Review: Michael Robbins on Trash
What “recycling” hides: a lucrative trade in waste disposal that concentrates it among the distant and poor
I don’t recall paying much attention as a child in the late 1970s to the concept of trash—all the stuff we unthinkingly discard—except in connection with one Woodsy Owl. Like Smokey Bear (whose praises I have also sung in these pages), Mr. Owl was a cartoon staple of my Colorado childhood, delivering his tagline on signs and posters: “Give a hoot! Don't pollute.” I am informed by the internet that Woodsy’s motto has since been updated to “Lend a hand—care for the land!” Because if there’s one thing owls are known for besides hooting, it’s their hands.
Woodsy was not as wise as I presumed. He was a hypocrite—a representative of the US government, which did not and does not give a hoot, as Alexander Clapp demonstrates in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. Clapp begins with an overview of modern garbage, which A. R. Ammons called “the poem of our time” (Clapp completely ignores Ammons, whose long poem Garbage should be required reading for anyone writing about the subject). There is a seventy-acre mountain of trash overlooking Delhi that is 236 feet high. In Norway, “the digestive system of a beached goose-beaked whale” contained “chicken containers from Ukraine, an ice-cream wrapper from Denmark, and an empty package of potato chips from Great Britain.” In the Galápagos, you are never more than seventeen inches from a piece of plastic. One million plastic bottles are discarded every minute; every minute, a garbage truck’s worth of plastic is dumped in the sea.
But Clapp’s story is narrower, and, in many ways, more insidious: how and why does all this waste end up where it does? In nuce, rich countries use poorer countries as garbage disposals, fobbing off their trash—from yogurt cups to nuclear waste—creating untold damage to the environment and public health. As the Economic Community of West African States put it in 1988: “At a time when industrialized nations refuse to buy our commodities at reasonable prices, these same countries are selling us death for ourselves and our children.” Ammons wrote that “toxic waste, poison air, beach goo, eroded / roads draw nations together.” But, like Woodsy, he was wrong.
Clapp’s book works best as a kind of investigative journalism. He travels from Turkey to Guatemala to Ghana to Greece to Indonesia, mapping the global trafficking of garbage and hazardous waste: intricate systems of cheap labor, shipping, bribes, poverty, various shadowy waste brokers (“they have WhatsApp numbers, Google Translate, a cousin in Newark or Croydon”). The book brims with depressing details (“rates of cancer in Palestinian scrap villages in 2022 were four times those of other towns in the West Bank”). Landmark environmental regulations in the seventies and eighties made it unaffordable to store hazardous waste in landfills in the US, which ironically led to the commodification of trash, as corporations realized they could just pay poorer countries, where the costs of disposal were much lower, to accept it. This has led, as you might imagine, to further ecological destruction. One researcher concludes that it would require seventy thousand years to remove all the plastic in the Pacific Garbage Patch from the sea.
And forget recycling (“Recycle with Woodsy!”): the reduction of a major social problem to personal ethics is always a scam, insofar as it reduces systemic catastrophe requiring systemic change to a matter of individual behavior. The contents of your recycling bin end up polluting Turkish farms, baked into tofu in Indonesia, transformed into toxic fumes in Ghana. Most of it doesn’t get “recycled” in any meaningful sense. It just poisons poor people out of sight: “much of what you have been led to believe was getting ‘recycled’ … has the opposite effect of what you have imagined.” It redistributes “material packed with toxins onto poorer corners of the world, all while allowing wealthier nations to engage in what has essentially become a morality performance … that absolves consumerist guilt and dissuades self-examination about why we insist on producing as much as we do.”
Waste Wars is not short on villains: crooked waste dealers, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, former World Bank chief economist and US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. But of course the culprit is ultimately the global economic system itself, which not only depends on the mass production of disposable goods but incentivizes the lucrative trade in their ultimate disposal, without concern for the resulting harm. Like the soaring concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, the trash piling up in Indonesia and Ghana, sickening their inhabitants, is tangible evidence that this system is unsustainable, but it continues to expand, following the inexorable logic of capital. The French philosopher Michel Serres calls this “appropriation through pollution,” a kind of “malfeasance.” When a factory in America ships its toxic effluents to be dumped in a mangrove swamp across the globe, the company has appropriated that space, excluded others from it. It is a form of theft no less brazen than the enclosure of the commons that marked the beginning of capitalism.
Serres concludes that “we will be saved from the apocalypse if and only if all the humans of all the countries unite without borders to make the world their partner.” I suppose we will go on regarding this as so much sentimental nonsense until civilization collapses and the plastic water bottles inherit the earth.
Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. He has written for Book Post on translation of Rilke, Ovid, and Baudelaire, as well as Marcel Proust, Paul Muldoon, Allen Ginsberg, apocaplypse by fire, “Nancy,” the destruction of animals, and cheesy reading.
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“Give a hoot! Don't pollute.”
From the moment when you first heard those sonorous lines, you were clearly destined to become a poet.
"Garbage" really is an amazing and excellent poem that should be more widely read. For that matter the Tape for the Turn of the Year is pretty good. Ammons seemed at his best with short verses but room to stretch out. I know why they've faded but there is something about post-Cantos long poems that is really lacking in poetry today. Ammons, Carruth, even Olson had some great runs. Encouraging to see some younger poets try it again.
As to the book, unsustainable yet expanding seems like the motto of our times. Sigh.