A philosophy of the worthless, the condemned, the discarded.

‘There is such a fine Montaignesque scope to On Garbage ... [a] little masterpiece ... Scanlan [is] an essayist of the first order […] for those who wonder how the species that rises to the horrendous occasions of September 11, 2001, or the recent tsunami, searching for body parts at Fresh Kills Landfill or sorting through corpses for signs of life; how the same human kind could look away from famine and holocaust, Rwanda and Darfur, Scanlan’s inquiries cast some light among the shadows in the dark. Like a wide-eyed miner up from the underworld, what he tenders in On Garbage looks like gold.' — Thomas Lynch, The Times