Oliver Franklin-Wallis is an award-winning magazine journalist, whose writing has appeared in GQ, WIRED, The Guardian, the New York Times, The Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Economist's 1843 magazine, and many other publications. This is a fascinating and comprehensive tour of the second half of that equation – the tossed-out usually gets a thousandth the attention of the not-yet-purchased, but Oliver Franklin-Wallis does his best to redress that balance, in a book that wills you see the world quite differently than you did before. Its rare that I would leave such a detailed review, but I find it necessary to do anything on my part to convince you to read this book as well.

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. 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.

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. An eye-opening account of the global waste crisis—and how our throwaway culture is trashing the planet.

It is an unflinching account of the best and worst of us, related through the things we choose to discard.

Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 18, 2023. An urgent, probing and endlessly interesting investigation into our staggering wastefulness and the environmental crisis this is creating right under our noses.