In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot famously tallied images of a lavish but exhausted culture—empty bottles, sandwich wrappers, cigarette butts. A hundred years later, what seems remarkable about his scraps of refuse is how inoffensive and even organic they are. Stony rubbish, dead trees, the odd corpse in the garden—nothing that couldn’t be absorbed back into the earth. Of course that was 1922, when the chief form of plastic in use was Bakelite.

Around the same time as the poet’s reckoning, one of the first plastics manufacturers was founded. As Alexander Clapp recounts in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, his recent book about the economics of garbage, the invention and production of new synthetic chemicals that began during World War I expanded disastrously during World War II, when Axis and Allied powers tasked their respective petrochemical industries with developing synthetic forms of limited natural resources such as cotton, flax, and rubber. Their efforts soon bore strange and ruinous fruit. In 1942 an American historian studying the applications of plastics predicted that these new materials would have “more effect on the lives of our great-grandchildren than Hitler or Mussolini.”

It didn’t even take that long. By 1944, Clapp writes,

US soldiers were marching across France to the tune of bugles made of plastic, arranging their hair with plastic combs, sleeping in tents made of plastic canvas, and flying airplanes that had been dispatched across the Atlantic packaged in plastic Saran Wrap to shield them from salt spray.

Bakelite had been a novelty, but plastics in all their profusion became an addiction. We quickly evolved from careful consumers treasuring the celluloid-backed hairbrushes that graced our grandparents’ dressing tables to buyers “mad in pursuit, and in possession so,” dressed in Shein and blinking numbly into glass and plastic cell phones as the seas around us heave with continents of floating crap. 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. Our patterns of consumption, Clapp writes, “now stand responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions.” 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.”

It’s not just plastics, either. Clapp tracks everything from 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. He stands on the island of Java contemplating sinister, fetid fields of plastic baking silently in the sun, sequestered well away from tourist meccas. He considers containers full of used disposable plasticized diapers reeking with shit and mislabeled as recyclable that nearly touched off hostilities between Canada and the Philippines, which was meant to receive them. After Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte threatened war, they were shipped back.

As you read Waste Wars, it becomes clear that in some fundamental way we are incapable of dealing with the problems caused by our existence and our consumption, which may amount to the same thing. When it comes to waste, we are all criminals, believing despite substantial evidence to the contrary that if it disappears from our sight—flushed down a toilet, tossed in the trash, discarded in the ocean—it has somehow ceased to be. That so much waste never vanishes from the earth is the great and horrifying theme of Clapp’s book, an angry and unsparing masterpiece of reportage.

In his zeal to penetrate what he calls the “bizarre, illogical industry” of “globalized garbage” as it has evolved in the 2000s, Clapp, an investigative journalist working with the Pulitzer Center and based in Athens, Greece, took countless flights, nineteen bus rides, fourteen trains, and six ferries to find some of the developing world’s most secretive dumps. The complexity of the travel reflects the fragmented, piecemeal disorganization of an industry whose multibillion-dollar valuation rivals the traffic in both drugs and arms. Unlike those illicit industries, however, this trafficking is largely legal, proudly incentivized by the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Clapp notes that in 1991 Larry Summers, then chief economist of the World Bank and always a champion of First World fecklessness, delivered himself of a now infamous modest proposal, minus the Swiftian irony, suggesting that the “economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” He’d long felt, he added, that “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted.”

Thus Agbogbloshie came into being: a benighted neighborhood of 60,000 souls huddled near the center of Accra, Ghana, on the banks of what Dickens would have called “a deadly sewer,” a lagoon where wheelbarrows dumped rice sacks full of cell phones as though they were “bags of dirty laundry.” The outdated cell phones, along with televisions, laptops, and computer monitors discarded in the US and EU, were then picked apart for components and the remaining husks set on fire as “kindling” to extract the copper from cables and cords. Dealing with these legal imports of a type beloved by Summers, who didn’t have to live there, became the brutal job of those who did. The men of Agbogbloshie established, if not assembly lines, then what Clapp calls a “de-manufacturing line, reducing all the amenities of our modern world,” including air conditioners, refrigerators, engines, and lawn mowers, to their most valuable parts. Walking through this hellish waste-scape, Clapp felt his feet crunching on “shards of computer-screen glass and cracked iPad covers and stray Hewlett-Packard mice; a pink bra has been stamped into the mud by so many thousands of footsteps to the point of resembling a fossilized crustacean.”

