Mr. Clapp is a journalist and the author of “Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash,” from which this essay is adapted. The New York Times [unlocked]. The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie. “It’s not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa. Today’s waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run by organized crime? Of course. ‘For us,’ a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, ‘rubbish is gold.’ But much of it doesn’t have to be. Waste export remains scandalously underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone can give it a go.” Rich countries get their garbage out of sight and out of mind, waste middlemen turn rubbish into gold, and a lot of people are robbed of their golden years. “Cancer rates have soared in Casalnuovo di Napoli, Italy, where burying or burning of waste has poisoned water and land.” ‘Triangle of death’: will Italy finally tackle mafia’s toxic waste dumping?…”