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Philly’s trash-pocalypse is straight out of dystopian sci-fi

The sanitation convenience center is easy to miss; an unassuming driveway tucked between warehouses and lots of parked tractor-trailers on an industrial boulevard in southwest Philadelphia.

A lone city worker greets me as I drive in, directing me to park perpendicular to a rear-loading garbage truck bursting with black contractor bags. 

I roll down my window, and the stench of rancid milk floods in with the July heat. 

“I’m here to drop off recycling,” I tell him. 

“Put it in the truck," he replies. 

“It’s just getting thrown away, isn’t it?” I say. 

“Yea,” he replies, with an apologetic half-smile. “It is.”

Dejected but resigned, I unload my bag of carefully cleaned cans and flattened cardboard boxes to add to the refuse heap. After all, I’ve come this far. The alleyway behind our house is overflowing with our neighbors’ trash. I’m worried it’ll attract cockroaches in the basement.

This is Day 8 of the Philadelphia District Council 33 municipal workers’ strike. 

A 9,000-strong union that includes sanitation workers, water department employees, 911 dispatchers, library employees, and airport maintenance crews, the men and women of DC33 provide many of the basic services you’d expect in a modern city: safety, emergency response, clean water, and yes, garbage removal. 

Despite their essential roles, DC33 workers earn a paltry $46,000 a year on average, several thousand dollars below a living wage for the city. Union leaders are calling for annual wage increases of 5%, an amount Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, who ran on a platform of cleaning and greening the city, claims would be “fiscally irresponsible.” But experts in waste management say that the city needs to pay its sanitation workers more to solve its longstanding litter problem. Otherwise, the department will remain understaffed and demoralized, leading to missed trash pickups and rushed, messy collections.  

Until a deal is reached, residents are being directed to drop their garbage at dozens of temporary locations around the city—many of them residential street corners where our friends and neighbors live—so that strike-busting contractors can haul it away.

We aren’t having that bullshit in our household. But the situation has grown desperate, so I’ve taken our recycling to one of the city’s permanent drop-off centers for reusables and electronic waste.

Only to learn the stuff will very likely be incinerated.

Backing up to leave after my environmental sin is complete, I spot roughly two dozen men in bright yellow vests that read “Sanitation Worker” camped in front of a red brick building across the street. They’ve got tents, lawn chairs, and coolers filled with drinks. A few dozen yards away, a tremendous heap of household trash simmers in the late morning sun, juices spilling onto hot pavement and evaporating into a sticky glaze. 

As I drive home past pile after festering pile of garbage, I’m reminded of Empathy Hour, a short story by Matt Bell about a not-so-distant future in which the wealthy have moved inside giant arcologies to escape the ravages of climate change. 

At a glance, the arcologies are a picture of ecological living: According to the government, air and water are continuously recycled. So is everything people eat, wear, and own. In reality, a shadow city of underpaid workers toils away underground, dismantling toxic electronic waste by hand and shoveling knee-deep fungal matter in the mushroom farms that feed the residents above. 

The lack of empathy for these essential workers would be shocking, except for the fact that most arcology dwellers aren’t even aware of their existence.

Bell isn’t the only author to speculate that our trash problems will follow us into the future: Many works of science fiction make a similar prediction. 

Garbage is a beloved backdrop of the cyberpunk genre, where neon-lit cities are often surrounded by larger-than-life junkyards. There’s Blade Runner 2049’s “Trash Mesa,” a sprawling wasteland south of Los Angeles where vicious scavengers salvage precious metals, and the mega-landfill on the outskirts of Night City in the videogame Cyberpunk 2077.

In Ernest Cline’s cyberpunk-inflected novel Ready Player One, people use virtual reality to escape their claustrophobic lives inside the “Stacks,” towering, junkyard-esque dwellings made of abandoned shipping containers and construction debris.

While cyberpunk writers tend to imagine future humans living alongside (or inside) mountains of garbage, in the 2008 Pixar film WALL-E, we’ve left our trash problems behind. The film’s titular robot roams an uninhabited, rubbish-strewn Earth, compacting garbage into cubes and collecting objects of interest from the wreckage.

Humans are nowhere to be found; the Amazon-esque BnL (Buy n Large) corporation evacuated the entire population to live otiose lives on giant spaceships. While director Andrew Stanton has insisted that the robot love story was never meant to be an environmentalist manifesto, its bleak backdrop offers a dire warning about where corporate greed and unchecked consumerism could take us.

Of course, in science fiction, humanity’s garbage problems don’t end on planet Earth: They follow us across the galaxy and beyond. 

In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo famously eludes capture by the Star Destroyer Avenger by floating away with the garbage the Imperial ship jettisons into space. Apparently, even this hyper-advanced civilization hasn’t come up with a better way to deal with its trash than the galactic equivalent of ocean dumping.

Perhaps this is unsurprising given the Empire’s notorious lack of interest in environmental stewardship, but you’d think someone would realize all those derelict ship parts could be used to build Death Stars faster.

The more socially-conscious Federation running the show over in the Star Trek universe does a better job keeping its cosmic backyard clean. The replicator systems that print everything from clothing to coffee aboard 24st century starships are advanced recycling machines that turn waste into energy before reassembling new matter from it. 

But before replicator technology was perfected, even Starfleet sometimes resorted to dumping.

Closer to home, Jo Sung-Hee’s 2021 film Space Sweepers highlights the very real problem of space junk, taken to new heights by greedy space capitalists. Earth’s low orbit has become a garbage dump for the uber-rich, who’ve fled their smog-choked home world to live idyllic lives on artificial planets. To keep the affluent off-worlders safe, workers risk their lives capturing the biggest, most dangerous pieces of space junk with robotic claws and harpoons.

Space Sweepers lays bare the social inequities at the heart of modern sanitation.

For people who can afford to live in nice neighborhoods, trash is typically out of sight, out of mind. But those cleaning it up are paid a pittance to keep it that way. Too bad the space sweepers aren’t unionized; if a derelict satellite threatened a billionaire’s space mansion, it would give the workers serious leverage during a strike.

Interplanetary cleanup crews may be fiction for now. But the struggle to make ends meet hauling trash into the asteroid belt is one that many Earthbound sanitation workers can relate to—including members of the DC33 union here in Philly.

Returning home after my failed attempt to recycle, I sit down at my computer and open the Philly Inquirer to breaking news headlines announcing the strike has ended. The union accepted the mayor’s proposal of 3% annual raises, considerably less than they were asking for. 

“The strike is over and nobody’s happy,” DC33 President Greg Boulware told reporters shortly after the negotiations wrapped up. Boulware reportedly ended the strike abruptly in anticipation that court orders would soon force employees back to work.

Considering how things went down, I can’t say I’m hopeful we won’t see another garbage strike in the future, or that the mayor’s vision that Philly will become “the cleanest and greenest big city in the nation” will be realized anytime soon. 

Indeed, if there’s one thing the DC33 strike made clear, it’s that it’ll take more than extra trash pickup days and bi-annual block sweepings to clean the city up. We are no more able to sweep our befouled streets to permanent cleanliness than legions of WALL-Es can remediate a garbage-strewn planet. 

Especially if we continue to undervalue the people doing the cleanup.

— Maddie