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This is Science Friday. I'm Flor Lichten. Today in the podcast, where our garbage actually goes and the stinky business of trash disposal.

The more I dug into the waste trade, the more I realized that it bore striking resemblances to the drug trade.

I think we have all had that experience of getting to the end of, I don't know, a peanut butter jar and thinking, where should this go?

Trash or recycling? Should I rinse it out? And where will it actually end up?

My next guest had those same questions and went to great lengths to answer them, visiting

five continents to chronicle how our trash travels.

And along the way, he discovered a multi-billion dollar trash trade, run by shady wastebrokers, a whole global industry powered by slimy spoons and crinkled plastic bags and all the other stuff we throw away.

It's a putrid business that we're all a part of

and know little about. Here to help us sort through this garbage story is Alexander Clap.

Journalist and author of the new book, Waste Wars, The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. His reporting

has appeared in the New York Times and the economist, and he's based in Athens, Greece.

Alex, welcome to Science Friday.

Flora, thank you so much for having me.

Why did you write this book? Did you have a turning point moment with trash?

Yeah, it's a good question, a fair question.

I mean, most people don't decide to give up two years of their life to travel around the world and visit landfills and ports and attempt to understand where some of the nastiest, smelliest material is going.

But I would say that the turning point was maybe six or seven years ago.

I was on a bus in Romania, and I remember looking outside the window and seeing

stacks of plastic waste on the side of the road, and I think that was sort of strange. I mean,

it wasn't in a landfill, and it was unclear what was happening to this waste. I did what any

journalists, I think, would do. I started asking around, what was that waste that I saw?

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