Where Does Your Garbage Go?
Oliver Franklin-Wallis young career has been spent writing on some the biggest names in tech & entertainment such as Elon Musk, Spiderman’s Tom Holland and Star Wars director JJ Abrams.
However he has now turned his attention to far less glamorous topic. Oliver joins the Bright Ideas Gathering to make the case that we are living in a waste crisis. Sewage flooding our rivers, plastics in ours oceans; rubbish shipped abroad and inflicted on the world’s poor.
Oliver discusses the research behind his first book, Wasteland. The book is his attempt to explore what happens to our stuff after we throw it “away” – the places it goes, and the people who deal with it when it gets there. It’s a story that took him around the UK, to the USA, India, and Ghana; from the inside of dumpsters to mountainous landfills, super-sewers to ghost towns, via the largest nuclear waste store in Europe.
And beyond merely chronicling the global ‘waste industrial complex’, he will discuss its important implications for our future and what needs to change.
Oliver’s bio
A Garbage Investigator
- Oliver Franklin-Wallis is an award-winning magazine journalist, whose writing has appeared in WIRED (where he is a contributing editor), British GQ, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, 1843, and many other publications.
- He has written about art fraudsters and deep-sea explorers, reported from Liberia on the ebola virus, chronicled the fractious race to build a hyperloop, and profiled countless startup founders, scientists, film directors and celebrities.
- His first book, Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters, is available for order now.
