WASTE WARS

Some trash gets tossed onto roadsides. Some gets burned for fuel. Some gets buried underground. But most of it lives a hot potato second life, getting bartered, sold, re-sold, smuggled, salvaged, re-purposed from one country or mafia or corporation to another, often across thousands of miles.

WASTE WARS tells the stories of five trash conflicts being waged in different corners of the world right now.

WASTE WARS always keeps one grander question front and center: If the handling of its trash can expose deeper truths about a particular society, what can the global business of trash say about our world today?

WASTE WARS is about the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade which almost everyone in the world engages in and yet which almost no one realizes is happening.

Alexander Clapp is a journalist and writer based in Greece. In 2013 he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor's Degree in Classical Languages. After graduation he moved to Greece. For three months he cleaned hotel rooms on the island of Mykonos. Later he went uncover in the Golden Dawn, Greece's neo-Nazi party. He wrote about both experiences for London Review of Books. He has since written on the Balkans and Eastern Europe for a range of other publications, including Guardian Long Read, The New Republic, The New York Times, New Left Review, The Economist and The Baffler.
Clapp is the recipient of numerous journalism awards. In 2017 he was named a Balkan Fellow for Journalist Excellence and won a European Union Migration Media Award. In 2018 he won a Matthew Power Literary Reporting Prize. In 2019 he won a Robert B. Silvers Reporting Grant. In 2021 he won a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award. (His award-winning piece, "The Vampire Ship," published in the September 2020 issue of The New Republic, has been optioned for a forthcoming documentary series.) His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages.