Professor Brett Christophers of Uppsala University shows how everyday actions, such as putting out the recycling bin, relate to global systems of extraction and disposal. He argues that the waste crisis goes far beyond litter or recycling, revealing how contemporary capitalism renders both environments and human lives expendable.
When Brett Christophers put out his recycling bin one morning, he like millions of others took comfort in the idea that his plastic waste was heading for responsible recycling. As he explains in his recent article on waste and in conversation with Thomas Jones on the London Review of Books podcast, that belief is only partially true and often quite misleading.
Christophers’ reading of three major books on waste reveals a stark picture. Some materials such as aluminium cans really are success stories. They can be recycled many times, at lower cost than making new metal, and with relatively limited environmental harm. Paper in many contexts also has a reasonably high recycling rate.
Plastics are a completely different story. Despite decades of public campaigns and household sorting, fewer than one in ten consumer plastic items is ever recycled. Many plastics cannot be recycled at all for basic chemical reasons. For those that can, reprocessing is often more expensive than making new plastic, or requires methods that produce toxic emissions. Even under the best conditions, plastic can usually be recycled only a small number of times before it becomes unusable waste.
As he underlines in his talk, incineration is frequently presented as a solution. In many wealthy countries the share of household waste sent to incinerators has risen sharply. Energy from waste plants burn rubbish to generate electricity and heat, and modern facilities are less visibly dirty than older incinerators. Yet burning waste produces very high carbon emissions. Christophers notes that per unit of electricity generated, some plants emit more carbon dioxide than coal fired power stations. In other words, one environmental problem is being traded for another.
At the same time, incineration and landfill do not make plastic vanish. Plastic that is not burned often fragments into tiny particles that spread through soils, rivers and oceans. Recent medical research suggests that microplastics are now present in human blood and organs. The long term health effects are uncertain, but the scale of exposure is growing.
Exporting waste and importing harm
One of the most disturbing patterns highlighted by Christophers and by the books he reviews is the way wealthy states shift their waste burden onto poorer countries.
In the late twentieth century, as environmental regulations tightened in Europe and North America, it became increasingly expensive to dispose of toxic waste at home. Exporting it became vastly cheaper. Some corporations and governments then paid countries in the Global South to accept these materials, framing it as a form of economic opportunity. As one critic put it, governments were offered a choice between poison and poverty.
By the late nineteen eighties, the dollar value of toxic waste exports from the global North to the South exceeded the value of development aid in the opposite direction. Later, similar patterns emerged for plastic. For many years China was the main destination for discarded plastic from the United States and Europe. In 2008, the value of scrap plastic exports from the United States to China was higher than any other single export category.
China’s rapid industrial growth created huge demand for plastic, both as packaging and as input material. Once domestic production capacity expanded, however, the economics shifted. It became cheaper to produce new plastic at home than to import and sort foreign waste. In 2018 China sharply restricted imports of many categories of waste. Governments and exporters in Europe and North America scrambled to find new destinations.
Exports shifted to countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and India. Outside Delhi, the Ghazipur waste mountain now covers a vast area and is estimated to hold around fourteen million tonnes of rubbish. It grows by hundreds of tonnes every day. Much of that material began its life in the homes and shops of foreign consumers.
Electronic waste tells a similar story. In Ghana, vast volumes of discarded computers, laptops and phones arrive on the promise that they are reusable. In reality only a minority can be repaired. The rest ends up in open dumps where toxic substances leach into water and soil. Sites such as Agbogbloshie near Accra have repeatedly been described as among the most polluted places on earth.
Designed to be thrown away
Christophers stresses that waste is not a simple by product. It is built into how the global economy works. Planned obsolescence has been central to profit making since at least the mid twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when most people had limited disposable income, firms often competed on durability. If a household could afford only one cooker or one pair of boots, it wanted them to last. Over time, rising incomes, new technologies and the spread of mass advertising changed that logic. After the Second World War, expanding consumer markets made it attractive for companies to sell more frequent replacements rather than long lasting products.
Today, phones and laptops are routinely replaced not because they have broken, but because software updates no longer support older models or required apps cannot run on them. Christophers notes that device makers deliberately shape this cycle. Consumers may still want to use older products, but are pushed toward new purchases through design decisions, operating system rules and app requirements.
Fashion is perhaps the most extreme example. Clothing is produced in huge volumes, designed to go out of style within months or even weeks. A significant share of garments is never sold at all. Many items that are returned within refund periods are not reshelved but destroyed. Unsold stock is burned or buried, often in the same countries where it was produced, far from the shops where it was meant to be displayed. As one of the reviewed authors argues, the very premise of fashion is rapid obsolescence.
Food waste is another major problem. In the United Kingdom, the average household throws away hundreds of pounds worth of edible food every year. Supermarkets often donate some surplus food to food banks, which helps people in need but also reduces disposal costs for retailers. Large amounts still end up in bins despite being perfectly safe to eat. Attempts by individuals to recover food from supermarket waste containers are frequently blocked by security measures.
Industrial waste: the hidden majority
A striking point in Christophers’ discussion is that household rubbish, for all the attention it receives, represents only a small fraction of the total. Roughly ninety percent of global waste is generated by industrial activity, including mining, construction and manufacturing.
Mining produces enormous volumes of tailings and spoil, often stored in vast dams and piles that can fail catastrophically. Construction and demolition generate rubble, metals, plastics and wood that are rarely reclaimed at scale. Yet public debates, policy tools and activist campaigns tend to focus on consumer behaviour, while the industrial origins of waste remain relatively invisible.
The books Christophers reviews recognise this imbalance, but their main emphasis still leans toward consumer choices. For him, that feels mismatched. It is not that individual behaviour is irrelevant. Rather, without structural change in how industry operates, reductions in household waste can only have limited impact.
Climate politics and the distraction effect
Another theme that emerges in the podcast and Christophers’ writing is the way concern about climate change has overshadowed other environmental crises. Waste and biodiversity loss are deeply connected to the climate problem, yet often receive less direct attention.
Some policies presented as climate friendly can actually intensify waste related harms. The shift from landfill to incineration for household refuse reduces the volume of visible rubbish and can be sold as a form of renewable energy, but it also locks societies into long term high emission infrastructure. Once expensive incinerators are built, there is a strong financial incentive to keep feeding them.
Christophers also highlights the limits of corporate social responsibility. When environmental measures collide with shareholder interests, profit almost always wins. The case of privatised water and sewage services in England is a clear example. Companies have paid large dividends over decades while underinvesting in infrastructure. The result has been frequent releases of untreated sewage into rivers and seas, followed by relatively small fines that can easily be absorbed as a cost of doing business.
Hear the full episode here.