About a year ago, I visited a recycling centre in east London with a group of students for a module I teach on ecological literature. We were met at reception by a press officer named Phoebe who had agreed to show us round. After donning hard hats and steel toe-capped boots we went through a door into an enormous hanger. On one side there was a mountain of rubbish to be sorted; it was steaming gently in the cold air. On the other stood the “MRF” or “materials recovery facility” –a huge, Heath Robinson machine bristling with conveyor belts, vibrating plates and spinning helical augers, which separated recyclable material such as metal, plastics and paper, before it was bailed up and sent on for processing elsewhere.
The MRF wasn’t working when we visited (breakdowns are common) but Phoebe was keen to stress its efficiency. The machine could, she said, handle 140,000 tonnes of rubbish every year – the domestic and industrial waste of several London boroughs. Even so, sorting wasn’t a completely mechanised process. Before we left, Phoebe showed us inside the “quality control cabin”, a small room in which a dozen or so workers would manually remove hazardous material – mainly batteries, especially from disposable vapes – from the conveyor belt before it got anywhere near the MRF.
For most of us, what happens to our rubbish after we throw it away remains largely invisible. Who could face the realities of the afterlife of the 500kg of rubbish the average European throws away each year? The thousands of tonnes of waste that are dumped in landfill across the developing world every day? The fast-fashion detritus that washes up on the world’s beaches after every storm?
A couple of excellent books – especially Oliver Franklin-Wallis’s Wasteland and Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars, both published last year – have shown how implicated we all are in what Clapp calls the “arduous, globe-spanning, carbon-spewing journeys” created by the modern waste industry. Simon Paré-Poupart’s Trash!, a slim, energetic, memoir-cum-manifesto that has been a hit in his native Canada, draws attention to another uncomfortable truth about the afterlife of rubbish: that it is still people – rather than machines – who bear the brunt of dealing with all the stuff we throw away.
Paré-Poupart is a 41-year-old binman from Montreal who has worked as a “runner” (following behind a rubbish lorry collecting bins, emptying them, and placing them back in front of people’s homes) for the past 20 years. He first took the job when he was a college student and – with brief interludes to study for further degrees and work in journalism – he has continued ever since.
Paré-Poupart is the latest in a long line of literary binmen, to include Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump”; Nikolai Gogol’s Stepan Plyushkin, who in Dead Souls spends his days “fishing” for discarded treasure in the village dump; and Clive King’s Stig of the Dump, about a vestigial cave boy who lives on a rubbish heap. The work he describes is physically arduous and often dangerous, and because of this it tends to attract misfits. Paré-Poupart’s colleagues, he writes, are “former bikers, dopers, athletes who have abandoned all hope of making the big time, grown-up kids scarred by tough childhoods”. “The garbageman,” (and, at least according to Trash!, they are nearly all men), he writes:
… is the Sisyphus of our consumer society, a hapless labourer condemned to go from house to house picking up rags, swept along day after day in the never-ending flow of refuse we produce. And every day he is fated to resume this labour afresh, again and again, for all eternity. If we weren’t there to shoulder this burden, everything would fall apart. The rats would take over, the air would turn fetid, plague and cholera would run rampant.
There is pride here, too, and Paré-Poupart is careful to celebrate the grit of his fellow workers: runners who move “like machines” to get through their route as quickly as possible; the colleague who can ride the garbage truck “like a human flag”, holding himself out horizontally with just his arms as it drives along. A binman in Montreal will haul more than 20 tonnes of trash each day, running 15 miles during every shift. All of this takes its toll, and the average runner’s career is only ten years or so (many quit after their first shift). There isn’t much in the way of career progression either. Some become waste collection drivers, but most work until they drop.
What might keep someone doing this kind of work? For Paré-Poupart, being a binman is less of a job and more of a “vocation”. He works as a freelancer in what is still a wild industry. In Canada at least, refuse collection still seems to be a relatively well-paid job, perhaps because so few people want to do it.
Books about work – especially that which one has not done – are often fascinating for the specific textures of a life they unveil, and Paré-Poupart’s genial obsessiveness makes him good company in this regard. Trash! is full of inadvertently funny, slightly monomaniacal sentences like “Let’s get back to the crux of the matter: bin placement” and “Let’s talk about smells”. He is particularly exercised by the hierarchy of waste: regular bin collection, he writes, “is for real men”, whereas “recycling is for amateurs”. Compost, on the other hand “is beneath contempt” – annoying to deal with because loads are smaller, collection routes are much longer, and stricter environmental regulation means that it “quickly degenerates into a bureaucratic shitshow”. And it stinks.
Waste management has always been a murky business (it’s not surprising that Tony Soprano is in the trade), but one aspect of it Paré-Poupart doesn’t say much about is the internationalisation that has shaped the industry over the past 50 or so years, and which now seems to be in retreat. In Waste Wars, Clapp points out that by the early 2000s, America’s main export to China was rubbish (often the packaging of goods that Chinese producers had exported to America in the first place). Now China is refusing to take in any more of the world’s waste, and the West is having to find other solutions to its rubbish problem.
The closing down of international waste marketplaces has led to an increase in both local eco-crime and the promotion of closed-loop recycling and composting schemes. But according to Paré-Poupart, there is a fundamental contradiction in attempts to “green” the waste industry. Rubbish-collection companies are international conglomerates governed by capitalist principles, so even the greenest of initiatives are aimed towards expansion rather than reduction or moderation.
If there are any conclusions to be drawn from Trash!, they have to do with living within one’s means. Paré-Poupart is a committed “freegan”: a gleaner who lives off the things thrown out by others (he says he hasn’t bought any clothes in years). We should all be using less, he argues – personally recycling rather than trusting this to big business. Though the total volume of trash thrown into landfill in Montreal has reduced in the past few years, he observes, the amount of labour needed to service that waste – to collect it, sort it, and ship it elsewhere – has gone up. “The green bin embodies the promise of victory in the war against pollution,” he writes, “We garbagemen see something different… a magic trick, or more properly a sleight of hand.”
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the kind of “wasted labour” refuse workers are obliged to perform is a direct by-product of the excesses of modernity. “The more goods we accrue,” Paré-Poupart summarises, “and the greater comfort we enjoy, and the cleaner our surroundings are kept, the more waste it produces, from the junk that fills our landfills to the ‘wasted’ existences of fellow human beings.” A decline in stuff thrown away wouldn’t just benefit the world ecologically, it would mean fewer people would have to live lives that depend on this kind of labour. It would also, of course, leave the rubbish companies unhappy.
After we had finished our tour of the recycling centre, Phoebe told us that the MRF was currently under capacity. They had the resources to deal with much more waste, she said. Even now they sometimes had to turn the MRF off, as there was not enough material to feed it.
Jon Day’s books include Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier (Notting Hill)
[Further reading: Inside the great deprofessionalisation]
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This article appears in the 01 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Happy Birthday America
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