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W.A.S.T.E. Not

John Scanlan looks for the future in the dustbins of history New York City Department of Sanitation

The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Lifeby John Scanlan. Reaktion Books, 256 pages. 2025.

On a chilly day in Brooklyn, I paused to admire two trashmen at the intersection of Wyckoff and Suydam as they worked during rush hour. In the space of a red light, the man on the southwest corner launched the full city street bin skittering like a hockey puck diagonally across the street, where the second man grabbed it, dumped it into the truck, and slid it back to its latticed cylindrical holder cemented to the sidewalk. “That’s quite a system,” I said to the nearer man. “These are Eric Adams’s fancy new bins, right?” “Yeah. They’re all right,” he said. “But the old ones used to slide better.”

As part of Eric Adams’s “War on Trash,” the city rolled out five thousand “trash cans of tomorrow,” with new anti-rat concrete shells, in the fall of 2023. But for these trashmen, their bottoms were not up to spec. Real waste is difficult to conceptualize, let alone eradicate. Once such heaps are fully handled by professionals, waste forms an underworld of which most people are only vaguely aware.

As John Scanlan demonstrates in his new book The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life, trash and the political imagination have always nourished each other. Taxpayer money handled by political criminals also circulates through similar secret underworlds. Mounds of refuse were stacked “higher than automobiles parked at curbs” in the Lower East Side during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. It made the downtown Yippie provocateur Abbie Hoffman, who was organizing a protest at the time against the government’s neglect of his neighborhood, wax apocalyptic: “Future historians would write that America was destroyed by a nuclear attack when in actuality the people just stopped picking up their trash.” The strike was only nine days long, but it forced Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller to offer a new contract to the workers, proving that some vermin will run away from trash rather than toward it.

A cultural historian at the University of Central Lancashire and the author of books on a grab bag of topics—among them memory, Van Halen, the Rolling Stones, and the Sex Pistols—Scanlan says midway through the book that he worked for four years in the early nineties at a Glasgow flea market called the Barras, selling remaindered bolts of cloth. His penchant for punk and junk means skimming the endnotes of The Idea of Wasteis like stumbling on a yard sale with everything you’ve ever wanted: from Silent Springto Simulacra and Simulationto The Sopranos.

The Idea of Waste’s table of contents is a little koan-like, with chapters titled “Objects: Consume, Accumulate, Destroy” and “Temporalities: Deep, Infinite, and Meaningless.” Scanlan rejects linear narrative—“Temporalities,” for instance, begins with Hesiod’s Theogonyand ends with Elvis’s “Viva Las Vegas”—tracing instead the arc of waste’s waning materiality in the social imagination. Scanlan’s argument is that what we call “waste” is better understood as an idea, not an assortment of things. It is an “object of human consciousness” that organizes our perception of the world, “something that inheres or attaches itself to everything we do at all times, whether or not we are conscious of it.” Scanlan contends that, though technocracy has hidden waste in its increasingly alarming forms from the public eye, it never disappears. Seen his way, all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear—but, like any repression, waste returns in fantastical forms.

Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization. The ancient Trojans waded “ankle deep” in pottery shards and animal bones and whatever else they threw on the floor until they got so fed up with the mess that they paved it over. Rome’s first underground sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which used the city’s rivers to sweep away waste, was constructed in the third century BC. Writing over two centuries after its construction, Livy praised the Cloaca as a monument without match, and Pliny, writing about a hundred years after him in AD 77, called it the “most noteworthy achievement” of the Roman Empire, beating out the Colosseum and the Parthenon. At the time of its construction the Cloaca was an engineering spectacle, and it also became a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Sturdy infrastructures that served the people endured; flashy monuments to emperors did not. During floods, Pliny noted, “the street above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in.” Humbly concealed by walls and by continued elevations of the surface of the city through centuries of accumulated matter, its invisibility ensured its durability.

No Roman subject could have predicted just how enduring an achievement the Cloaca Maxima was: SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and People of Rome—the emblem of ancient Rome) decorates manhole covers and trash cans throughout Rome. European sewer systems of the nineteenth century drew many comparisons to the Cloaca. “And as would be the case much later with the underground tunnels and drains of Paris and London, its concealment had the effect of making it an object of curiosity,” Scanlan notes, “providing it with the allure of a place that held truth or secrets about the life of the city.” The sewers drew admiration from many quarters—photographer Félix Nadar explored Paris’s extensively in the 1860s, and London’s caused a Manchester Guardian reporter to muse three-quarters of a century later: “These tremendous undertakings may very easily be the most lasting memorials of our cities.” “Out of sight out of mind”—yet also: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The sense that waste was a thing to be conquered became a transhistorical justification for increasing waste technocracy, but the mysterious underworld of waste has always beckoned to the chthonically inclined.

