Why Can’t the Public Sector Pick Up Our Trash?

One book on waste management that has stayed by my side for years is Giants of Garbage by Canadian journalist Harold Crooks. That book is my bible. The central question it asks is a vital one: Is it possible to maintain democratic governance over waste management?

Crooks documents the ways North American cities have been pressured to subcontract garbage collection to private entities. Waste management as we know it has largely developed in opposition to municipal practices. The pattern holds in Greater Montreal as well: municipal expertise, which has traditionally been unionized, has been broken up and replaced first by small contractors and subsequently by big multinationals.

Today, the City of Montreal handles less than 5 percent of waste collection on its territory. And it is one of the only municipalities in the region with a municipal collection service. This laissez-faire capitalist approach to waste management comes with risks. Crooks discusses Walter Lippmann’s notion of an “upperworld” and an “underworld,” the latter of which arises to protect weak economic actors from unwanted rivals. Networks of underworld players have historically stepped in when legislators removed markets from the legal economy, think prostitution, gambling, drugs today, or alcohol during prohibition.

In Italy’s decentralized and fragmented waste management system, the mafia thrives, with all that this implies.

The same has happened in waste management. In some of the worst instances, the underworld has fulfilled “the need for social organization” as the deregulation of waste management has been filled by major conglomerates or organized crime, and frequently some combination of the two.

In Italy’s decentralized and fragmented waste management system, the mafia thrives, with all that this implies. “Waste is gold,” said one member of the Camorra (the Neapolitan mafia), referring to the traffic in toxic waste, whose revenues in Italy are estimated at fourteen billion euros.

Of course, entrusting waste management to gangsters and racketeers has repercussions. In Naples, the mafia has buried toxic waste everywhere, creating crisis after scandal for years. In an area known as the “triangle of death,” cancer rates have soared, fields are poisoned, the rivers stink. It’s a plague.

Waste management by vast private monopolies is a more respectable enterprise. Or at least, that’s how it looks, if we confine our perspective to North America. But when we widen our view to explore the global industry, the picture grows cloudier. Massive corporations are adept at finding loopholes and slipping between the cracks of laws and regulations, and are experts in the art of applying pressure to create a legislative environment favorable to their interests.

It is perhaps not a stretch to say that there is no such thing as real democratic control of large-scale capitalist enterprise. Working for these conglomerates gives you a taste of the same control and endless bureaucracy as when you try to deal with civil servants, without any of the rights that come with being a resident of a city or citizen of a country.

Those of us on the front lines have a different, firsthand experience of what it feels like when big industry players implement complex and fastidious policies and practices. Mostly, all this approach does is add a layer of annoyance.

When the French waste management conglomerate Derichebourg began doing business in Quebec, it tried to impose its European corporate culture on North America. The company had a fleet of brand-new hybrid trucks, beautiful, state-of-the-art machines that had the drawback of being incredibly slow. That about summed it up. The venture didn’t even last two years. Derichebourg ended up having to subcontract many of its routes to smaller brokers. And when it did, productivity doubled. As a rule, this hybrid system of conglomerates subcontracting to brokers is what you find in Greater Montreal.

I dream of a world where the castoffs of society self-manage the project of managing its waste.

And I have to admit that this system suits me fine. As it happens, I hate the very idea of a Cleanliness School and the overregulated life of civil servants in equal measure, neither more nor less than I abhor the violence of the underworld and the organizational culture of international conglomerates. It just doesn’t work for me. From where I stand, none of these management systems listens to the garbagemen themselves; none of them trusts our experience, considers making us part of the actual waste management processes, or cares about our culture. None of them, even those un- der municipal or government jurisdiction, are in any real way democratic, as I understand the term. But then, who’d consider asking a garbageman for advice on democracy?

I have the soul of a ragpicker, those proudly free and fiercely independent waste collectors who in Paris fiercely opposed the new laws of Eugène Poubelle and the other architects of modern public sanitation. I recognize myself in the anger of the Parisian mudmen who stood against the policy of the tout-à-l’égout system of dumping everything in the new sewers, which meant routing latrine sludge, a material previously harvested and sold as fertilizer to farmers, into the sea. Politically, I guess you could call me an anarcho-garbageman. I dream of a world where the castoffs of society self-manage the project of managing its waste.

As a mercenary, I make my living by slipping through the cracks of the system, working with the brokers who do the bidding of massive conglomerates. Some of these brokers feel a little like a mafia, others are more aboveboard, but all are ingeniously adept at walking fine lines and bending rules where they have to. By operating in between the many links in the chain, I dream of the freedom and fraternity of the Parisian ragpickers.

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Excerpted from TRASH! by Simon Paré-Poupart. Copyright © 2024 by Lux Éditeur. Translation copyright © 2025 by Pablo Strauss. Reprinted by permission of Melville House