Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
At the end of Caroline Fraser’s disturbing discussion of three books on the waste crisis that is harming the poor and destroying the globe, she concludes, “Read them while you can, while you still have breath in your body, because they are chronicling the end of the world as we once knew it.”
Her review in the April 23rd issue of the New York Review of Books is the most disturbing article I’ve read in a long, long time. Living in the postmodern West, we survive in what the Situationists once dubbed “the spectacle,” where everything is reduced to the fiction of the commodity exchange, the buying-and-selling of selfhood and otherness and everything in between. And waste is the end form of the commodity exchange, where self and other are reduced to what is discarded.
Fraser reviews three books which, together, paint a grim portrait of the harm civilization is imposing of the very poor who seek to find something of value in the endless waste that the “advanced” nations of world – and especially the U.S. of A. – dump in the ever-growing “out-houses” in parts of the U.S. and throughout the “under-developed” rest of the world. The books are: Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown), Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife by Colin McFarlane (Verso) and Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe by Jared Sullivan (Knopf).
Fraser is unforgiving in her critique of the hollowness of our good intentions. Digging into Clapp’s book, she notes:
“Some of us virtuously recycle items that will be transported across the world to smother island nations in single-use plastic bags and water bottles, milk jugs, yogurt tubs, pet food and potato chip bags, Styrofoam meat trays, Coke bottles, Amazon mailing envelopes, and fast-food wrappers.”
Adding, “Our patterns of consumption, Clapp writes, ‘now stand responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions.’” Going further, she notes from Clapp’s data: “Every day 8.2 billion of us discard 1.5 billion plastic cups, 250 million pounds of clothes, 220 million aluminum cans, 3 million tires.’ Every living human represents around one ton of discarded plastic, which will certainly survive us. By 2050, the weight of plastic refuse in the oceans alone will exceed, Clapp says, ‘the weight of all fish put together.’”
Adding to this mess, she warns of the “monumental piles of toxic metallic scrap from dismantled cruise ships to paper of all kinds—newspaper, office paper, cardboard, and junk mail — following the viscous trails of the developed world’s prodigious trash, reporting what happens to every imaginable castoff of the comfortable as it filters down into Central and South America, Africa, and Asia: used batteries; medical, agricultural, construction, and chemical waste; e-waste; nuclear waste.”
Adding still more to the ever-accumulating mess are outdated cell phones, along with televisions, laptops, and computer monitors, as well as air conditioners, refrigerators, engines and lawn mowers. And there is “shipbreaking,” what Clapp calls the “pools of labor desperate enough…to undertake the dangerous task of wrenching those ships to pieces.” This takes place in Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India.
One of the most disturbing parts of her review is her passing discussion of some of those who try to survive by seeking what is left as valuable in the vast waste deposits. One of these is Mohammed Awal, at 23, but looked decades older, his body covered in scars and pitted by flying sparks of burning plastic or metal.” He is the leader of what is dubbed the “burner boys,” who set fires every afternoon, “disposing of vast mounds of the flammable remains of stripped electronics and appliances: tires, computer screens, televisions, Styrofoam insulation.”
Another is Oğuz Taşkin, who in 2021 was killed at age 30, not long after being hired to help demolish the Carnival Inspiration. Climbing down into its decommissioned engine room with a blowtorch, the room was full of gas invisibly and he set off an explosion. As Fraser reports, a coworker was incinerated and died on the spot. Taşkin, “despite being burned on over 99 percent of his body, climbed up five floors before collapsing on a deck, telling others to look below for his colleague. Then he screamed, ‘Get the sun off me!’ He died three days later, leaving a wife and a child.”
Fraser’s review reminds readers of the horrendous practices facilitated by the U.S. government and its agencies at Los Alamos, NM, — dubbed “Acid Canyon” — as part of the Manhattan Project as well as at the Kingston Fossil Plant, one of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) coal plants.
And if one has a very short memory, she recalls the good-old days of New York City in 2021 during Hurricane Ida when 10 people drowned in submerged basement apartments in parts of Manhattan or Queens city during the flooding caused by Hurricane Ida. Most recently, floods killed two people in October 2025.
There is a lot more in the review – do read the review and the book’s profile.
