In the end, it all ends up in the same place – the endless ingenuity of humanity in one filthy, fascinating mass. I never thought I’d love a book as much as Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter but this is like a much needed update.

This next quote references how to counterbalance pollution: “There’s an old saying in environmental science: “The solution to pollution is dilution. Again and again, we are scouring the innards of the Earth and filling the empty void with our waste. Franklin-Wallis does a bang-up job of highlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly of the waste "management" across the world. He looks at it as a sympathetic person from the first world, and tries to say that consumerism and skewed international relations are to blame for the waste-led environmental crisis in the poorer and third world countries.

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. While we congratulate ourselves on saving the planet, traders in Africa are left to eke out a living from poor-quality fast fashion. This is an excellent book that discusses the various forms of trash that humankind has created, and how we deal with it today. Franklin-Wallis achieves the difficult feat of making an ostensibly mundane topic feel urgent, and the compassionate profiles effectively humanize a problem that’s massive in scope.

It was interesting, though heartbreaking, to learn of the waste pickers around the world, especially in developing countries who sort through our trash, finding things to use and sell. A must read for everyone, since waste is an issue that has been abstracted for most and is one that we ignore to our peril.You just live with it, waiting until something happens that is so horrible it can no longer be ignored. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. I have been quite hopeless about the current state of Earth's pollution, and this books' findings confirmed them. We are perhaps starting slowly to come full circle, with the growth of the sharing economy and the realisation that we don’t need individual ownership of everything. By one estimate, up to 7 percent of the world’s gold reserves may currently be contained in e-waste.