Trash would be quite the depressing book, except it’s so often surprising and whimsical. Where else do you get to see scenes fro Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove recreated from teensy bits of trash?

Edited by John Knechtel, Trash collects together a wide range of art and writing: Pretty pinkish photos of dust bunnies, an eerie fictional story set in a zero-waste town — even a photo essay examining the body as trash, pointing to the hundreds of young girls been murdered — and officially forgotten — in Juarez, Mexico.

“There is the question of affect, the strange experience of feeling sympathy for rubbish,” writes Gay Hawkins about Bill Keaggy’s series 50 Sad Chairs. This strange sympathy forms the emotional center for this book, which brings together trashed and empty urban spaces, super-efficient landfill dumps, and abandoned paper airplanes.

One of the most compelling essays is Heather Rogers’ “Message in a Bottle,” which calls out the soft drink industry for engineering a disposable culture for corporate profit by getting consumers to buy the drink packaging they used to get free under a reuse system. Keep America Beautiful, in fact, is as an ingenious greenwashing tactic invented by the soft drink companies behind it, reframing the growing trash problem as one caused by the consumer who litters, rather than the companies producing the litter. Today, we see KAB’s tactic used to resist styrofoam bans.

Trash does have some dull moments — the poetry, for example, reads a helluva lot like prose — but provides an eclectic and riveting read overall. One thing the book didn’t cover’s trash in space: “13,000 pieces of junk, each of them more than 30 feet long, are orbiting in space.” And now, they’re thinking of pushing a 1,360 fridge into orbit –

Thanks to Michelle for lending me this book.

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