Get trashed with April's book of the month

This month’s Curious Reading Club book takes place pretty much everywhere, with firsthand reporting from countries including the USA, Guatemala, Ghana, Turkey, and Indonesia. Perhaps the book’s most important location of all, however, is the one that’s closest: your trashcan.

We all know that burying garbage probably isn’t the best idea for the environment, but we have also been told that recycling that garbage is a way to turn that around—cue a plethora of inventive ways to find a second life for otherwise unwanted materials, and by doing so save the planet. 

But the reality, as journalist Alexander Clapp lays out in his fantastic book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, is much more warped and aberrant. Your recycling, and what happens to it, has become a multibillion global dollar scheme to hide away the most immoral depravities under the guise of doing good.

I’m pleased that Waste Wars is April’s book of the month: it’s a wide-ranging and deep book that takes you on a surprising and often unreal journey. Clapp traces the route taken by things you throw into your recycling bin, tracking them to the places that they end up.

That’s where he meets the people who are finding ways to turn them into profit, from trash brokers to identity scammers; from workers in unholy Anatolian shipbreaking yards to Javanese villagers dealing with flowing rivers of garbage.

Released this past February, it’s had some rave reviews. Bill McKibben says it “will transform the way you look at trash—and hopefully it will spur some real change at the highest levels” while the Atlantic says (brace yourself) that it is “a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.”

I think it’s a pretty remarkable dive into the hidden realities of our high-consumption lives that will change your relationship to rubbish. Copies of this eye-opening work are shipping out to paid members as we speak: I hope you enjoy it.

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Waste Wars is part of our Eureka strand: 6 books per year that are specifically focused on science, technology, and medicine. Also available is our Explorer membership, which focuses on society, history, and big ideas with 6 books per year.

Or you can go for our classic one-book-per-month package, paying either monthly or annually.