Trash!: A Garbageman's Story

“Raffish and spirited . . . a nonconformist cri de coeur . . . Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate . . . It’s been a long time since I’ve read so good and rowdy a memoir about blue-collar work.” — Dwight Garner, The New York Times

A Montreal garbageman's sharp and funny memoir/exposé, in which he attempts to convince people to "stop imagining that your garbage magically disappears" . . .

This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean.

Paré-Poupart’s story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees and working in more “respectable” fields, he is still on a truck — out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him.

Includes eight black and white photographs of the author on the job.

His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends, as a committed freegan.

Trash! — the French edition of which is a runaway bestseller in Canada — explains and questions efforts to “clean up” a business with longstanding conventions of its own, a last bastion of well-paid employment for people who cannot fit in anywhere else.

Aligned with great books about work from Zola to Orwell to Lucia Berlin, and in dialogue with societal critiques like How To Do Nothing, Trash! will change how you think about your waste and the people who handle it.

Simon Paré-Poupart became a garbageman in Montreal to pay for his college education. After graduate studies in sociology and international business, and work experience as a journalist and social worker, he returned to the job, and has been a garbageman for twenty years. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

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“Raffish and spirited . . . a nonconformist cri de coeur . . . Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate . . . It’s been a long time since I’ve read so good and rowdy a memoir about blue-collar work.” — Dwight Garner, The New York Times

". . .a sparkling little gem of a book about the lives of men who wallow in a city’s muck and “scrub clean the stains of our consumer society.” — Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal

"Exhilarating on every page." — Lily Meyer, The Atlantic

"Imagine if Anthony Bourdain were your garbage man." — The Los Angeles Times

". . . [a] modern-day Margaret Mead (with French-Canadian swear words) observing the absurdity of our consumption. He’s a sociologist who celebrates physical labor. A philosopher-king hauling our garbage and analyzing our waste. It’s a voice from the trenches. It’s funny. It’s honest. And it’s short." — Diane Brady, Fortune

"A withering critique of how modern societies have come to generate trash, conceive of trash, and dispose of trash." — Joe Keohane, The Boston Globe

"Enlightening, unpretentious, and gently political, Pare-Poupart’s fascinating account will help readers view their garbage in a whole new light. It’s a treasure." — Publishers Weekly

"Arresting." — Kirkus Reviews