In the 1980s, Philadelphia was in the midst of a trash crisis. A sanitation workers’ strike had left the city with an immense backlog of garbage. The solution: Ship it overseas, on a rusting cargo vessel called the Khian Sea. But when one country after another refused to take Philly’s waste, it turned the Khian Sea’s trash voyage into a trash odyssey, and shed light on a growing problem that critics came to call “garbage imperialism.”

Featured in this episode:

Kenny Bruno

Sources:

Simone M. Müller’s book The Toxic Ship

Alexander Clapp’s book Waste Wars

Planet Money’s reporting on the Mobro 4000: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511

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Today, Lawless Planet brings you an episode from our friends at Drilled Media. Season 12 of their flagship podcast is called SLAPP’d, and it tells another side of a story we covered earlier in our episode “Surveillance and Sabotage on the Dakota Access Pipeline.”

Greenpeace, which was only tangentially involved in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been slapped with a $666 million bill for damages...despite the fact that DAPL was built, and has been making Energy Transfer millions of dollars for years. How did we get here? Cody Hall, an Indigenous water protector who was a key figure during the Standing Rock protests and was initially also targeted in Energy Transfer's suit, walks us through how things went down back in 2016 and 2017, and where this suit began.

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We’re doing something different on Lawless Planet this week. We’re sharing an episode from our friends Scamfluencers — a show that unpacks the wildest true stories of high-profile scams and the con artists behind them.

When Jeff Carpoff starts a business making portable solar generators, it becomes an instant hit among big corporations, Hollywood studios, and deep-pocketed investors. They think they’re getting a good deal on green energy – and a huge tax credit to go along with it. But Jeff’s clients don’t realize that he’s been playing them. And when he flies too close to the sun, it’ll blow the fuse on his whole operation.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.