The world’s waste problem is growing fast

In “Our Mutual Friend”, Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, stray paper “hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure”. Since those words were published in the 1860s, the world’s waste problem has changed in both scale and composition. These days plastic in one form or another is strewn on verges, clogs rivers and swirls around oceans in vast gyres. Circulated by winds and tides, tiny nanoplastics have penetrated all manner of watery ecosystems, reaching both the Earth’s poles and its highest peaks, with unknown consequences for the planet.

Worried by the pollution caused by a throwaway culture, Oliver Franklin-Wallis—a British journalist who has written for The Economist—heads to places that best illustrate this profligacy. In “Wasteland” he visits an Indian landfill that is piled almost as high as the Qutub Minar, a well-known minaret in Delhi; Ghana’s largest second-hand clothes market, through which 15m garments are thought to pass every week; a former mining area in America that is blighted by dumped lead, zinc and cadmium; and a defunct nuclear-power plant in the north-west of England, which contrasts starkly with the natural beauty of the nearby Lake District. He sees these places as evidence of human myopia about the Earth’s fragility and the finitude of its resources.