The Dump: Waste, Landfills, and the Infrastructure of Disappearance (American Infrastructure: Engines of Belonging)

The Dump: Waste, Landfills, and the Infrastructure of Disappearance (American Infrastructure: Engines of Belonging)

Every city hides a mountain of waste. From landfills and incinerators to sewers and recycling plants, the infrastructures of garbage shape modern life as powerfully as water systems or electric grids. The Dump: Waste, Landfills, and the Infrastructure of Disappearance reveals how the story of America’s trash is also the story of its prosperity, its inequalities, and its fragile dreams of making what we discard simply vanish. This book uncovers the hidden history of garbage collection, toxic landfills, sewage treatment, and recycling myths, tracing how waste has been engineered into invisibility. It explores the rise of municipal sanitation in nineteenth-century cities overwhelmed with refuse, the invention of the “sanitary” landfill as a mid-century innovation, and the global trade in plastics and e-waste that now sends American trash to distant shores. In doing so, it places waste at the center of cultural history, environmental justice, and the politics of disappearance. Through vivid narrative and historical detail, The Dump shows how communities have been divided between those who benefit from invisibility and those who bear its costs. Landfills are sited beside working-class neighborhoods; incinerators rise near communities of color; “recycling” often means shipping contaminated plastics overseas to be burned or dumped where environmental protections are weakest. The myth of “away” has always depended on someone else’s backyard. At the same time, garbage reveals unexpected truths about who we are. Archaeologists have long turned to trash as the most reliable record of daily life. From tin cans to plastic bottles, from ash heaps to disposable packaging, the material remains of consumer culture show not only what people bought but what they believed could be thrown away. Waste has become both an archive of abundance and a reminder of its limits. The book also confronts the failures of disappearance. Methane seeps from beneath capped landfills. Leachate poisons aquifers. Superfund sites testify to the legacies of toxic disposal. Incinerators once promised the magic of complete combustion, yet dioxins and smoke remain. Even recycling, celebrated as civic virtue, falters under contamination, market collapse, and the sheer scale of global consumption. What was meant to be temporary has proven permanent, and what was buried has a way of returning. But The Dump is not only about infrastructure; it is about people. It recovers the stories of sanitation workers, ragpickers, and canners whose labor has kept cities habitable. It follows the rise of environmental justice movements that linked garbage to race, class, and the right to breathe clean air. It examines host community agreements and toxic bargains, showing how towns weighed tax revenue against the cost of living beside refuse. And it considers the new cultural promises of “zero waste” and “circular economies,” asking whether they represent real transformation or simply another rhetoric of disappearance. Written with precision and moral clarity, The Dump: Waste, Landfills, and the Infrastructure of Disappearance is both history and warning. It invites readers to confront the permanence of what we throw away, to see landfills not as failures but as mirrors of modern life, and to recognize that disappearance is never complete. The mountain of waste is always there, reshaping landscapes, bodies, and futures. To read this book is to enter the hidden world of what society tries to bury, and to ask not only what we leave behind, but what it will mean for those who inherit it.