It is in the land defiled to extract the rare metals, in the forests cut down and discarded to make the packaging, in the toxic chemicals discharged into rivers to manufacture the plastics inside. But this book offers some (maybe prohibitively expensive) solutions, and that is delightful in itself!

Yet Franklin-Wallis learns that by recirculating the highest-quality and highest-value goods in the UK and other rich countries, the “value that we would have exported to – and which traders in places like Kantamanto have relied on to survive – falls”. Like the way he presents the info actually makes me want to try in a way I never have wanted to before.

His writing has appeared in GQ, WIRED, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist, The Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Men’s Health, and many other publications. Sewage flooding our rivers, plastics in ours oceans, rivers, bodies; rubbish shipped abroad and inflicted on the world’s poor.

Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world. I loved learning where all our trash ends up, be it textiles, food, industrial waste, chemical waste, electronics, packaging, and more. That might seem small, but in metals terms, you’ll find ten to fifty times more copper in a metric ton of electronics than in a metric ton of copper ore, and 100 times more gold per metric ton of smartphones than ore from even the most productive mine. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the workings of the modern world and concerned about its future. I don't think the author at all intended for this book to be a gloomy outlook on how we are all f**ked.With his investigative chops and contagious curiosity, Oliver Franklin-Wallis has cracked wide a dozen hidden, jaw-dropping worlds . However, it also gave me a grain of hope that not only regular people but also decision makers and big corporations are finally starting to take some steps in the right direction. As well as following the rubbish trail, he looks at how companies are twisting some of the recycling that we think is doing good to their own ends and profit margins. Beginning just after the Second World War, the novel charts the changes in society during the next 60 or so years.