Business of dirt

Oliver Franklin-Wallis, features editor at British GQ magazine, felt sick walking through a waste dump in Kanpur, a major industrial cluster of leather factories in Uttar Pradesh. The dump was carpeted with leather scraps. Goats and chickens were seen picking through the waste for food. Calling it a desolate site, Franklin-Wallis went on to ask a poignant question: “How little we truly see of the way things are made, and how little we understand of the true cost?” The statement sums up his book Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where it Goes and Why it Matters.

The book is as much about waste as it is about people involved in the dirt business. The whole ecosystem built around waste management is rooted in poverty, politics, colonialism, corporate greed and environmental injustice, which comes with some serious consequences to human health.

The author follows the complex journey of different variety of wastes—solid, industrial, paper, plastic, food, fashion, nuclear and electronic—in the Global North, largely the UK. Barring field visits to India and Ghana, the developing world—which faces a higher burden, given its growing population and poor infrastructure—finds little space in the book. However, issues concerning the Global South are briefly covered at various points in the book.

Perhaps the most powerful part of the book is the comparison of landfill facilities in Ghazipur in Delhi and the Ellington Sanitary landfill in rural UK. The former is infamous for its immense size, environmental impact and improper working conditions for the waste workers, who mostly belong to marginalised groups like Dalits and Muslims, while the latter runs on cutting-edge technology. The reason the two sites look poles apart is, as one would expect, money. The author rightly points out that waste disposal is a basic human right in the Global North, but a luxury in the Global South, whose citizens struggle to meet their basic needs of food, water and education.

Though wealthy nations have better resources at their disposal, they resort to outsourcing their wastes (plastics, clothes, and electronic waste) to the Global South, without providing it enough resources to deal with the toxic consequences. They find it cheaper to ship waste abroad than to recycle it within their borders, the author explains in his book.

Take fashion, for instance. Globally, the number of garments purchased per capita increased by about 60 per cent from 2000 to 2014, according to the multinational consultancy McKinsey, partly due to the rise of fast fashion. The discarded materials find their way to Pakistan, east Europe or west Africa for reuse. But here is the catch: Even as the import of discarded clothes increases job opportunities and tax revenues in the Global South, there are glaring problems. For example, 40 per cent of the clothing that arrives in Kantamanto in Ghana every week (an estimated 6 million garments) is not fit for use and becomes waste, the author points out. This waste, then, accumulates in the gutters or dump sites. The leachate (contaminated liquid generated from water percolating through a solid waste disposal site, accumulating contaminants and moving into subsurface areas) ends up polluting surface rivers and groundwater or reaches the beach before washing out to the sea.

Like fashion, gadgets are not being built to last. This invariably means more e-waste. Ghana has become a popular destination of e-waste in recent years. The imports have polluted the soil, groundwater and even food in Agbogbloshie, an e-waste recycling site in the capital. The author writes that informal recyclers were found to have unsafe levels of lead and cadmium in their blood and urine. A similar story emerged with used plastics, which are exported for recycling to the developing world. In the Global South, there is a larger problem of industrial pollution and the ensuing blame game between the different stakeholders. The author highlights this during his visit to Kanpur, where a leather tannery owner blamed electroplating and metalwork industries for polluting the Ganga river. The situation was the same in Ludhiana, an industrial hub in Punjab, when Down To Earth visited the city in 2023. The dyeing and electroplating industries were pointing fingers at each other when 11 unsuspecting residents were killed in the city after inhaling a toxic gas on April 30, 2023, probably due to the dumping of acidic effluent wastes into the sewers.

As the world moves towards a low-carbon economy, newer challenges will emerge. The author stresses that the planet is not prepared for the decaying fossil fuel infrastructure like oil rigs, pipelines and power plants, nor is it prepared to deal with the renewed interest in the nuclear sector, which faced a setback following the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. In December 2023, as many as 198 signatory countries to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change called for accelerating the deployment of low-emission technologies, including nuclear energy, to help achieve deep and rapid decarbonisation. Countries, barring Finland, do not have a plan to deal with the toxic nuclear wastes, which will remain radioactive for tens of millennia. Until then, the author writes, “traces of nuclear wastes will be evident in the geological record billions of years from now, as perhaps the most enduring marker of the Anthropocene.”

This was first published in the 1-15 July, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth