http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-existential-conundrum-that-is-the-american-waste-paper-basket/
If the acclaimed 20th-century existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger had written a book about garbage cans, it might read like portions of “The Paradox of the Waste Paper Basket” by Jos Legrand. Published earlier this year in Maastricht, Netherlands, where Legrand lives, Paradox is a concise history of the trash receptacles used in American offices between 1870 and 1930. You know, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a retired Dutch art-history teacher to be passionate about.
Legrand’s unnumbered book (it’s about 50 pages long) arrives as the zeitgeist, as Heidegger probably would have put it, is unusually preoccupied with garbage cans. In many municipalities across the United States, one must practically have a degree in waste management before tossing one’s refuse in the trash. There’s a blue can for recyclables, a green one for compostables, and if your garbage is truly garbage, it goes in the black can, depending, of course, on where you live (which can make traveling complicated, but I digress…).
Happily for us, Legrand digresses, too, devoting a fair amount of his book to the “European” (his word) perspective on the great American waste paper basket. “Mistakes are as old as the office,” he writes, “and therefore the waste bin is the symbol of the ‘officium imperfectum,’ the imperfect office.” This, Legrand believes, is just one of several paradoxes of the office waste paper basket.
“As long as the bin hasn’t been emptied,” he elaborates, “its contents are the physical rendering of our thinking, our doubts, and ultimately the rejection of everything that doesn’t fit into a certain system. Once emptied, that visibility is over, or, as Heidegger would say, the truth is hidden again.”