With the rapid industrialization of the Victorian city came the explicitly progressive urge to submerge its grime. Mudlarks, ragpickers, and sewermen populated London’s new underworld. The sewermen, with their “l(fā)ong greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity” for holding money, jewelry, and other cleanable trinkets, were a cut above the mudlarks. Mudlarks, mainly women and children who scavenged on the banks of the Thames, wore “torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.” But this grime, inspiring contemporary works like Dickens’s Bleak House, covered everything: “Fog everywhere” opens the second paragraph of the novel. For Scanlan, Dickens’s fog is not only the grimy remnant of industrial production; the Lord High Chancellor presiding over the decades-old case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce sits “at the very heart of the fog.” For Scanlan, Dickens’ fog obscured the social apparatus—London’s bureaucracy and class system—thereby keeping the lower stratum from rising out of the perceived muck. Progressive urban projects further ensured class segregation as a matter of aesthetics. Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of To-Morrowallotted spaces for the healthy and happy middle class, as well as for inebriates and the insane. His “slumless and smokeless” urban plans designed a future city with less (visible) waste.

But interred beneath the gardens of modern progress was mass culture’s growing pile of discarded commodities. Responding to the fragmentation of Europe in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin posited history as an endless accumulation of debris in his Arcades Project, which Scanlan calls a “strange literary waste-book.” Benjamin’s unfinished meisterstück, which he called the Passagen-Werk, is a collection of thousands of entries organized according to some sixty-odd “Konvoluts,” or motifs: “The Collector”; “Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Ruins of Paris”; “The Flaneur.” Under “Methods of Display, Advertisement, Grandville” for instance: “The purpose of the advertisement is to blur over the commodity character of things. . . . The commodity tries to look itself in the face.” Its namesake, the arcades, were indoor passageways of glass and iron that reached their apogee in 1830s Paris but were being displaced by department stores when Benjamin was writing. The junk shops in the arcades fascinated him:

A world of secret affinities opens up within: palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, prostheses and letter-writing manuals . . . These items on display are a rebus: how one ought to read the birdseed in the fixative-pan, the flower seeds beside the binoculars, the broken screw atop the musical score, and the revolver above the goldfish bowl.

To Benjamin, the past epoch’s ruins were allegories for history’s mutability. Scanlan’s arcades are self-storage units, seedy underbellies swollen with failed commodities. The units were first marketed to people going through disruptive life events in the 1970s. One self-storage unit from the 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambscontained “the sundered chattels of divorce . . . living room suites, breakfast ensembles, spotted mattresses, toys, and the photographs of things that didn’t work out,” as well as a severed head. The boomer generation was bequeathed heirlooms by dead relatives. Rather than cram them next to the shiny new objects, they became “decluttered.”

In 1995, Brian Eno poked fun at the Zen ideal of self-storage by packing twenty-six units in a facility of a London suburb with, among other things, a continuously playing recording of Laurie Anderson’s ululations, a woman suspended in a tank of water fed by oxygen tubes, and the Vizier of Memphis(on loan from the British Museum). Self-storage contained hidden treasures too. The now famous photos of the unknown nanny/photographer Vivian Maier were liberated in 2007 from a self-storage unit during a posthumous lot-crying that would have made Oedipa Maas gasp—and Storage Huntershosts applaud. Whenever I pass a windowless Extra Space storage unit in Brooklyn, I always wonder: From where do they source the Extra? Is there a reservoir of Space that these units are siphoning from? Perhaps the strangest element of self-storage is that they provide emptiness. The Manhattan Mini-Storage billboards window-dress this nihilism quite cleverly: store your stuff until your student loans are paid . . . so forever and the only place where climate is under control. They wink-wink nudge-nudge at the modern need for something as uncanny and apolitical as emptiness.