Meanwhile, everything in and around these men was becoming toxic. In 2019 a study by environmental NGOs discovered that chicken eggs in Agbogbloshie were among the most poisonous on the planet and that the children who consumed them or other poultry products were also consuming mass quantities of chlorinated dioxins. One environmental researcher said that the residents of Agbogbloshie could look forward to “a drastically reduced life expectancy.” Recycling e-waste was a recipe for early and painful death, “every bit as dangerous,” Clapp says, as mining rare earth minerals. In Agbogbloshie, he saw scores of men and boys missing hands and fingers, “feet shorn of toes, limbs pocked with burns, and the occasional one-eyed dismantler.”

His guide to this inferno, Mohammed Awal, was twenty-three but looked decades older, his body covered in scars and pitted by flying sparks of burning plastic or metal. The leader of the “burner boys,” Awal directed the setting of fires every afternoon, disposing of vast mounds of the flammable remains of stripped electronics and appliances: tires, computer screens, televisions, Styrofoam insulation. Burning off the PVC plastic that encases e-waste was the quick and dirty way of exposing the coils of valuable copper within. Unfortunately, it also released all manner of toxic fumes and chemical solvents, which instantly leached into the ground and the river. On occasion, Awal lost all movement in his arms and legs. At night he coughed up blood. He was making three dollars a day, Clapp notes, while the annual estimated worth of the gold, copper, platinum, and other metals and minerals in discarded electronics added up to around $57 billion, more than “the value of American Airlines, Burger King, and Adidas put together.” Awal’s dream was to make enough money to return to his tribal land in northern Ghana to grow yams.

Agbogbloshie became so infamous over the years, featured in hand-wringing NGO reports and Guardian columns, that the Ghanaian government finally razed it in 2021, promising to build a new hospital on a site so contaminated with heavy metals that it has been compared to Chernobyl. The hospital has yet to materialize, but as of 2025, scrap dealers, who had retreated to perform their labors in informal havens across Accra, have begun to return.

Waste Wars is full of stories like Awal’s, each more horrific than the next. Perhaps none is more infuriating than Clapp’s account of “the most insane and improbable scrap trade of them all.” This is the demolition of steel ships of all kinds, including obsolete aircraft carriers, container ships, oil tankers, rusting passenger ferries, fishing trawlers, and cruise ships. The deadly business of “shipbreaking” is performed in only a few countries around the world—those with shorelines that can handle massive volumes of scrap, such as Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. They must also possess, as Clapp points out, “pools of labor desperate enough…to undertake the dangerous task of wrenching those ships to pieces.” China once hosted such yards but shut them down after deciding that the pollution wasn’t worth it. Crafts are beached and essentially torn asunder by hand in a “maniacal process” involving armies of poorly paid and untrained laborers. These acts of “chaotic demolition” amount, Clapp says, to an “ecological nightmare,” despite shipping firms’ boasts about their sustainability. The industry is said to recycle enough metal to make “420 Empire State Buildings’ worth of steel every year,” but thanks to the laxity of international shipping law, this form of recycling is subject to virtually no environmental oversight.

The practice results in horrific accidents. Men are crushed by collapsing walls of steel or poisoned to death by toxic fumes; others are killed when they fall from the decks. Clapp visits the Taşkin family in the Turkish town of Zara to meet the three brothers of Oğuz Taşkin, who was killed in 2021 at age thirty, not long after being hired to help demolish the Carnival Inspiration. A “vessel of almost cartoonish awfulness,” as Clapp calls it, the Inspiration,built in 1996, once sailed as part of the Carnival Cruise fleet; the ship was scrapped in 2020 in Aliağa, Turkey, a shipyard notorious for dozens of accidents over the past few decades.

With fourteen stories, the Inspiration served two thousand passengers at twelve bars, two theaters, a driving range, and a casino. As it drifted around the Caribbean, “a floating shrine to the stupefying self-indulgence of America’s cruise ship industry,” Clapp says, it emitted over its twenty-four-year lifetime “more carbon than a US suburb.” While climbing down into its decommissioned engine room with a blowtorch, Oğuz Taşkin set off an explosion; the room was full of gas invisibly funneled into the enclosed space by an evacuation pump. A coworker was incinerated and died on the spot. Taşkin himself, 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.

The irony, of course, is that carbon hogs like the Inspiration are being decommissioned and “recycled” to enable cruise lines to launch ever larger and more elaborate ships. These are increasingly fueled by liquefied natural gas, said to be a less polluting alternative to conventional heavy fuel oil, despite releasing significant amounts of methane. Nonetheless, cruise lines tout them as the “cleanest” ships afloat.

Clapp’s scathing descriptions shock us out of complacency, raising political and moral questions about the value we place on different classes of human beings: consumers versus those who clean up after that consumption, many of whom are treated as if they were rubbish. His conclusion is not a hopeful one, since we’ve made little progress in reducing our reliance on single-use plastics. The best we can do, he suggests—despite the continued enthusiasm of consulting firms such as McKinsey and Company for ocean dumping as a financial opportunity—is to stop shipping our so-called recyclables to other, poorer countries. As one campaign put it, “Africa is not a dumpster!”

