India is on the global frontlines of the waste crisis: Oliver Franklin-Wallis, author of Wasteland

Author: Divya Gandhi

The river of rubbish at the Green Recycling in Maldon, Essex, says the award-winning journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis, is “an awful sight” but leaves him mesmerised: his eyes catch “a single discarded glove; a crushed Tupperware container, the meal inside uneaten; a lone photograph of a child, smiling atop an adult’s shoulders.” Franklin-Wallis’s journey around the world of detritus, which he chronicles in his new book Wasteland, takes him to landfills and ghost towns, sewers to secondhand markets. It takes him to Ghana’s Kantamanto that sells second-hand clothes, branded ones, better known as Obroni wawu, or ‘dead white man’s clothes’, much of which goes to dumpsites.