All waste goes through cycles of decomposition, buying and selling, or displacement. It was not until the 1970s that the idea of “recycling” appeared in opposition to “disposal.” England’s rag-and-bone collectors formed the economy of recycling before 1970. Rag collectors only appeared after the fourteenth-century popularization of the spinning wheel, which enabled the production of a surplus of rags for the first time in history. Bones were ground into fertilizer, while linen rags were sometimes reused to make linen again, or else they too were returned to the earth (flax makes great fertilizer). But industrialized clothing production in the mid-nineteenth century meant that there were now many different kinds of rags, some with trimmings and linings, some in blended materials. By 1949 these Mr. Krooks had to sort through some seven hundred and fifty grades of rags. “I can tell them in the dark,” Scanlan quotes a collector saying, “but you can still lose out on a deal if you aren’t awake.” By 1970, rag-and-bone collectors had disappeared as recycling became centralized by city haulers and municipal tracking codes. Secondhand stores and eBay keep decentralized recycling—albeit as an economy of trends and “vintage” styles—alive. Despite the “hunter-gatherer impulse” that thrills William Gibson when he clicks eBay’s Seller’s Other Auctions, browsing eBay, antiquing, and thrifting are, for the middle class, a pastime, albeit an eco-friendly one.

The “throwaway society” invented the idea that any commodity could be briefly desired, barely used, and tossed out of sight with impunity. The many tech gadgets you’re supposed to give dad this Father’s Day come with a gift receipt but no reminder that their lithium-ion batteries form centuries of toxic landfill. Dads—well, all people—form a bond with their phones and laptops. Sherry Turkle compares the oneness of tech device and human to “the diabetic [who] feels at one with his glucometer.” “The user who is engaged with their device is probably not given to contemplating the future waste that it creates,” writes Scanlan, “given that they are rather caught up in a permanently unfolding present that arrives on demand, through [our devices’] potentially limitless experiences.” But this constant media stream produces not only dead phones and laptops—it also generates media waste.

Don DeLillo—The Idea of Waste’s protagonist—is invoked many times (Underworld, his sprawling 1997 novel about trash, is essentially a companion text), here to explain media waste. Nicholas Branch in Librawatches the Zapruder film over and over, as many Americans did and still do, to reclaim information junk (how JFK falls, the scattered movements of a crowd in 1963). Images are fragments—sharp fragments that lacerate what they portray. The Paris Reviewcalled DeLillo “the chief Shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction,” and Walter Benjamin (whose “aura” DeLillo alludes to in “The Most Photographed Barn in America” section of White Noiseas well as in the introduction to Libra) can come off as a cigarette-chuffing, corkboard-pinning conspiracist too. Scanlan attributes their shared obsession to the intriguing possibility that “our perception of the familiar world . . . might hold some hidden passage into a space . . . vast beyond comprehension.” Data holds that same intrigue.

Twenty-first century data centers are low-profile infrastructures that sustain the internet. Its tenders—sad, pale people who navigate the enormous Matrix-like warehouses on Razor scooters, according to the official Google tour video—destroy files that undergo “bit rot” by grinding them to shrapnel in a metal shredder. But stranger than the material destruction of data, for Scanlan, is its immaterial persistence. Everyone is constantly emitting data waste: our search histories, likes, and wants leak out of us. A London advertising firm equipped recycling bins with data-capturing technology—dubbed “spy bins” by the news—in 2013 to siphon the smartphone data of four million passersby. The application for this data waste is still unknown, even to the firm—but collectors know most junk doesn’t have value . . . yet. Scanlan concedes that “one has to marvel at the ingenuity of a mind that came up with the idea to use a structure so ubiquitous that it is invisible.” There’s something sort of funny about consumers becoming mini Zapruder films, dossiers for advertisers to obsessively scan. (DeLillo, who worked as a copywriter at an advertising agency, would probably agree.) Everyone sometimes imagines a frenzied algorithm piecing together their identity from their YouTube search history (What’s the perfect product for a woman who watched a clip from Groundhog Day, the execution video of Ceau?escu, Pilates ab blasters, and Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” all in one week? An app for ukulele players, apparently.)

“To be human,” Scanlan offers at the end of his book, “is to produce a world as an excess of meaning, or as something that leaves a remainder that is beyond meaning and comprehension.” A historian, a conspiracist, and a salesman all walk into a labyrinth. They inspect the broken bottles of those who have come before. The conspiracist wishes to collect, piece together, and thereby redeem the broken fragments of reality for a coherent, whole, five-cent bottle deposit truth—a truth of which he is already certain. The salesman wants to sell the bottle or even the fragments, to hell with the truth.

But what about the historian? He tries to find more bottles, more fragments, suspicious of easy truth. He becomes exhausted and aimless, alone in his deep dives and rabbit holes. But has his tunneling undermined the foundation? Has everything rotted into an unstable, irredeemable remainder? Does Scanlan want the trash to win? The key perhaps is in the book’s subtitle: On the Limits of Human Life. The limits of human life—and the truths that order it—are challenged by Scanlan’s vortex of waste. But waste is not a metaphor that kills all metaphor; it is eternal, in everything—conveying its own truth to those who care to look.