Life Among the ‘Garbage Faeries’

In our hyper consumption driven economy, we don’t often give much of a thought to what we toss in the trash. Municipalities take care of dealing with all the headaches from our trash so we don’t have to. That’s part of our utility bill or city service fee. I can’t help thinking about who actually deals with it after I do. Our local trash service picks up our curbside cans – green waste, recycled and land fill.


When visiting New York, I couldn’t help noticing how much trash is produced and how amazing it was that more of it wasn’t visible. Somebody’s doing a Sisyphean job. In fact, a small army of dedicated Garbage Faeries do the job. Robin Nagle wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal adopted from her book: Picking Up: On the Street and Behind the Trucks With the Sanitation Workers of New York City.

Robin Nagle: What I discovered in New York City trash