Dirt, garbage, dross, waste, litter, filth, scrap, rubbish, junk.

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These are just some of the words used to describe objects that, at some point in their existence, are stripped of their original value and become abject matter—something to be removed from sight, both physically and symbolically. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously stated that dirt is «matter out of place»—a definition that presupposes an underlying order, allowing societies to distinguish between what belongs and what does not [1]. But this perspective extends beyond anthropology. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, reflecting on the stereotypical portrayal of India as dirty and chaotic, has noted how waste produced in urban centers is consistently relegated to a space that is always represented as an undefined elsewhere. The primary method of waste management remains its uncertain displacement, an idea that recalls Italo Calvino’s reflection on the imaginary—yet all too real—parasitic city of Leonia:

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Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. [...] Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia’s boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption [2].

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Rather than imagining human beings as disembodied minds acting in an increasingly digital reality, we must remember that we inhabit the world physically as well. This interdependence gives shape to anthropic spaces—ephemeral places that can always be abandoned, only to be reclaimed by the forces of nature. Writer and landscape architect Gilles Clément refers to these spaces as the third landscape, a term that emphasizes the processes of abandonment and estrangement that generate them. These areas—whether unintentionally neglected or deliberately erased from view—become aesthetically unpleasant, evoking the presence of an actor who has ceased to act. They stand as sites where organic and inorganic forces advance, while human presence retreats. Thus, the challenge is to render waste management tangible by investigating the contexts in which waste accumulates. Landfills, in this sense, offer a privileged vantage point: they reveal the network of relationships that forms around discarded materials, the belief systems that sustain these spaces, and the political dimensions they take on. These places are not merely an example of environmental degradation; they are sites of experimentation and suspension of cultural norms, where waste can regain significance.

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This is the case of the Jardim Gramacho landfill, which until 2012 served as Rio de Janeiro’s main waste collection center. This landfill was not just a dumping ground—it was a place of work and life for thousands of catadores, informal waste pickers engaged in the recovery of recyclable materials. In her ethnographic research, later compiled in Reclaiming the Discarded, Kathleen Millar sought to understand why catadores kept returning to the landfill, even after periods away. One picker she interviewed explained that newcomers initially saw the landfill as a horrible place, unbearable in the long run. Yet, over time, they would get used to it—some staying for years—reflecting the landfill’s peculiar power of attraction. Anyone arriving at Jardim Gramacho had to endure a grueling apprenticeship, learning to distinguish valuable recyclables from the undifferentiated mass of waste, collecting and transporting them in bags for resale. Gradually, these actions were assimilated into a habitus [3], fostering an awareness of the environment and integrating into a shared social life: communal meals, soccer games, and moments of leisure. Despite the individual nature of waste-picking, these interactions helped forge a community of reliance.

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A key aspect of Millar’s study was her direct participation in waste recovery—experiencing firsthand the initial sense of repulsion toward the amorphous, anonymous accumulation of refuse. This perceptual shock eventually gave way to a habit of seeing and touching waste, as well as smelling its sharp, pungent smell. Yet waste is both a source of income and a potential health hazard. While recyclables like plastics and metals hold economic value, toxic substances within the waste pose serious risks. As such, waste remains ambiguous—neither entirely resource nor entirely threat.

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But why, then, do catadores return to the landfill? Their work is not merely a survival strategy—it is a way of shaping and inhabiting the world. This practice reshapes individuals: it allows them to retain autonomy in managing their work hours around economic and family needs, rejecting the subordination of wage labor. Wage labor has long been central to the middle-class ideal of the good life, particularly in (North)Western societies: political stability, career progression, and family security remain aspirations for many. Yet, this remains a form of «cruel optimism» [4]. In Brazil, catadores do not quickly spend their earnings out of financial mismanagement but rather because they act within a different idea of what it means to live a good life. Money is shared with family and friends, and spending quickly becomes a tactic to develop long-term projects in precarious conditions—for instance, buying bricks immediately to build a future home or bar. The identity of catadores is transformed by a local interplay of power, opportunity, and labor, revealing how waste workers around the world are as diverse as the waste streams themselves.

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Waste management workers in Qom City, Iran (Mostafa Meraji, 2022).

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In this sense, it may be useful to look into Joshura Reno’s ethnography Waste Away, which focuses on middle-class waste workers at the Four Corners landfill in Michigan. Here, as the author points out, waste management is interpreted as a learning process. For these workers, the landfill exerts a power that is not confined to the sphere of sensory perception. Society often associates landfill work with low social status and, therefore, a lack of better employment opportunities. This denigration stems from the idea that one’s social position is the result of personal choices alone. Yet, the circumstances within which an individual operates shape their mobility far more than individual efforts or aspirations. For this reason, one’s work is not determined solely by their abilities, and recognizing this can lead to a new sense of self. In this sense, stigmatized workers can reinterpret their own practices as a form of resistance to social prejudice. However, this requires rejecting external judgments: the workers of Four Corners might feel paralyzed by shame if they internalized the idea that their job diminished their worth or potential. For them, stability is not only a financial aspiration—it also involves responsible management of their savings and care for their personal network, ensuring their children’s education and securing a future. Unlike the Brazilian catadores, however, these workers maintain a separation between work and private life. While labor in the landfill follows the logic of profit and commodification of people and things, private life is envisioned as a space of affective and disinterested reciprocity.

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Waste has become so massive in scale that its management is left to a small portion of the population. Society reduces waste to a problem of separation—between people and their refuse, and between waste workers and everyone else. Reno’s research highlights how the effort to make waste invisible reflects the reproduction of life practices in North America: buying goods, maintaining a tidy home, investing in children’s futures, and so on. Yet, rather than denigrating landfills, a more critical perspective would examine the entire system of extraction, production, and consumption. These spaces provide us with an opportunity to rethink our relationship with commodities, the lifespan we concede to objects, and our notions of cleanliness and functionality.

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Observing the social life of waste across different ethnographic contexts allows us to rewrite the stories surrounding waste and those who engage with it. The marginality of landfill workers is not necessarily imposed—it can be a choice, a form of resistance against an order they refuse to accept or belong to. While waste has often been regarded as mere facts or matters of concern, it can now be reinterpreted by integrating a dimension of care into its materiality. Those involved in managing waste see potential where most urban inhabitants of the global North do not. Moreover, they recognize the unsustainability of the production system that creates this waste, yet their voices remain unheard due to the social stigma they face. Waste is not simply matter out of place. It generates unusual places where lives take shape, where the discarded and the human become entangled and reciprocally contaminated, producing new identities, new stories, and new ways of seeing the world—a world we have turned away from our gaze.