‘Trash!’ Is a Close-Up Look at the Waste of Modern Life - The Atlantic

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Like many small children, my daughter reveres garbage trucks. In the mornings, she goes to the window and asks, eyes shining, whether today will be a “garbage-truck day.” When she sees or hears one, she reacts with a giddy, half-afraid delight that I imagine she’ll reserve, someday, for roller coasters or getting a body part pierced. Once, I had to spend half an hour teaching her the concept of synonyms because she was so upset that I’d referred to the sacred trucks’ contents as “trash,” not “garbage.”<br>According to the Montreal garbageman Simon Paré-Poupart, toddler garbage fandom is a manifestation of the age-old human appreciation of strength and daring. In his memoir, Trash!, a French-language hit recently translated into English by Pablo Strauss, Paré-Poupart explains that children are “so impressed by the truck that they worship the man who seems to tame its force.” But really, his book argues, garbagemen wage war against a force far more powerful than any engine or trash compactor: their fellow humans’ tendency to acquire more stuff than they need. Paré-Poupart loves his job, but he also knows that by tidying up the “detritus of the most polluting civilization in human history,” he and his colleagues make it too easy for everyone else to forget how much waste they really create. In Trash!, he challenges his readers to pay more attention—to see the age of DoorDash and same-day delivery as garbagemen do.<br>Trash!: A Garbageman's Story<br>By Pare-Poupart, Simon

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It doesn’t look good. Trash! is a street-level portrait of both lack and excess, an exposé of rich societies’ overconsumption and waste. Every day, Montreal’s garbagemen throw the results of too much buying into their trucks and receive too little in return: low wages, long hours, no job security, no aid for the athlete-level wear and tear that come with the job. And they don’t get much respect, never mind that if they weren’t there to clean up the city, it would grind to a sick, smelly, rat-infested halt.<br>Paré-Poupart takes Francophone literature to particular task for leaving his colleagues out of the cohort of “‘working-class heroes’ celebrated in popular culture, from Quebec’s novels of rural life to Émile Zola’s miners. Nobody writes novels about garbagemen.” He seems to be writing for those who need to imagine, not remember, what it’s like to take an accidental “shower in compost bin juice” or have the man whose garbage cans you’re wrangling sneer at you, “I went to school so I wouldn’t have to do a job like that.”<br>Read: The interior lives of hoarders<br>Trash! is an intriguing attempt to broaden the parameters of this kind of book. Paré-Poupart has a distinctly 21st-century knack for swirling together theoretical and visceral language: René Descartes on one page, and grubs “wriggling and swarming in every garbage bag” on the next. His grab-bag writing is reminiscent of the internet at its rare, educational best. Paré-Poupart’s style gives his book a rambunctious spirit, a sense of a hungry, catholic mind at work. All sorts of dilemmas come together in Trash!, which reveals them to be expressions of the same core issue. Paré-Poupart shows readers a society whose members, with too few exceptions, seem to treat both their belongings and the workers who ultimately handle them as disposable.<br>Paré-Poupart is, by his own account, an unconventional garbageman. As a teenager, he was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee with academic dreams unusual for his middle-class community, in which “liking school didn’t command respect.” His family wanted him to go to college, but only because doing so would lead to higher pay. What his stepfather really valued, at least, was masculinity: While Paré-Poupart was still in high school, he got hired to run behind garbage trucks after his stepdad challenged him to “be a man.” (In Quebec, trucks often drive at a crawl while collectors jog after them, tossing in trash.)<br>Garbage put Paré-Poupart through college and graduate school in sociology, and even as he pursued work in research and social services after earning his degrees, he kept “right on throwing trash, where the physical challenge, camaraderie, and steady income balance out the intellectual satisfactions of other jobs.” In Trash!, he brings his two careers together, although he never allows the writer side of himself to outshine the garbageman. Take his critique of recycling, which he describes as a “magic trick, or more properly a sleight of hand.” It’s an illusion, in both Quebec and the United States, that most plastic really goes anywhere except an enormous drift in the ocean or a giant heap in one of the poorer countries that buy rich ones’ refuse. To Paré-Poupart, this reality is not just a planetary insult but also a personal one. The contaminated plastic that recycling companies ship from Montreal to India, he writes, includes “recyclables I picked up...