4 out of 5 stars
I suspect that I am like most people, I try to recycle as much as I can, I have general recycling, a box for batteries and defunct electronics, bags for scrunchy and soft plastic and we have one of the hot bins that makes vegetable peelings into fine compost. But I still have to throw stuff in the regular bin, not everything can be recycled as yet sadly.
But what happens to that stuff that the council collects every other week? I suspect that I am like most people and think out of sight out of mind and move on to the next thing in my life. One man who wondered just what happened to the rubbish he and his family were creating was Oliver Franklin-Wallis, who decided to follow his nose for a story.
In this book he goes to the municipal waste sites in the UK, to see what the waste industry does with the tonnes of stuff we throw away. But this isn’t just a UK issue, the 8 billion of us in the world generate millions of tonnes of waste and a lot of this is shipped around the world to countries that have ended up dealing with it, so he heads out to Africa to see where the ultra-cheap clothes end up after people have worn them a handful of times and onto India to see the enormous landfill sites there and the people picking through the rubbish with the hope of scraping a living.
As well as following the rubbish trail, he looks at how companies are twisting some of the recycling that we think is doing good to their own ends and profit margins. It makes for quite shocking reading, but a little part of me isn’t surprised in some ways. He also makes a visit to Sellafield, passing the armed guards at the entrance to see what we are doing with the waste from nuclear plants. This deadly radioactive material still has the possibility of harming 300 generations later so what we do with it has to take into account a changing world. Terrifying stuff.
This is a really important book, even though it isn’t the most pleasant of reading material. Franklin-Wallis is a tenacious researcher, prepared to go where most won’t and isn’t afraid of asking difficult questions to those that he meets. He doesn’t always get the answers he is looking for, which in its own way speaks volumes. Well worth reading and I am so glad that this book doesn’t come with a scratch and sniff card…
I definitely used to think “out of sight, out of mind” with my recycling, and when we moved into our current apartment block I was vaguely shocked to recognise that, although we’re required to sort and separate our rubbish and recycling, it basically all goes in the same lorry and ends up in the same place. “Recycle more” is certainly not an environmental catch-all when the municipal end of the system is so patchy…
I think if we actually knew what happened to it we’d be shocked. The worst part is the dishonesty that surrounds all of it.