Wasteland Quotes

“Fashion is the business of waste; its very existence is obsolescence.”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“Cleaning up is expensive; arson is cheap.”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“As modern agriculture and supply chains have made food cheap, diverse, and plentiful, it can also sometimes feel that we have forgotten to value the food we do eat, or understand the environmental or human costs that have gone into its production - from meat farming to out-of-season blueberries delivered by refrigerated air-freight fresh from Peru.”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. 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”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future