Canadian writer, social worker, and sociologist, Simon Paré-Poupar who did his first round as garbageman in Montreal as a teenager in “Trash” writes “The Garbageman is the Sisyphus of our consumer society. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society.”

He says he has personally shifted nearly 70, 000 tonnes of junk, but he and his peers are given a wide berth by the households they serve, “people thank the courier… the mover, and the small carrier. But they barely see the garbageman. They wish we could be invisible, just as they hope their garbage will magically disappear.” Perhaps we tell ourselves that we’ve done half their work for them, by fastidiously parsing our leftovers for recycling.

“Garbagemen are born, and only rarely made. We are former bikers, dopers, atheltes who’ve abandoned all hope of making the big time, grown-up kids scarred by tough childhoods” writes Paré-Poupart. He is interested in the garbage industry as one of the last unionised workplaces for unskilled men- at least in Canada- and in society’s reckless wastefulness. Paré-Poupart quotes approvingly from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: “The sewer is the conscience of the city …. The mass of filth has this in its favour, that it is not a liar.” For the Canadian, “our garbage speaks to us” and “its honesty can come as a relief… Grabage bursts our mirges, puts everything on equal footing, and tells the whole story.”

Some meek souls still receive the binman still, and even give him a Christmas box, but they’re in the minority. Most of us aren’t ready to look him in the eye. He sees our empties and our junk food cartons, our palisades of surplus packaging. He’s in out guilty secret that we’re despoiling the planet because, as with our own piles of detritus, we balk at getting to grips with it. According to Thrash we’re adding 2bn tonnes of solid waste to the world’s spoil heaps every year. According to Paré-Poupart “not even heavens are pristine: the “tin can” of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, now rattles through a midden of 10, 000 tonnes of junk”. 

Trash: A Garbageman’s Story by Simon Paré-Poupar, translated by Pablo Strauss, Melville House £12.99, 192 pages.