All That Litters is Not Sold

... in which Ashley surveys the landfill.

When we moved to Germany, we decided to live in the city of Wuppertal because it seemed affordable. And by affordable I mean filthy. Don’t get me wrong; our little boho paradise is a cozy, multi-kulti blend of young families, leftist agitators, and beer-funneling fußball fanatics, a peaceable mingling over bongs and ping pong. We love our funky Wuppertal. But frankly, the whole city could use a good hosing.

 In particular, I noted upon our arrival in this crudtopia that the city had a litter problem. But after traipsing among the refuse for a few months, I realized that what Wuppertal had, more specifically, was a Durstlöscher problem.

Durstlöscher (Thirst Quencher) is a brand of convenience store beverage, in the manner of Hi-C or Kool-Aid, heavily sweetened and artificially (repulsively) flavored. It’s sold in downtrodden neighborhood kiosks for one Euro, packaged in 16-ounce Tetra Paks, an oversized juice box for overgrown toddlers. It's available in watermelon, lemon, banana, blueberry, bubblegum, and a host of other quease-inducing flavors. And for the sugar-fiend kids and kidults alike who indulge in it, part of the ritual of guzzling the putrid fluid is the Durstlöscher Stomp, in which the empty carton is smashed flat on the sidewalk and left as a warning to the others.

Or for whatever reason it’s left there, but left there it is. Everywhere, every day, at bus stops and on stairways, on playgrounds and in graveyards, Durstlöscher cartons strewn about like losing lotto tix in a Dollar Tree parking lot. The stomped boxes are so ubiquitous that they begin to seem like an organic occurrence, like fallen leaves or squished pigeons, part of Wuppertal’s natural landscape.

For my part, rather than scooping up the Durstlöschers and properly disposing of them like an exemplary citizen, I’ve been regularly documenting the flattened packages in photographs, free to view on my Durstlöscher Wuppertal Facebook page, to help amplify my self-righteous fascination with this corporate debris. It's a lot of work for what is literally the least I can do.

In the pre-smartphone age, there were certainly times when I regretted not having a camera handy during my encounters with noteworthy garbage. There was the time I sat in the Chick-fil-A drive-thru, back when you could eat there unhomophobically, and noticed, nestled in a small tree alongside the parking lot, a bird’s nest made almost entirely of Chick-fil-A straw wrappers. A perfect snapshot of modernity. No sooner had I spied this suburban poetry when I looked ahead to discover, climbing underneath the restaurant’s dumpster corral, a huge rat, stopping to pose momentarily with his dinner. He had a Chick-fil-A-branded bag of half-eaten goodies in his jaws, looking as if he were just another take-out customer. Think of what a compelling portrait that would have made, a Darwinian statement about rat’s inhumanity to chicken. Take that, Pizza Rat.

What appeals to me in these visions, naturally (or rather unnaturally), is the branding. While we may still conceptualize litter in generic, Depression-era-tenement terms, as consisting of fishbones and banana peels, we have long been wading in a daily deluge of corporate-branded refuse. Any given pile of trash is a logo cornucopia, the discarded remains of Winston fixes, Mello Yello stimulation, Taco Bell regret, and Trojan satisfaction. It is, in fact, the final stage of the branding process, advertising from the billboard above to the gutter below. For a crumpled Burger King wrapper in the street, its oozing tomato and ketchup remnants being devoured by cockroaches is still a helpful reminder that a Double Whopper with cheese would really hit the spot right about now.

My home in America was a target market for this kind of street-level pitch campaign. Seeing that this was leftover farmland, which remained slightly overgrown most of the time, passing motorists regularly tossed their refuse into the weeds, as if the unwanted Skoal cans and Big Gulps would simply disappear, no questions asked, like mouthy bookies buried at sea. What made their litter disappear, of course, was me, retrieving their trash from the yard every few days like a chain gang convict. And this is where I began my personal archaeological study of what consumer brands a trash-tossing shithead prefers. I’ll go ahead and give you the abstract of my unpublished research: It’s Bojangles. Littering shitheads prefer Bojangles by a wide margin.

