First a disclaimer - one cannot review, fairly, a book which one has yet to read. I have only read the electronics recycling chapter published in The Guardian, which features in part WR3A member Evans Quaye, who Oli spent time with in Accra.Evans honestly has one of the most modest shops in Ghana, but he did an excellent job of convincing Mr. Franklin-Wallis that the "export bad" story was not remotely fair to Africa's Tech Sector. The chapter ends not with so much a conclusion, but a confusion... cognitive dissonance isn't the ultimate success, but in The Guardian's Environmental newsroom, it represents incredible progress. Oli gets an A.
Another chapter of Wasteland was positively reviewed last week at The New Yorker. I had to have a follow up chat with Oli when when I got halfway through the New Yorker review by Elizabeth Kolbert @ElizKolbert).
Her concluding paragraphs include a very fair analysis by Oli Franklin-Wallis, which for The Guardian Environment standards deserves an A+. The next to last paragraph of the New Yorker article -
There are also practical hurdles. Precisely because plastic is now ubiquitous, it’s difficult to imagine how to replace all of it, or even much of it. Even in cases where substitutes are available, it’s not always clear that they’re preferable. Franklin-Wallis cites a 2018 study by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency which analyzed how different kinds of shopping bags compare in terms of life-cycle impacts. The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use and carbon emissions.” When Schaub’s supermarket stopped handing out plastic shopping bags, it may have reduced one problem only to exacerbate others—deforestation, say, or pesticide use.Very fair. But the New Yorker article is titled "How Plastics are Poisoning Us", and it's hard to get to the end of the article without thinking it's based on Penn and Teller's 2004 "Recycling is BS" The LAST paragraph bears Elizabeth Kolbert's conclusion.
It also wasn’t all that long ago that we got along just fine without Coca-Cola or packaged guacamole or six-ounce bottles of water or takeout everything. To make a significant dent in plastic waste—and certainly to “end plastic pollution”—will probably require not just substitution but elimination.
It is hard for me to imagine that readers of this New Yorker article are more likely to wash out their plastic bottles and recycle them. And my fear is that it's a perfect recipe for the current state of affairs - conspiracy theories, shaming, suspicion - that young people may throw recycling as a practice in the rubbish bin as an "ok boomer" moral licensing scheme. If the defending recycling is complicated, convenience becomes the enemy, and there's nothing more convenient than giving up.
It seems to those of us in the recycling industry that most coverage of recycling is dismissive or downright anti-recycling, but that coverage of the only alternatives - mining, petrorefining, and forestry - is too rare. It's less costly for a reporter to get to a city dump - Agbogbloshie is 20 minutes from the airport, 10 from Movenpick hotel - but the publisher or photojournalist gets the same "exotic Africa" credit as if they had visited Kabwe, or the mining portrayed in Siddharth Kara's "Cobalt Red".
