TRASH!

The untold story of garbage, by a sociologist and garbage collector.

You might not expect the person tossing bulging trash bags into a garbage truck to have a bachelor’s degree, let alone a master’s. Most of us have been socialized to see garbage collection as a low-down, last-resort job—the kind of thing done, ideally, in the dead of night or the dark hours of the morning, when the rest of us can ignore it. Montreal garbageman Pare-Poupart first got a job on a garbage truck as a teenager, pushed by his stepfather to prove his masculinity: “Jesus, Simon, make a man of yourself!” To his surprise, he found he loved the work. The physical challenge of running for hours, the effort of heaving heavy bags and throwing them overhead, and the camaraderie drew him to the profession. What began as a challenge became a passion that paid for college and offered a sense a community: “Garbagemen live life free of the scrutiny of others, with all its attendant pressures.” Even after completing his master’s, Pare-Poupart is still on the truck. His chronicle of the work is a fascinating inside look at a world seldom seen. His sociology degree is an asset, providing a well-researched lens into our relationship with waste. “Day after day, I heave and haul the detritus of the most polluting civilization in human history,” he writes, estimating that he’s hauled “nearly seventy thousand tons of trash” in 20 years. Being face to face with waste makes it impossible to ignore what many people don’t want to see: the sheer volume of trash we produce every day as a result of our obsession with comfort and goods. “If we weren’t there to shoulder this burden, everything would fall apart,” he writes, describing how rats and disease would pile up along with the trash. We depend on people like Pare-Poupart to make our garbage something we can ignore. In this arresting book, he makes that invisible work something you can’t look away from.

A sharp and engaging reckoning with the detritus of our times—and the people who clean it up.