We tend not to think too much about binmen. They operate in a shadow world, their rounds complete before most of us have even left the house. And when we do see them, do we not avert our eyes, recoiling from the filth and, if we’re really honest, slightly ashamed that someone else is doing the dirty work? Yet uncollected rubbish, conversely, is the first sign of a broken or bankrupt society; the winter of discontent, a pile of bin bags. We know, deep down, that we need binmen, even if we can’t quite acknowledge it.
Simon Paré-Poupart is familiar with all of this. In his two decades as a binman – or garbageman – in Montreal, he has been submerged in rubbish, day after day, and observed the people whose streets he cleans. ‘I’ve hauled nearly seventy thousand tons of trash, and this fact cannot help but shape the man I am today,’ he writes in Trash! A Garbageman’s Story. ‘The looks I get along my route show me that people sometimes mistake me for the trash I handle.’
Well, since writing his book, this piece of trash has been on the cover of Harper’s and featured in the New York Times, the Literary Review of Canada, Le Monde and the Atlantic. ‘It’s kind of crazy,’ he laughs. ‘We didn’t expect that at all.’