More and more, we struggle with the most basic forms of disposal. “Bodies produce waste,” Colin McFarlane confirms in Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife, a book about social and class struggles over the sewage treatment and infrastructure in cities, towns, and neighborhoods. He describes a 2008 painting by Nicole Eisenman, Coping, that depicts a number of surreal, Brueghel-like figures trudging through what might be a Northern European town: “The faces are calm, appearing thoughtful, sad, or resigned.” The assorted townsfolk—a mummy, a woman holding a dog, a balding businessman in suit and tie—are wading through what appears to be “a river of shit, waves of brown lapping at their waists.”

That redolent river has begun making itself known even in prosperous and developed cities. In 2024 and 2025, flash floods in Catalonia and Valencia inundated cities with all manner of sewage and hazardous residue. North American cities are experiencing similar deluges, because many (Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Cleveland) have what are called “combined” sewer systems, with rainwater and sewage moving through the same pipes. Whenever these systems experience sudden high rainfall events, untreated sewage can overflow, reaching nearby bodies of water and even city streets. The UK, McFarlane points out, has recently become aware that it has no remaining rivers, lakes, or streams untainted by sewage.

Despite the universality of the problem, McFarlane’s book is dedicated to showing that when it comes to fecal management, “we are not all ‘in it together.’” “Bodies are not equally vulnerable,” he says, noting that “women and children’s bodies are especially at risk,” with the lack of infrastructure for human sanitation posing a perpetual threat in poorer urban and rural areas in the Global South. Twenty years ago, touring one South African school, I was brought to a tiny cement outhouse at the rear. Despite the reluctance on the part of my guide to speak of such delicate issues, I gradually began to grasp that there were clear dangers posed to girls who used such a facility, with flimsy or nonexistent doors. Girls attending school were vulnerable to harassment or attack by boys or men following them to outhouses. Girls who were menstruating and had no means or products to deal with it might choose the safer and less embarrassing option and stay home from school, a dilemma explored in the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary short Period. End of Sentence.

In some African, South Asian, and Southeast Asian countries, it’s a common hazard for people and wildlife—even elephants—to fall into open septic tanks or be injured or exposed to pathogens by shoddy pipes and failed drainage, problems that may seem remote to many Americans.^* But anyone living in basement apartments in low-lying areas of Manhattan or Queens must now be uncomfortably aware that floods killed two people in October 2025. Ten were drowned in 2021 in submerged city apartments during the flooding caused by Hurricane Ida, and survivors were faced with complex cleanup to address sewer backups and mold. The connection between sanitation and climate change, McFarlane writes, is now inescapable, and the failure to upgrade such infrastructure has led to urban residents around the world experiencing “physical exhaustion, illness, disease, harassment, and violence.” New generations entering the “sanitation battlefield,” McFarlane says, must realize that the struggle requires careful strategies and is “intensely political.” He might be speaking directly to Zohran Mamdani’s administration.

Corporate waste disposal specialists rarely have strategies. Their modus operandi typically involves throwing chemical waste into rivers, pits, mounds, holding ponds, canyons, arroyos—sometimes out the back door. In the city of Los Alamos, New Mexico, there’s a popular recreational trail that passes through an arroyo now known as Acid Canyon because the physicists who conducted experiments for the Manhattan Project routinely piped into it liquid radioactive waste laced with weapons-grade plutonium as well as strontium, cesium, uranium, americium, and tritium. Despite millions of dollars spent on three remediations and the removal of hundreds of tons of soil, plutonium-239 and -240 are still detectable in the canyon and have leached into a lake sixteen miles away.

Another example comes to us by way of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal electric utility corporation founded by the Roosevelt administration to bring electricity, flood control, and economic development to the backwaters of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and a handful of other southern states. Beginning in the 1950s the Kingston Fossil Plant, one of the TVA’s coal plants, was faced with the question of how to store its coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal that consists largely of silicon dioxide, aluminum oxide, and iron oxide, and contains smaller amounts of calcium oxide, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, lead, mercury, strontium, and hexavalent chromium (the source of consternation and cancer in the film Erin Brockovich), among other toxins.

Plant operators made the decision to sequester the ash slurry by routinely “flushing” it into what had been a spring-fed swimming hole, later termed an unlined “holding pond.” There it accumulated for fifty years at the rate of a thousand tons a day, growing into a sixty-foot-tall mound measuring some eighty-four acres at its base, held back by an earthen dike until December 22, 2008, when a spectacular blowout occurred and 1.1 billion gallons of sludge breached the dike. The massive spill destroyed or damaged twenty-six homes, washed out a road and a railway line that delivered coal to the plant, knocked down trees, wiped out power lines, broke a water main, ruptured a gas line, surged into the nearby Emory and Clinch Rivers, and covered the surrounding area with sludge, in some places six feet deep. Twenty-two people had to be evacuated.

