Our trash cans speak to us, nay, they scream like a garbage truck that squeaks as it swallows miles of trash, surplus in perfect condition, intact food hidden in skips or green bags, useful clothes, etc. ‘objects still capable of fulfilling their primary function. Out of sight, out of mind.
In certain neighborhoods, we throw away our cabbages, in others, we tear open the green bags on a treasure hunt. In my area, “bulky items” will be collected on October 14. The day before, there will be an open-air IKEA festival. The ex-Cowboy Fringant Dominique Lebeau (and ex-municipal councilor in Saint-Lambert) wrote to me that he furnished himself like that, on his bulky days.
I have long had a (surely unhealthy) fascination with our waste and what we find there, saddening me to see what we abandon on the sidewalk, innocent victims of overconsumption, planned obsolescence, fashions, our desires, our insatiable mental obesity, our renewable dissatisfactions. I take photos during big scrap days. It’s anthropological.
I’m not the only one. The garbage collector Simon Paré-Poupart, who has just published the excellent Garbage ! Diary of a drainerfills our senses with the exciting story of what he throws in the truck all day long. This is a job that he exercises out of passion three days a week, despite a master’s degree in international administration, and which also allows him to practice “freeganism”, a form of recycling our waste. “The annual production of solid waste has exceeded 2 billion tonnes worldwide and is expected to reach 3.4 billion in 2050. Garbage can be found even in space. Nearly 10,000 tons orbit the Earth. Should I send my CV to NASA? » writes the drainer 38 years old. His teacher, the philosopher Alain Deneault, advised him to write this book. These testimonies of educated workers capable of observing the world like Zola are as rare as they are precious.
Production creates the consumer.
The belly of Montreal
It’s so true that Paré-Poupart made me want to go out again The belly of Paris by Zola (1873), which I read out loud this week, for the simple pleasure of finding the street, the Halles, the people left behind, the restaurateurs who pass on their leftovers for two cents to the homeless. penny. Zola tells us about a time when Eugène Poubelle did not impose his container until ten years later, in 1883.
My grandfather, who experienced the beginning of the 20th centurye century in Gaspésie, told me that there was no garbage collector at the time, a pig for table scraps, a scrap dealer, a guenillou (rag picker), and we unraveled the sweaters to recover the wool, boiled Next. We recovered everything, even the poverty, to make catalonias. And the sea contained cod, not plastic.
Today, we live without realizing it on a camouflaged pile of rubbish. “For there to be overconsumption, this overconsumption must be managed. That’s us. It’s as if we didn’t exist,” said Simon Paré-Poupart about his despised profession in an interview with All one morningon July 2, the day after National Moving Day, where he found around thirty bags of clothes abandoned in a hurry, recycling and garbage mixed together. “It takes a lot of time to shop for them, to choose them. When the time comes to dispose of it, everything goes to waste,” he says. “Industrial society sells us a utopia: growth in production could lead to a reduction in waste. More cossins, less waste. This is the program. No wonder recycling takes up so much space,” writes Simon.
And yet, we produce annually (in 2022) 441 kilos of waste per person in Montreal. In my 80-unit building, we try to educate residents about composting through awareness campaigns. Only two brown bins out of the six allocated are filled each week. Resistance is still strong.
If you tell me I’m dying tomorrow, I’ll take one last trip back in a truck, without thinking much about it. I’m going back to where I need to be.
Far from zero waste
This summer, I had fun reading a work of the same type written by the street sweeper Michel Simonet, A rose and a broom. Known for hanging a rose on his cart, this friendly man has become a popular figure in Fribourg, where he works as a “roadman, ecological operator, outdoor cleaner, neighborhood janitor, sidewalk hygienist, cart peripatetic , head of a prole’s job, easy-going cleaner of the balèze broom, cleaner, filthy waste-getter, selfish philanthropist…”.
Over two and a half pages, Simonet lists everything he finds in a year as unusual objects on the sidewalks. This ranges from cannabis scales, bras, pellets of cocaine, new shoes, money, “strong friendships, the gift of simplicity, peace of heart”. Under his tender pen, he indeed brings us a calm in the poetry of the street.
“To enter the profession, the French garbage collector must pass written, physical and oral tests at the cleanliness school. […] In Quebec, the emptier is never a cleaner. Never,” writes Paré-Poupart, who tells us about heatwaves, garbage juice, grubs and pestilential odors that we end up no longer smelling. Some vomit.
I am something like an anarcho-trash collector who dreams of self-management of emptying by the rejects of society.
And for the four cathode ray tube TVs that Simon sportsly flies through the air every day, there is something to be heartbroken too. The garbage collector estimates that around fifty televisions are thrown away per day in Montreal North. When he called an official from the Association for the Recycling of Electronic Products, he was told that it was impossible.
In the meantime, the only landfill site in the Montreal region will have reached indigestion in 2027.
When the garbage collectors go on strike, in the middle of a heatwave, when the sites are overflowing, when our bins are host to insects and rodents, it will perhaps be time to listen to what they say about us.
Instagram: josee.blanchette