The Waste Land

Too many memoirs about class are the products of the upwardly mobile, written by those who peddle tales of growing up poor from their new positions of comfort. While the J. D. Vances of this world exploit their backgrounds cynically, the overall dynamic is hard to avoid. Putting a book together is simply more feasible for someone with a certain amount of education and free time. In this regard, Simon Paré-Poupart’s Ordures! Journal d’un vidangeur (Trash! A garbageman’s notebook) is a rare delight. Really an extended essay on waste disposal, overconsumption, and the lives of trash collectors, it is penned by an actual garbageman.

Paré-Poupart began running behind garbage trucks in his teens, and he’s kept at it, at least part-time, for two decades. Mind you, he also has an advanced degree in sociology, which he uses to create a beautifully hybrid text. Part exposé of the hidden lives of trash collectors, part critique of consumer society, this account mixes in blue-collar curse words with references to labour history and Émile Zola. Throughout, Paré-Poupart insists on the nobility of his profession. He and his colleagues “pick up, day after day, the remnants of the most polluting civilization in the history of humanity,” each of them a modern Sisyphus struggling to keep our cities from burying themselves in their own detritus.

In Quebec, Paré-Poupart is a vidangeur, a term that does not translate easily into English. Speculating on the word’s etymology, Paré-Poupart notes its connection to an old term for emptying cesspits. Yet the label “garbageman” seems more appropriate than a gender-neutral, bureaucratic equivalent like “sanitation worker,” especially given that this book is also a meditation on virility. Paré-Poupart notes that “the figure of the alcoholic or drug-addict father is common among garbagemen.” His dad was the former, while his stepfather mocked him as effeminate. In this context, signing up for such a physically demanding job became a way for Paré-Poupart to prove his masculinity. His co-workers are universally male and often troubled: they include “former bikers, roid-heads, disillusioned sportsmen, children from the margins.” Some of them work drunk or high. In their world, however, they excel as part of a ragtag crew of high-performance athletes. They run some twenty-five kilometres a day, dragging and tossing all kinds of loads into their compactors. Paré-Poupart describes a former NHL player who tried manning a truck for a TV special and “wasn’t able to stick to the pace of a garbageman for more than an hour.”

The appeal of the job is multi-faceted. On the one hand, Paré-Poupart enjoys the exercise, the adrenaline, and the sense of solidarity. On the other, he sees the work as honest in a society that would rather lie to itself. Our modern waste disposal systems are essentially a form of denial that erases traces of overconsumption, shipping much of our trash to other countries and exaggerating the efficacy of municipal recycling programs. The workers who facilitate this lifestyle are likewise disregarded. Paré-Poupart details a variety of slights: overweight bags wedged between cars or left with nails sticking through the plastic, residents who spy on the men to make sure they collect loads that exceed the legal limit. Once, a suburbanite told him to go back to school if he didn’t like his job. The man was stunned when Paré-Poupart replied that he already had a master’s. Such reactions help fuel Paré-Poupart’s commitment to his trade: he wants to defy the stigma attached to it and “prove that there are no sub-professions.”

Politically speaking, Ordures! is uneven, offering points of critique but no coherent program of reform. Waste disposal is liable to be taken over by organized crime or ruthless multinationals, Paré-Poupart warns, and workers are frequently injured. At the same time, labour unions are ill-suited to the anarchic spirit of garbagemen. He includes a memorable anecdote about Raphy, a true “sanitation worker” trained in France, where his job required formal study at a “cleanliness school,” involved street sweeping alongside collecting bags, and was subject to rigid regulations. A former union representative, Raphy was unable to adapt to Quebec’s rough-and-tumble scene: he kept reflexively bringing up the “rules” and attracted so much hostility that he eventually switched careers.

Having once led a failed union drive himself, Paré-Poupart realizes that what he really wants is autonomy. He “dreams of the self-management of trash by society’s rejects,” a non-system that would let the worker escape both exploitative bosses and “bureaucratic measures that end up making his job boring.” It’s hard to see how this would work in practice. Paré-Poupart’s embrace of “freeganism”— scavenging goods instead of buying them — reads above all as a lifestyle choice, hard to replicate at scale.

More compelling are the insider details Paré-Poupart provides. He reveals an internal hierarchy within his milieu: trash collection is for real men, chumps deal with blue bins, and only those desperate for a job stoop to picking up compost. He explains how his colleagues communicate indirectly with irresponsible residents: a garbage can might be placed upside down simply to make it more stable, but if you find one thrown on your lawn, you definitely did something wrong. His descriptions of operating in heat waves, when bags are swarming with maggots, or after blizzards, when the roads are slick with ice, are packed with sensory details. And he deepens his account with historical references, reminding readers, for example, that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated after travelling to Memphis to express solidarity with striking sanitation workers.

By insisting on the importance of garbagemen, Paré-Poupart prepares the ground for a provocative thought experiment: “Imagine if we collectively decided to remunerate and glorify professions according to their social utility or necessity.” This reflection is marred by one telling exclusion. In a book so engaged with class, the writer never reveals his wage. One suspects it is decent. In an interview with La Presse, Paré-Poupart mentioned that earnings vary widely but are comparable to those of construction workers, if not higher. That’s likely for the best, because Paré-Poupart elegantly and effectively makes the case that we should all think more about the people who collect our trash. Rumour has it that in some upscale neighbourhoods, residents even give them tips for Christmas.