I was particularly impressed to see how many categories he covered under the "waste" umbrella - from garbage and recycling, to sewage and toxic sludge, to nuclear waste - it all "flowed" smoothly together.

The contents of the night buckets were used for garden fertiliser, the dung from passing horses collected for potted plants. Waste is not the most appealing subject for a book," admits Oliver Franklin-Wallis in the introduction. Sometimes it seems as if our main role as humans is to enjoy shiny things for a little while until they become discarded things.I’d recommend this book to anyone concerned about our planet, and who wants to dive deeper into specific green issues such as. 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.

Recycling my yogurt containers and milk jugs didn’t feel like enough, I’ve been trying to find a balance so I don’t have to live as a minimalist but also aren’t contributing to fast fashion waste or more plastic ending up in landfills or oceans. It’s my attempt to explore what happens to our stuff after we throw it “away” – the places it goes, and the people who deal with it when it gets there. It’s full of arresting figures… Franklin-Wallis, the features editor at GQ, grounds his narrative in first hand reporting… Oh, and one more thing.You have to admire Franklin-Wallis’s constitution as he visits a giant recycling plant in Essex, an energy-from-waste plant in Avonmouth and a sewage plant in Isleworth before venturing to India to scale the Ghazipur landfill mountain and endure the delights of one of Kanpur’s tanneries – notoriously grim and visceral places.

While it's maybe not the cutest topic, it was fascinating to learn about and it's impossible to ignore in the age of increasing climate crisis. Here’s this book’s takeaway: Do what we as consumers can do and should do to keep Our Mother safe and healthy - even though it may not do any good. My sister, being both older and a tattle-tale, threatened to tell if I didn't stop looking at those disgusting pictures. Thank you to Netgalley and Hachette Book Group for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.Tirelessly reported, it is a book both horrifying in its implications and gleefully hair-raising in the way it is told. And the author does make that clear but for the first time I feel like hey maybe I should be more adamant about being less wasteful. We have long been blithely throwing out our waste – tossing it over our shoulders and moving on to the next shiny new thing, with little thought to what happens to the discarded item. Just as everything we consume comes from somewhere on earth, so too everything we produce must go somewhere on earth – even if we don't want to think about it. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste.

More than 480 billion plastic bottles are sold worldwide every year—approximately 20,000 every second" and "four trillion plastic cigarette filters". Anwar, a waste picker in Delhi, is “a neat man in a red hoodie and suit trousers, with kind eyes and a sweep of dark hair”. Oliver Franklin-Wallis wondered what exactly happens to both our rubbish and our recycled rubbish and this is a book of his discoveries.The author doesn't mention any nudie magazines, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to have been thrilled by such a find. Even though he’s a UK author and many of the examples are from his end of the world, there were still enough general issues mentioned that affect all of us as humans on earth.