Oliver Franklin-Wallis (The Guardian, The New York Times, GQ) spoke to a captive audience at the last TBD meetup about his new book, Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters which is out now. The book took him four years to write as he travelled all over the world seeing the realities of the waste you and I create.
The slide that stayed with me is this one, the bamboozlement consumers have all been feeling is designed. There are 28 marks for recycling that brands slap on their products to fool us into thinking they are green. Most are just greenwashing. Making sure you know the difference, buying alternative brands that don’t greenwash and holding the right powerful people to account (product procurement) at gatekeeper brands are all defences against waste.
Look out for the full talk coming in a week or so. Oliver is available for more speaking opps (see below) and the book is an eye-opening and sobering read. There’s also this piece by Oliver in the Guardian that he wanted me to share with you which is below.
In the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national park. But you can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (not to mention the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled. What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees or the fakes?
I haven’t come to Fresno to see the trees; I’ve come about the device on which I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city, green trucks are unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI), the largest electronics recycling company in the US.
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that’s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, kept “just in case”. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our biggest competitor is apathy.” READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE
Follow Oliver: @olifranklin (X)
More info: oliverfranklinwallis.com
Book Oliver to speak: UK/EU and US/rest of world
Reminder: Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters is out now. Buy your copy here.
