Do you remember the landfill crisis?

In the 1980s, a lot of environmentalists worried about running out of suitable spaces

to safely contain all the stuff Americans throw out. It did not come to

pass that our cities were overrun by garbage, but it's not like we collectively produce

less trash than we did a few decades ago. The solution to America's landfill crisis, we export

a lot of what we don't want to deal with. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Often we pay other countries to take in our refuse. Sometimes American businesses actually

charge foreign partners to accept our castoffs. But regardless of the direction in which

money changes hands, there is a steep and inevitable environmental cost to disposing of unwanted manufactured stuff, and it's mostly being paid by low-income countries.

Journalist Alexander Klapp uncovers how this all works in his book, Waste Wars, The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash.

Alexander, welcome to think.

Thank you very much for having me, Chris.

It's a great honor to be speaking with you.

You note that we live in an era in which the human ability to generate garbage has surpassed the Earth's ability to generate life.

What do you mean by that?

Well, this was actually a 2020 scientific study by

nature, the publication. And what I found was that we were producing and discarding

materials at a completely unsustainable rate. It's a bit of a, it's a bit of difficult to explain,

but essentially what's happening is we are building buildings,

we are producing cars, we are producing plastic at such a rate that actually outpaces the world's

ability to produce biological life. So in many ways, we've actually overtaken our planet with

trash or eventual trash. You open the book in Turkey, which in 2017 announced this highly ambitious plan to transform into what it called a zero-waste country.

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