The ever-increasing volume of human-manufactured products and the staggering resulting waste should be of serious concern to residents of Alaska, beyond the occasional controversy over bears raiding trash cans and debris from homeless camps.

Considering the subject of trash, waste and recycling on a worldwide basis, I would recommend a 2025 book by Alexander Clapp, “Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash.” It provides an investigative accounting of the monumental flood of waste and trash that the human species creates and spreads around the planet, from wealthier countries to poorer places few people are aware of, and the multibillion-dollar industrial businesses that have resulted.

The author travels to such places to gather the information the book relates, often at personal risk. The amount of trash, garbage, used products and plastic in many forms that is transported, dumped, buried, burned, torn apart and supposedly reused is mind-boggling.

The situation is fraught with greed, corruption, toxic pollution, environmental destruction, social, cultural and ethnic degradation, recycling fraud, and egotistical cruelty and indifference. The amount of money, the disingenuous methods employed, the secretive nature of much of it and the blocking of public knowledge about the problem, often through high-powered litigation, are staggering.

Many people may have some idea of the problems, but the book provides a much wider, more thorough, big-picture, truly eye-opening perspective — a must-read book. As the 1960s musical group Four Jacks and a Jill sang in a David Marks song with an interesting history, “It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.”

Like it or not, Alaska is part of that world.

— George Harbeson Jr., Homer

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