Obviously, I was fighting a losing battle. Not only did the jettisoned junk continue to fall in my yard every day, it smothered every roadway in that American bubbaburg. And I began to understand the local attitude of accepting empty pudding cups as part of the natural order because, having no city trash pickup in those days, I spent a lot of time at the county dump. Here, the natives backed their sports utility garbage trucks to the precarious edge of a manmade cliff and flung their Heftys into a chasm of human legacy. Stretching out into the horizon, rolling hills of dirt and debris, a virtual sea of gargled Scope and half-eaten Hungry Man, of empty Pringles and soiled Pampers, of fritzed Zeniths and defeated George Foremans. All of them being crushed into the dirt by a sort of knobby steamroller I thought would come in handy in my own yard. The county dump is a mass grave for commodities beyond their lifespan, Amazon ashes to Disney dust.

Disney especially. For what’s notable about the modern landfill is that its fast food content is outnumbered only by the number of fast food toys in the mix, those kid’s meal figures promoting the latest Pixar film or Marvel cartoon. This is where one is struck by the cycle of life at work in the junkyard, the media products living and dying, their promotional plastic a limited-time offer, their shelf-life expired too soon. Toy Toby Maguires are ground into pulp to make way for glow-in-the-dark Tom Hollands. As with our own lives, perhaps the real sin for this intellectual property is having been greenlit in the first place.

The baitclickers among you have surely seen the headlines about the Funko toy company dumping $30 million worth of their ubiquitous “Pop” figures into the landfill, unsold. You know the Funko Pops, don’t you? That immortal retail infestation that transforms any and all pop culture characters, from Harry Potter to Freddie Mercury, into identical, soulless, dead-eyed action figures with elephantine heads and no mouth with which to scream? Funko crunched the numbers on that product line and determined it was more cost-effective to move all those black-eyed Snoop Dogs and Baby Yodas straight to the garbage barge rather than to the shelves at Barnes and Noble.*

This is part of an intriguing modern trend by which toys, electronics, cars, and even motion pictures are produced and then sent directly to the dump as a tax write-off, completely bypassing the consumption stage of consumer goods. Like McNuggets going straight into the toilet without having the decency to pretend to be food first. The corporates have decided they can create and toss their branded garbage a lot more efficiently without us.

As impractical as that sounds, the bottom line may one day dictate that Durstlöscher is more profitable as a curb-stomped branding exercise than a purple-flavored beverage. And we’re certainly conditioned for it here in Wuppertal, casually accepting the Durstlöscher detritus along the avenue as if it were pinecones. Branded garbage is homogenized garbage, not that much different from the retail product it was only moments ago. It’s lost its ability to disturb.

There was one bit of roadside refuse I recall that unsettled me. Back on the old farmland, I was making my litter collection rounds one day when I spotted a large, black garbage bag that someone had tossed into the blackberry bush. It was tied shut, and its contents were a mystery. I picked up the bag and saw that a heavy mass was gathered at the bottom. I could surmise by the weight of the thing that it was one large lump of something. It didn’t rattle like cans or shift around like a sack of lima beans. Hefting the bag indicated that it was something in the neighborhood of a Thanksgiving turkey.

The thought of opening that bag had me imagining long conversations with the police and local newspaper reporters, neither of whose company I particularly enjoy. So I did what the suits at Funko do when they don’t want to think about it anymore. I took the mystery bag to the landfill and buried it, unopened, among the Marios and Pikachus past their expiration date, knowing that knobby steamroller would grind whatever sad story was contained therein to its eternal conclusion.

That bag was one piece of litter I did not subject to my archaeological study. It was too unnerving, too saturated in the horrors of the unknown. Because it didn’t have a logo on it.

- A.H.

* Barnes and Noble:  Popular American retail chain undertaking the difficult mission of running a bookstore for illiterates.

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)