
Waste Wars
The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
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Narrated by:
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Greg Lockett
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By:
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Alexander Clapp
About this listen
A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.
Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.
Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell listeners what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world.
Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage—the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away—has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?
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What is the difference between men and women? Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, examines the divisions—as well as the common ground—between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American.
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Someday there may be no gender
- By stacey a shapiro on 03-26-25
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Air-Borne
- The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
- By: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the COVID pandemic was caused by an airborne virus. In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery.
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Very clarifying look at how messy science can be
- By webtraverser on 03-04-25
By: Carl Zimmer
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When the Earth Was Green
- Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance
- By: Riley Black
- Narrated by: Wren Mack
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Riley Black brings us back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides listeners along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.
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AMAZING-READ QUEER BOOKS
- By Grace Haws on 04-23-25
By: Riley Black
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The Infrastructure Book
- How Cities Work and Power Our Lives
- By: Sybil Derrible
- Narrated by: Derek Dysart
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet—all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have no idea how these systems work. How is water treated? How do cities manage rainwater? Why do traffic jams exist? How is electricity generated and distributed? What happens to trash after it is picked up? How does the Internet work?
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Insightful and engaging!
- By Rishabh on 03-08-25
By: Sybil Derrible
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The Man Nobody Killed
- Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York
- By: Elon Green
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with Billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma.
By: Elon Green
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Homes for Living
- The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons
- By: Jonathan Tarleton
- Narrated by: Max Newland
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In Homes for Living, urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces listeners to two social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.
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A passionate, knowledgeable, and fair parable on the topic of housing and ownership that resulted in work of literary art.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-03-25
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Wasteland
- The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future
- By: Oliver Franklin-Wallis
- Narrated by: Chris Harper
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind.
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Big dose of reality - highly recommend!
- By Josie on 04-05-25
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No Less Strange or Wonderful
- Essays in Curiosity
- By: A. Kendra Greene
- Narrated by: A. Kendra Greene
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation—on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look. In twenty-six sparkling essays, Greene is trying to make sense—of anything, really—but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness.
By: A. Kendra Greene
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Life Hacks for a Little Alien
- By: Alice Franklin
- Narrated by: Sally Phillips
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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“Climb up here, Little Alien. Sit next to me. I will tell you about life on this planet. I will tell you how it goes.” Before she thinks of herself as Little Alien, our narrator is only a lonely little girl living in southeast England, who doesn’t understand the world the way other children seem to. So when a late-night TV special introduces her to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript—an ancient tome written in an indecipherable language—Little Alien experiences something she hasn’t before: hope. Could there be others like her, who also feel like they’re from another planet?
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Capturing neurodivergent thoughts
- By K. Salada on 04-16-25
By: Alice Franklin
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Zardoz
- By: John Boorman, Bill Stair
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a post-apocalyptic 2393, society is split between an elite group of immortal Eternals and a brutal underclass that live in the outlands and are controlled by the Exterminators. Zed, an Exterminator who has come to question his role and the exact nature of the world he inhabits, stows away in the flying head that descends to issue guns and sermons to the Exterminators, and enters the world of the Eternals: the Vortex. An ostensible paradise of rationality and order, the Vortex is revealed as a place which is itself full of division and intrigue. Has he come here of his own free will?
By: John Boorman, and others
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On Air
- The Triumph and Tumult of NPR
- By: Steve Oney
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill, Steve Oney
- Length: 21 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Founded in 1970, NPR is America’s most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio has long been home to shows such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and This American Life that captivate millions of listeners in homes, cars, and workplaces across the nation. NPR and its hosts are a cultural force and a trusted voice, and they have created a mode of journalism and storytelling that helps Americans understand the world in which we live.
By: Steve Oney
What listeners say about Waste Wars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Charles W. Olinghouse
- 03-05-25
Humanity with its head in the sand.
A must read to understand how humans are making the whole world toxic with no end in sight.
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- James Gerber
- 03-27-25
Eye-opening studies of where our waste goes.
After we put our recycling in the collection bin, we tend to forget about it and assume that if will be handled responsibly. Unfortunately, that is not always true. This book gives in-depth, first-hand information about the end-point of plastic, electronic and other "recyclable" materials (including ships!). However, the book could use some heavy editing, as the author frequently goes too far down a rabbit hole.
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- Tracie B.
- 04-15-25
Great writer of awful reality
Keen storytelling with gruesome facts! Why aren’t reporters telling this story?? What aren’t citizens demanding change!? Well it would be inconvenient. However, our beautiful planet and your grandchildren will pay the price of convenience. Clapp wittingly tells story after story of horrible truths of tons and tons and tons of our trash and even better our recycle being shipped to struggling countries made to deal with or rather bury, burn and ingest wealthier countries disposables.
Thank you thank you for presenting thia problem to the world!! Cheers and now what
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