Rubbish! : Dirt On Our Hands And Crisis Ahead Paperback / softback

We can no longer cope with our waste. Every hour in the UK we throw away enough rubbish to fill the Albert hall - a statistic quoted so often that perhaps we've stopped imagining what it means. And every year the flow accelerates. This is the story of our rubbish - from the first human bowel movement to the littering of outer space.

With a hankerchief to his nose, Girling picks through our fridge mountain, our crumbling sewers, trading waste, packaging waste, hazardous industrial waste... it is a mucky saga of carelessness, greed and opportunism, wasted opportunity and official bungling.

But Rubbish! is also a plea for us to consider other kinds of waste: the trashing of our landscape, the unstoppable floods of junk that clog our mailboxes, litter the skies and foul the airwaves... Rubbish! may not be a conventional battle cry but this is unmistakably a call to arms - not just for the three 'R's - reduce, re-use, recycle - but for us to fight for new ideas, brave initiative rather than reliance on old systems that are crumbling before our eyes.