[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In Trash! A Garbageman’s Story,[.small-caps] Québécois trash collector Simon Pare-Poupart presents a series of funny, provocative essays about his vocation. Pare-Poupart has been a “runner” working part-time behind garbage trucks in Montreal for over twenty years. He also has an advanced degree in sociology and has worked in journalism and the social sector. But throwing trash is his calling, a calling he cherishes with fierce pride.[.article__paragraph--cap]

This small book has impressive range: in under two hundred pages, Pare-Poupart delivers meditations on planned obsolescence, democracy, the inherent dignity of hard work, the politics of waste management in other countries, unions, freeganism, the joy of physical labor, and the comparative minutiae of throwing trash in the dead of winter and in the stinking heat of summer. He profiles several men (virtually all the garbage collectors he has encountered are men) who illuminate what the work of trash collection offers people on the margins of society.

Pare-Poupart makes an impassioned case for trash collection as a dignified profession that requires athletic skill and resilience – and that is, of course, vital to public health. He celebrates that people can show up for work strung out on drugs and still provide society with a meaningful service and earn the compensation they need to survive another day. Yet he also catalogs how people – especially “respectable” people – dehumanize garbagemen. Many fail to consider who must chip their bins out of the ice or deal with a burst bag of food waste (or worse), and he shares occasions of unprovoked aggression, of such respectable people cursing at him for no apparent reason.

Pare-Poupart suggests that garbage collection is socially undervalued, not primarily due to the stink and sludge but because of guilt about overconsumption and waste. Citing Ambre Fourrier, he notes that “on a global scale, what distinguishes rich from poor is that one group has the privilege of getting rid of their waste, while the other group inherits it. … The garbage collector is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.” He becomes, then, an uncomfortable reminder to the rich – which includes most everyone who lives in the West, whose waste is largely exported to the Global South – of the ethical problems of trash.

And Pare-Poupart goes much further in his examination of how garbage collection is shaped by politics and geography. One chapter, which features a Black French garbageman who immigrated to Quebec, examines how unions, racial politics, and government regulations shape the profession. 

Though Pare-Poupart gives a nuanced account of debates about how the field should work, he himself is a self-described “anarchogarbageman” who personally relishes the freedom of working in an industry where the rules aren’t always adhered to.

The book is full of anarchic joy, yet it illuminates the quintessential paradox of many twenty-first-century jobs: “I’m a cog in the wheels of the system. But I’m also, in my modest way, a grain of sand slowing the works.” Trash! is entertaining and smart, relatable and strange in equal measure, and well worth picking up for anyone interested in thinking about the ethical, social, environmental, and political complexities of working today.

‍