Der Krieg um unseren Müll

A riveting investigation into the dark underbelly of the global trash trade - a dirty, multi-billion-dollar industry that almost no one knows exists.<BR><BR>The total mass of the world's manmade materials has recently come to equal the entire biomass of the earth. This means we are living in a world where man's ability to create garbage, or eventual garbage, has surpassed the earth's ability to create life. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing, and disputes about what to do with the tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged in just about every country on earth. Some are border skirmishes, fought to move trash out of one place and dump it into another. Others are waged across thousands of miles.<BR><BR>But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening. For every story about how a commodity gets hustled through world supply chains for consumption, there exists another untold story about how it gets discarded for renewal - or for eternity. Some trash gets tossed onto roadsides. Some gets burned for fuel. Some gets buried underground. But most of it lives a hot potato second life, getting bartered, sold, re-sold, smuggled, salvaged, re-purposed from one country or mafia or corporation<BR>to another, with devastating consequences for millions of people.<BR><BR>Waste Wars tells the stories of five trash conflicts being waged in different corners of the world right now. They are representative but rich strands in the story of our planet's runaway garbage pandemic. In each theater, a different commodity is being smuggled or imported or bartered. Sometimes there is a winner; sometimes there is a loser. And in each theater a different political dilemma - from global inequality to the pitfalls of green politics - is presenting itself through the seemingly pedestrian medium of trash. A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, Waste Wars exposes the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade in which almost everyone in the world unknowingly engages and asks: If the handling of its trash reveals deeper truths about a particular society, what does the global business of trash say about our world today?

Das dreckige, globale Geschäft mit unserem Müll: Eine investigative Reportage des preisgekrönten Journalisten Alexander ClappMülldeponien auf der ganzen Welt sind überfüllt. Täglich fallen Millionen Tonnen von Müll an, und um deren Entsorgung entstehen oft regelrechte Kriege. Dabei entwickelt der Müll ein geheimes Nachleben. Er wird illegal entsorgt, als heiße Ware verschifft, verkauft und weiterverkauft und von einem Land ins andere geschmuggelt. So reist unser Abfall über mehrere Jahre Tausende von Kilometern.Alexander Clapp verbrachte zwei Jahre damit, den Spuren unseres Müllsauf fünf Kontinenten zu folgen. Er enthüllt eine katastrophale Realität: Unser Müll hat in den letzten vierzig Jahren eine weltumspannende, milliardenschwere Wirtschaft hervorgebracht - oft mit verheerenden Folgen für die ärmsten Länder der Welt.