice, not killing people for profit, and not destroying your own health, safety, and security. Our system of waste forces us to act in opposition to those values.
We don’t have to. We can change the system. Understanding it helps. Listen to this episode, read Alex’s book, and read his opinion piece. Here are its opening paragraphs:
In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen.
Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America.
In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.