Tag Archives: Oliver Franklin-Wallis

I often seek out the books which receive rare positive reviews in Private Eye magazine and Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Wallis is a truly eye-opening look at where our waste actually ends up. Franklin-Wallis probes a lot of uncomfortable truths about recycling and greenwashing on his travels around the world starting at a recycling centre in Essex and followed by a mega-landfill site in India, a textile market in Ghana, a processing plant in California where defunct tech is recycled, and sewers in London. The legacy of wealthy countries exporting their waste to poorer countries as well as overproduction and corporate greed have created staggering problems with waste disposal. The most disheartening thing is how so many supposed solutions end up failing to make any real difference or cause more issues further down the line. With textiles, for example, cotton tote bags need to be used 7,000 times to match the environmental cost of a single-use plastic bag, clothes made from recycled fibres are themselves much more difficult to recycle and 25% of clothing is never sold because it is thrown away by companies rather than reused elsewhere. If the first two-thirds of the book haven’t made you feel depressed enough, wait until you read about the environmental impact of the 97% of global waste generated by industry including mining and nuclear waste which dwarfs the 3% generated by households. Franklin-Wallis does offer some messages of hope about how to reduce consumption, although I still finished the book feeling very overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. Essential reading, and a last-minute entry for one of my books of the year. Continue reading →