Want more garbage?

Waste Wars isn’t the first or only book about the terrors created by trash. In fact, there’s a whole slew of titles trying to look at the dirty truth about our refuse, from the food we throw away to endless consumer packaging to discarded electronics.

Let’s look at a few:

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser (Amazon | Bookshop) was maybe the herald of this subgenre, a 1999 release that focused on how the average American’s relationship with rubbish had undergone a radical change in the last 100 years. She argues that we’ve gone from a kind of chaotic, streets-filled-with-animals culture of reuse (think about all those people who used to make a living trading rags and bones) to a consumerist society that prizes convenience and offloads the danger somewhere else, out of sight. Strasser really is writing a microhistory of the idea of trash, which is definitely not quite the same as the exposé presented in Alex Clapp’s book. But looking back on it now, it heralds the kind of horrors that we see in Waste Wars.

A decade and a half later came another fairly definitional book, 2013’s Junkyard Planet: Travels In The Global Trash Trade (Amazon | Bookshop). Author Adam Minter has a different angle on the whole story: his family were in the trash trade themselves, and he grew up on a scrapyard in Minneapolis. But he lays out the situation and passes the baton to others.

Released in 2023, meanwhile, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future (Amazon | Bookshop) might be a bit of a mouthful—but it covers a lot of ground that’s similar to Waste Wars. Journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis walks the reader through different environments, and a range of scenarios, as he traces trash along its journey from (say) recycling facilities in Britain to massive dumps in India and Malaysia, and yes, e-waste dumps in Ghana. 

Finally Edward Humes, a prolific non-fiction author, appears to have written at least two books on the same topic: 2013’s Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash (Amazon | Bookshop) and 2025’s Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Waste and Heal Our World  (Amazon | Bookshop). In contrast with Clapp’s books, these are very U.S.-focused and are a little more angled towards consumer change than the big system thinking of Waste Wars. 

On thing’s for sure: there will be many more books written about this subject, given the scale and nature of the problems.

Onwards

Bobbie