Book review: “Trash: A Garbageman’s Story” by Simon Pare-Poupart

Lorraine is a wealthy suburb of Montreal, and the livin’ there is easy, as Simon Pare-Poupart recounts in Trash: A Garbageman’s Story.

Working here fills me with idyllic feelings, what with all the trees and greenery, all that clean fresh air. The yards are gorgeous, the streets wide and clear — and did I mention how green it is?

If that sounds a bit sarcastic, well, Pare-Poupart can be sarcastic at time in talking about his life as a garbageman and about society’s relationship to its rubbish.

And, in Lorraine in 2012 when Pare-Pourpart filled in for a friend, that meant bags stuffed with “the ‘green’ — piles of branches, mounds of grass clippings, dead leaves, tall mountains of organic waste.”  And there was lots of it, and it was heavy, and “such, such were the joys.”

Why is it, you may ask, that we have so much green “waste” in the first place?  Because beauty comes at a price. Trees, landscapes, large flowerbeds, gardens — all this organic life produces fruit, plant waste, and broken branches. Nature decomposes, it putrefies, it’s muddy. It’s dirty.

But model citizens aren’t having any of it. They want to live in a controlled, sanitized, smoothed-out environment. They want to live in a magazine ad. Not surrounded by piles of decomposing leaves.

 

Us and them

Trash is a book about two groups.

One group is us, all of us, who produce endless amounts of garbage and want to have as little to do with it as we can.  We certainly don’t want to live with it — just think how bad it got in New York City during the ten-day garbage strike of 1968 — and we don’t want to think about it.

Like the “model citizens” of Lorraine, we want our garbage — green waste and paper and glass and kitchen scraps and old furniture and broken lamps and anything and everything we’re done with — to disappear.  Like magic!

And the other group is the garbage collectors who make that disappearing happen.

 

Knowing the work

Except, of course, it doesn’t disappear. It just goes — is taken — somewhere else, as Pare-Poupart points out in this brisk, sprightly tour of world of what’s thrown away.

In many respects, Pare-Poupart, now in his forties, is not your usual garbageman. Two decades ago, he began working on garbage routes to pay for college and now has graduate degrees in sociology and international business.  He only works part-time so that he has space for other pursuits, such as doing social work or free-lance journalism.

There’s an edge of bitterness to his sarcasm, but that’s counterbalanced by the sheer enjoyment he gets, most of the time, from collecting trash. In other words, he’s more than a little critical of the waste management companies and of society’s handling of its garbage, but he’s no crank.

For instance, Pare-Poupart thinks the whole garbage collection thing would work better if those in charge listened to the ideas of garbagemen — guys who often have a lot of personal problems but, still, are the professionals who know the work.

 

“Smells”

By the way, all of the garbage workers Pare-Poupart mentions in Trash are men; maybe that’s how it is in and around Montreal. In Chicago, by contrast, women are a significant part of the work force. Also, garbage in Chicago is a city-operated service. At Montreal, most of the routes are privatized.

Nonetheless, at its heart, garbage collecting is garbage collecting.

Let’s talk smells. Riding behind a garbage truck is a bit like being on a farm. After a while you stop smelling anything at all. There are exceptions, of course. One garbageman trainer I know, Nicker, had a helper who would throw up when he reached the end of the first street on the route. After that, he was fine.

And I knew another helper who would actually spray perfume into the hopper, which makes about as much sense as trying to empty out a lake with a ladle. For most of us, though, the smell just goes away.

 

Spandex

Not that everyone goes about the garbage collection business in exactly the same way.

Consider Spandex whose real name is Michel and who got his nickname because of the shorts he likes to wear to work. He also goes shirtless with flip-flops on his feet.

And it’s true no one knows much about Michel. Except for one thing: he talks to the trash. It’s like he’d rather have a conversation with a garbage bag full of vegetable peels, or broken bottles than human beings. He tells the garbage all about the weather and fills it in on what’s new in his life…

He also asks the garbage how it’s doing, despite the cold, mud, and heat, and worms eating away at what few shreds of dignity these once-proud castoffs are still clinging too.

 

“A complete workout”

Pare-Poupart loves the work, in part, because “it gives you a satisfying sense that you’re getting shit done.”  And, also, it’s such a healthy kind of job.

That’s not Pare-Poupart being sarcastic.

For an athletic standpoint, it’s a complete workout, not unlike a CrossFit session. And as an added bonus, on some runs you get the chance to find stuff worth keeping for yourself or valuable scrap metal.

He wrote his book as a reminder to the “model citizens” of the world that they are creating a lot of trash that humanity is having a harder and harder time to dispose of because, in fact, it doesn’t disappear, even if you send it into space or into the ocean or to some Third World country.

And also as a suggestion to treat garbagemen with courtesy and respect, not as human trash.

 

The joy of garbage work

But, most of all, it seems, Pare-Poupart wrote his book to celebrate the joy of garbage work.

One thing the garbage community offers everyone working in it is the chance to keep on being who they are, making progress at their own pace, by holding down a job.

Garbagemen are held in such low social esteem that no one really pays attention to their existence. And that contempt isn’t all bad, from our point of view. Garbagemen live life free of the scrutiny of others, with all its attendant pressures.

Note he calls the garbage work force a community.  That says a lot about why Pare-Poupart likes his job. And then there’s this:

The world of garbage is a Wild West, and that’s exactly what I love about it. I love straddling the fine line between dirty and clean. I love the joyful chaos of garbagemen, our anarchic spirit and vague desperation….

I love the chaos of the garbage truck for its own sake. It gives me a space of freedom I can’t find anywhere else.

 

A fun visit

Trash is a book that tells a story you’re not likely to find anywhere else.

For “model citizens” like us, it gives a glimpse into a community of people who are often easy for us to overlook or, worse, ignore.

It provides yet another reminder of what it means when we throw stuff away.

And it’s a fun visit with someone who really loves his job.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.10.26