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Heaps of trouble
堆积如山的问题
Wasteland. By Oliver Franklin-Wallis.
《垃圾场》，奥利弗·富兰克林-沃利斯著。

In "our mutual friend", Charles Dickens's last complete novel, stray paper "hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure". Since those words were published in the 1860s, the world's waste problem has changed in both scale and composition.
在查尔斯·狄更斯最后一部完整的小说《我们共同的朋友》中，废纸“挂在每一株灌木上，在每一棵树上飘动，飞舞中被电线缠住，出没于每一个圈地”。自从这些文字在19世纪60年代发表以来，世界垃圾问题在规模和构成上都发生了变化。

These days plastic in one form or another is strewn on verges, clogs rivers and swirls around oceans in vast gyres. Circulated by winds and tides, tiny nanoplastics have penetrated all manner of watery ecosystems, reaching both the Earth's poles and its highest peaks, with unknown consequences for the planet.
如今，各种形式的塑料遍布道路两旁，堵塞了河流，并在巨大的海洋漩涡中旋转。在风和潮汐的作用下，微小的纳米塑料渗透到各种水生生态系统中，到达地球的两极和最高峰，给地球带来了难以预知的后果。

Worried by the pollution caused by a throwaway culture, Oliver Franklin-Wallis-a British journalist who has written for The Economist-heads to places that best illustrate this profligacy. In "Wasteland" he visits an Indian landfill that is piled almost as high as the Qutub Minar, a well-known minaret in Delhi; Ghana's largest second-hand clothes market, through which 15m garments are thought to pass every week; a former mining area in America that is blighted by dumped lead, zinc and cadmium; and a defunct nuclear-power plant in the north-west of England, which contrasts starkly with the natural beauty of the nearby Lake District.
曾为《经济学人》撰稿的英国记者奥利弗·富兰克林-沃利斯对丢弃文化造成的污染感到担忧，于是他前往最能说明这种肆意挥霍的地方。在《垃圾场》一书中，他参观了一个印度垃圾填埋场，该垃圾填埋场的堆放几乎与德里著名的尖塔库图卜塔一样高；加纳最大的二手服装市场，据信每周有1500万件服装通过该市场；美国的一个旧矿区被倾倒的铅、锌和镉污染；以及英格兰西北部一座已停用的核电站，它与附近湖区的自然美景形成了鲜明的对比。

He sees these places as evidence of human myopia about the Earth's fragility and the finitude of its resources. Rubbish, the author notes, is often deposited "on the margins, and on the marginalised". He explains the concept of "toxic colonialism", whereby trash is shipped by wealthier countries to poorer ones, and shows its detrimental effects up close. But he also acknowledges that the waste trade can sometimes be beneficial to communities on the receiving end: what one person deems useless, another sees as a potential source of income.
他认为这些地方证明了人类对地球脆弱性和资源有限性缺乏远见。作者指出，垃圾通常被“丢弃在边缘地区和被边缘化的人身上”。他解释了 “有毒殖民主义”的概念，即富裕国家将垃圾运往贫穷国家，并近距离展示了其有害影响。但他也承认，废物交易有时对接收端的社区有益：一个人认为无用的东西，另一个人认为是潜在的收入来源。

Throughout his tour of disfigured landscapes and industrial incinerators, Mr Franklin-Wallis decries the tactic of "planned obsolescence": ie, the marketing of products that quickly need to be replaced. A notorious early-20th-century example was the "light-bulb cartel", who conspired to slash the lifespan of their filaments. These days items ranging from "fast fashion" to wireless earbuds are liable to be thrown away or forgotten in a drawer before long.
富兰克林-沃利斯在参观毁貌的风景和工业焚化炉的过程中，谴责了“计划性淘汰”的策略：即销售需要迅速更换的产品。20世纪早期一个臭名昭著的例子是“灯泡卡特尔”，他们密谋缩短灯泡灯丝的寿命。如今，从“快时尚”到无线耳塞，很多东西很快就会被扔掉或遗忘在抽屉里。

The book comes alive in its descriptions of people and places. A paper-mill worker in southern England is "bald and aquiline, monkish, with the gentle stoop of an under-watered tulip". The appearance of a zero-waste zealot in the north of England is "somewhere between affable climate activist and festival drug-dealer". The colours and buzz of a market day in Accra are sketched in short, lively sentences, as is the dusty decay of an abandoned town in Oklahoma. Happily, Mr Franklin-Wallis writes stylishly about ugly things: cranes at a site for burning garbage "move slowly, Damoclesian, their noise a deep rumble"; the flow of rubbish at a waste plant is "relentless, the choreography balletic".
这本书对人物和地点的描写栩栩如生。英格兰南部的一个造纸厂工人是“秃顶、鹰钩鼻的、像修道士一样的人，弯着腰，像一朵浸过水的郁金香”。在英格兰北部，一个“零废弃”的狂热分子的出现“介于和蔼可亲的气候活动人士和节日毒贩之间”。阿克拉集市日的色彩和喧嚣用简短、生动的句子勾勒出来，俄克拉荷马州一个废弃小镇尘土飞扬的衰败景象也是如此。令人高兴的是，富兰克林-沃利斯先生用时髦的笔触描写了一些丑陋的事情: 在垃圾焚烧场的起重机“行动缓慢，如同达摩克利斯之剑悬挂其上，发出低沉的隆隆的响声”; 垃圾处理厂的垃圾流动是“无间断的，如芭蕾舞编排一般流畅”。

"Wasteland" is heavy on facts, many of them interesting and sobering. Twenty thousand plastic bottles are sold around the world every second. The world produced 2bn tonnes of solid waste in 2016, a figure that will rise to 3.3bn tonnes by 2050. But the piles of numbers can occasionally be a strain. At such moments, readers may find themselves agreeing that waste is "not the most appealing subject" for a book, as the author himself admits near the beginning of his.

Overall, however, he dispels that impression. "Wasteland" does not offer novel solutions to the problem of waste. Mr Franklin-Wallis wants you to buy less and recycle more, along with a crackdown on "greenwashing" (whereby companies make exaggerated claims about their environmental credentials). But he succeeds in outlining the size of the challenge. His book should prompt serious discussion in boardrooms and parliaments.


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