According to Jared Sullivan, whose Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe chronicles the disaster and its aftermath, the resulting scene “was the mouth of some kind of hell…a world of lifeless gray.” The spill smothered a dog and left an untold number of deer, geese, coyotes, fish, and other wildlife trapped in the mud, dying in contortions. No human being was killed outright, but many TVA workers and nearby residents were poisoned. The event was, as Sullivan says, “biblical.” It was also the largest industrial spill in US history.

Sullivan tells the story of one of the cleanup workers, Ansol Clark, a Teamster who had been driving trucks for the Kingston Fossil Plant. One of the first workers alerted to the disaster on the morning it happened, he drove immediately to the scene, where he and others worked frantically to save people trapped in the muck. “This is unbelievable,” a TVA employee wrote in a log that day. “We did not expect this.” They should have; there had been “red flags” that the dike might collapse since 1985, and an earlier “blowout” had occurred in 2003.

During the years it took to suck the coal ash out of rivers and scrape it off the landscape, the TVA persistently ignored worker safety. Much of the sludge was removed by railcar to a landfill in Alabama and dumped on the outskirts of a Black community that Sullivan describes as “one of the poorest counties in one of the nation’s poorest states.” Within a year and a half, Clark, after working fourteen- to sixteen-hour shifts at the site, collapsed with atrial fibrillation. The doctor who treated him noted on his chart an “exposure to toxic substances,” a shock to the patient and his wife, who had never been informed of the full extent of the hazards. Flushed into rivers already contaminated by 280,000 pounds of depleted uranium from the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory, much of the coal ash being collected was now radioactive.

One of Clark’s coworkers began complaining about sluggishness, saying that he and other men working at the site were coughing up a “strange black jelly.” The workers’ wives, who washed their filthy, ash-covered clothes at home, developed asthma and respiratory diseases owing to “household contact exposure,” a phenomenon well documented in asbestos-related lawsuits. Eventually Clark suffered a stroke and brain damage and was diagnosed with polycythemia vera, a rare blood cancer that damages bone marrow; it can be caused by exposure to radium, which is present in coal ash. His coworker, coughing up black jelly, developed obstructive lung disease, and they watched as another friend and fellow worker quickly died of lung cancer. Their boss was dismissive, telling them that they could “eat a pound of coal ash a day and be fine.”

Faced with the predictable consequences of its actions, the TVA behaved in a way described by the author as “cartoonishly wicked,” firing an employee who merely asked to wear a dust mask at work. The TVA blandly denied responsibility in subsequent litigation, as did Jacobs Engineering, the company it hired to handle cleanup, indifferent to workers sickening and dying from the toxic sludge. Some exposed to radioactive coal ash suffered leukemia and other blood cancers; others fell ill with hypertension, coronary artery disease, or lung cancer. Forty percent of the plaintiffs did not have health insurance.

In 2023, after a decade of litigation, only Jacobs settled, with 221 workers receiving amounts of around $222,000, a shockingly low payout owing to Tennessee’s cap on punitive damages. Not all were still around to benefit from that miserly portion; more than thirty died during the ten years after the spill. Ansol Clark had died in 2021 at the age of seventy. As one survivor told a mediator, speaking of Jacobs Engineering, “They don’t care if they kill us. They don’t care if they shorten our lives. They don’t care if they take away a dad from their family. They don’t give a fuck.”

Sullivan’s story of the wholesale ruination of human lives and of the Tennessee Valley is enough to make a reader writhe in frustration, anger, and disgust. He writes with painful grace about a formerly beautiful region, its “thick hardwood forests teem[ing] with elk, black bear, turkey, and deer,” and his account adds to a burgeoning subgenre of apocalyptic ecological nonfiction. The particulars of these works may differ, but the Miltonic corporate devilry is the same, revealing the arrogance of the false deities of a capitalism that makes hell out of heaven, aided by a host of infernal demons: Incompetence, Venality, and Deception.

The tally began, of course, with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in which her villains, including DuPont and the American Cyanamid Company, remain unnamed, although they rallied to attack her after its publication. Joining the list most recently is Mariah Blake’s excoriating They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, about the chemical industry’s infusion of air, soil, water, and the blood of most living beings on the planet with PFAS, a class of synthetic chemicals that causes cancers, immune diseases, decreased fertility, and fetal and childhood development problems. 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.