W.a.s.t.e. Not: John Scanlan looks for the future in the dustbins of history

Summary

The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life by 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 t...