I never thought I’d love a book as much as Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter but this is like a much needed update. By one estimate, up to 7 percent of the world’s gold reserves may currently be contained in e-waste.

You have to admire Franklin-Wallis’s constitution as he visits a giant recycling plant in Essex, an energy-from-waste plant in Avonmouth and a sewage plant in Isleworth before venturing to India to scale the Ghazipur landfill mountain and endure the delights of one of Kanpur’s tanneries – notoriously grim and visceral places. I’ve been trying to live more intentionally in regards to the things I purchase, get rid of, and waste. I want to give this book to everyone in my life - especially people who think caring about where their trash goes isn’t worth the effort.I didn't want to get into trouble, or worse, have someone come and throw them in the burn barrel, so I nudged the box down under some broken machinery. This is an incredible journey into the world of rubbish, full of fascinating characters and mind-bending facts. However, a fair warning is warranted, this book will almost guaranteed make you feel like a total shit. With his investigative chops and contagious curiosity, Oliver Franklin-Wallis has cracked wide a dozen hidden, jaw-dropping worlds. It is also home to some terrifying statistics: the four trillion plastic cigarette filters flicked to the ground and stamped out annually; the 20,000 plastic bottles sold every second; the 2kg of waste produced every day by the average American.

In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. Among the industrial-scale horrors, Franklin-Wallis finds warm and bright characters whose lives have become inextricably woven into the waste stream.It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions. This deadly radioactive material still has the possibility of harming 300 generations later so what we do with it has to take into account a changing world. One piece of electronic equipment can contain as many as sixty elements - not only commodities like iron, copper, aluminum, but a host of rare earth metals including cobalt, neodymium, and tantalum, which are used in everything from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. This is a fascinating and comprehensive tour of the second half of that equation – the tossed-out usually gets a thousandth the attention of the not-yet-purchased, but Oliver Franklin-Wallis does his best to redress that balance, in a book that wills you see the world quite differently than you did before.