You know the drill: plastic and glass containers go in the blue recycling bin, paper and cardboard in the blue sack, vegetable matter in the green compost bin, and the rest in the grey general rubbish bin. Households up and down the land go through variations of these familiar refuse-sorting tasks each week. But where does it actually all go?

Into the trucks that pick them up, yes, but after that? It’s a kind of act of faith that we imagine our detritus that we’ve carefully – or not so carefully – categorised is transported to the right location where appropriate measures are taken to dispose of it in the most sensible and ecological manner.

Or to put it more bluntly, most of us don’t give it a second thought once the weekly chore is done, the bins are emptied, and the rubbish collectors are on their way. Yet there have been a whole slew of books with titles such as Wasteland and Waste and Want that look at the dirty truth about where all of our consumer packaging ends up.

The latest in the genre is Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars, and like its predecessors, it is not a harbinger of good news. There is a reason why mafia bosses tend to work in “waste management”, because it’s a shadowy and unpleasant commercial world that few want to look at – or smell – too closely.

Clapp has few such sensory apprehensions. He ventures out to all corners of the Earth to hear stories of illegal fly tipping on a gargantuan scale, dubious recycling procedures, and the repeated story of the poor being left to deal with the crap that the rich world throws away.

In a searing introduction he writes of GPS chips that have been placed by activists in recycling bins to see where the contents go. In one example, a plastic bag left outside a Tesco in London is tracked to Harwich, the Netherlands, and then Poland, before ending up 2,000 miles away in an industrial yard in southern Turkey full of European garbage.

He also cites a 2020 report in Nature magazine that found that “the total mass of the world’s human-made objects… had come to equal the entire biomass of the planet itself”. All this stuff – buildings, cars, plastic straws – has different levels of obsolescence but sooner or later it becomes rubbish, some fit for recycling but much of it not.

Clapp’s concern is less about the global effect, though he acknowledges the widespread pollution and effects on climate change, than the inequalities of distribution of the rubbish itself. In a sense it’s a kind of critique of capitalist consumption and its economic disparities made by looking not at the buying power but throwing away power of the wealthy. It’s a book about how the global north dumps on the global south.

That’s both its strength and its weakness, because although Clapp makes a strong case for the unfair and all too symbolic fact of the powerless working in unhealthy conditions to recycle or bury the rubbish of the powerful, it leads him down a number of dead ends.

In the first half of the book we see him flying around the world in search of damning stories. In Guatemala there are tales of a secret wasteland where dangerous chemicals are buried, a kind of toxic El Dorado, but no evidence is ever found for its existence. So he concludes that it’s even more tragic that Guatemalans will forever wonder if it’s true or not.

Stories in Benin and the Marshall Islands about plans to dump radioactive and industrial waste also fail to materialise, partly because of successful protests after the plans are exposed. Clapp concludes: “The most alarming aspect of the hazardous waste trade? It’s not what we do know. It’s what we don’t… Those deals that did happen occurred precisely because they never got exposed – and likely never will.”

This is quite possibly true, because it is, as the author shows, a world filled with criminals, subcontractors and flags of convenience, all of them obscuring the filthy facts. But it somewhat undermines the exposé element of the book. Nonetheless he is strong on how China, for so long the dumping ground of western plastics, banned the importation of plastic waste in 2018 only to send its agents abroad to countries such as Thailand and the Philippines to continue the murky business.

The real issue, however, is the relentless and growing rate at which we keep producing this near-indestructible garbage. Although we want to believe that we’re doing our bit for the planet in selecting the correct bins each week, all too often, it seems, we’re simply relocating the problem far away and leaving it with the voiceless poor.

• Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish by Alexander Clapp is published by John Murray (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply