It is perhaps appropriate that this book, which studies various practices and objects of waste is composed as a series of fragments. The Romantics loved that form, just as they loved other examples, like ruins, of the disinherited, the neglected. This rich relationship might have been an apt starting point for a different book, but Hawkins is concerned with contemporary practices, and with finding a way towards an accommodation with waste, an ethics that avoids easy dichotomies and dogmatic moralism.

Her position is fully articulated only in the last chapter, the previous chapters comprising a sort of sidelong wisdom of alternative ways to dig beneath the rubbish. It is in the chapter on worms that we are presented with a wholly different approach to waste, a generative, positive relationship to the discarded. Of course, as Hawkins knows, worms do not exist in a commodity culture, but their natural relationship to waste can be seen in, say, a child playing with the box the fridge came in. At one point, Hawkins discusses W.G. Sebald, that poet of waste, and her book teaches us how we might come closer to the outlook of Max Ferber in The Emigrants (1972), who ‘felt closer to dust … than to light, air, or water’.