Next month, Little, Brown and Company is publishing Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. The author is Athens-based journalist Alexander Clapp, who has become known in Greece for his undercover foray into Golden Dawn, the neo-fascist political party, as well as his investigations of Thessaloniki tobacco tycoon Ivan Savvidis and shipping magnate Evangelos Marinakis.
Clapp got his start in journalism after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania when he received the Greek America Foundation’s 2013-14 Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship.
He later received numerous awards for his journalism, including a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award and an Alistair Horne Visiting Fellowship at Oxford.
The book, according to Little, Brown’s website, is about the global trash trade: The filthy billion-dollar industry in which, since the end of the Cold War, rich countries have been shipping their garbage and toxins to poorer countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
One chapter focuses on Greece and the ways in which American cruise ship companies dispatch their old vessels to the Aegean Sea to be dismantled, resulting in tremendous pollution and damage to Greece’s precious island ecosystem.
You can purchase the book here.
