We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture, people must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.
—Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers in the Harvard Business Review, 1927
In Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si’,” he observes that “modern anthropocentrism…views the cosmos…as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference.” While Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars makes no mention of Pope Francis, the book provides a stunning illustration of the pope’s insight.
The creation of a consumer culture—which the above epigraph from the Harvard Business Review called for a century ago—has resulted in ecological devastation. For starters, Clapp writes, our consumption patterns “now stand responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions. Every day, the world discards 1.5 billion plastic cups, 250 million pounds of clothes, 220 million aluminum cans, 3 million tires.” These nearly ungraspable numbers are among the staggering revelations with which Clapp confronts us. And it’s what each of us is contributing to every day.
Governments keep evidence of our wasteful ways at a distance. Garbage dumps are put in remote spaces that few even see—that is, until the trash in them becomes so mountainous that they can be spotted from the highway. New dump sites have to be found; sending trash abroad becomes attractive despite seemingly prohibitive shipping costs. Wherever it lands, we all pay when toxins or microscopic bits disperse, contributing to the travails of what Pope Francis called “our suffering planet.”
Clapp tells the story of developing countries in need of roads, bridges and all manner of infrastructure in the decades after World War II. A number of poor countries willingly agreed to accept waste in exchange for payments. They also found a new way to profit from it. Clapp draws on a study by the environmental historian Emily Brownell to explain that when the oil crisis drastically increased the price per gallon of gasoline in 1974, the petrostates deposited petrodollars in U.S. banks, which in turn began lending money; “countries from Costa Rica to Cameroon now began borrowing cash from Wall Street.”
Like those who find that their incomes will not cover the costs they have deferred to credit cards, many of the poor countries discovered that their weak economies left them unable to pay the worsening debt. Trash offered a way out; it became a commodity. Certain waste materials like cans, cardboard boxes and newspapers could be shipped to desperate countries as “resources” to be remanufactured and sold. But that led to “the blurring of any meaningful distinction between ‘resource’ and ‘waste.’ By the 1990s, if you didn’t want something within your borders anymore, one recourse was to label it a ‘resource’ or ‘recyclable material’ and sell or even donate it to the Global South.”
There was more: “In the mid-1980s, the developing countries turned to the International Monetary Fund to help them pay off the debt,” but its terms forced privatization that took much of the actual resources of the debtor countries. Taking cash for accepting more and more trash became what seemed to be the only option to reduce the debt.
Clapp traveled thousands of miles to observe the accumulations of trash around the world and the ways in which bits of it can be retrieved and sold. He spent weeks in a Ghanaian slum where “burner boys” extract spools of copper from discarded electronics. Many electronic devices have been around for only a few decades, and their built-in obsolescence has resulted in the creation of slums like the one in Ghana’s capital city of Accra, where each day brings more tons to be dismantled for recyclable parts—or burned in open fires, sending toxins into the atmosphere.
One of the few positives in Clapp’s sad tale is that more trash than one might expect gets recycled, even from cellphones. “Much of the material stripped out of old electronics can be reprocessed and slotted back into new electronics,” he writes. In India, recycled steel has been used in construction, including “some sixty thousand tons of steel that once formed New York’s Twin Towers.” In the city of Dubai, the world’s tallest building “is constructed largely out of reforged old steel.”
A surprising source of recycling comes from old ships that are dismantled in India and Turkey. After a beached hulk like the 14-story cruise ship Carnival Inspiration has its most hazardous elements removed—“asbestos, mercury, sulfuric acid, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls”—the steel from its massive 300-yard-long frame can then be cut into manageable chunks for recycling. This happens to hundreds of ships every year, leaving the surrounding coastline highly toxic. Turkey became a buyer of old ships in the late 1980s; it was cheaper to send ships there instead of the Indian Ocean, and Turkey had promoted itself as a zero-waste country, more a claim than a reality.
One of the book’s best sections deals with plastic waste. Most plastic cannot be recycled, and making new plastic is cheaper anyway. The thousands of different plastic compounds in existence cannot be mixed in recycling. Finally, the plastic we use on a daily basis contains “upwards of a hundred toxic contaminants.” Recycling simply diffuses them into new plastics.
Ninety percent of steel gets recycled; not so with plastic, over 90 percent of which is unrecyclable. The increase in plastic has brought about a worldwide plague; on average, Americans each use over 200 pounds of the stuff annually, up from 60 pounds in 1980. Unlike natural materials such as wood, stone and iron ore, plastic is “wholly foreign” to the earth. After plastic began filling U.S. landfills, the petrochemical industry promoted burning it. Then, like a drug pusher blaming his customers, they blamed people for using it.
Plastic began showing up in animals and fish, and by the 1990s, microplastics were found to be contaminating the ocean, from its surface to its furthest depths in the Mariana Trench. Some desperate petrochemical merchants tried to improve their public image by making themselves advocates of recycling. Companies such as Exxon, DuPont and Union Carbide opened recycling plants, but they closed all but one by 2000.
Exporting plastic waste became an enterprise when it could be sent to China or the Global South. China banned imports of foreign waste after 2017; before then, the country had served as a principal recipient of U.S. trash. South Asia soon became a substitute. In Indonesia, “an outlaw economy had been built on the currency of American and European trash,” and villages competed “at gunpoint for truckloads of other countries’ garbage.”
Clapp suggests partial solutions, such as reversing the trend of overpackaging, but that looks unlikely given that “in North America alone, nearly two hundred petrochemical plants are currently under construction.” By 2050, he writes, “humanity will have produced four times the total amount of plastic it has produced up to the present.”
Corporate propaganda presents a further difficulty. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company “publishes regular memos on trash insisting that the problem of waste entering the ocean is not so much an environmental calamity as a missed financial opportunity,” Clapp writes. Such thinking is what shapes our current governments and portends dire consequences for our “sorrowful planet.”
This article appears in January 2026.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts