If you were to approach this book at a bookstore, you would immediately be struck by the cover image. It’s a photograph of a couple sealed in plastic together with dozens of running shoes, taken by the Japanese artist Haruhiko Kawaguchi (aka Photographer Hal). It is one of many in which the photographer hermetically seals couples in plastic with their favorite objects. He only has one minute to snap the picture before he has an assistant break open the plastic to let in the air. The whole process is tense, but people love having their portraits taken in this way. I take this practice to be exemplary of our relationship to plastic capitalism: we are steeped in it, but it produces a lot of anxiety, particularly about the issue of the disposability of waste. The cover speaks volumes about the kinds of issues I discuss in the book.But I would also hope a reader would leaf through the book and see the other artworks that I discuss. Some of them are familiar, like the famous photograph by Chris Jordan of an exposed albatross corpse showing pieces of hard plastic inside. Others, perhaps are unexpected, like Melanie Bonajo’s Furniture Bondage (2007), an image of a woman standing naked, with mundane household objects strapped to her body. Our patterns of waste production and consumption are not predictable, and they register in unusual ways in contemporary art.There are a lot of images of figures with trash: people walking, dancing, sorting, posing in landfills. There are maps, films, photographs, drawings, and more. Some of the images are beautiful. Some are hideous. Many are disturbing. All are fascinating. My hope is that they stand as a provocation to read further, to seek out the descriptions and from there, the arc of the book’s argument.I close the book with a poem by Adrienne Rich from 1973 called “Diving into the Wreck”. I find this poem heart-wrenching, but at the same time it captures so much of the thinking and the analysis of contemporary art that I have worked with. If there is one thing to read in the store, after looking through the images, it would be that poem.When I started the book, my sincere hope was that people would understand that a politics of managing or controlling domestic waste was a symptom of an economic logic, rather than a truly ecological paradigm. I also wanted the reader to see how important art is to visualizing the “big picture” of waste, and making strong connections between the global circulation of waste and the economic paradigm of capitalism.From my perspective now, it seems more important than ever that people connect to the sensibilities of the artworks I discuss. Nobody is a stranger to the fact that there is a climate crisis, and that global warming is a symptom of carbon emissions, the largest form of planetary waste produced by the global oil economy. The question is: how might we think or feel about this predicament? I would like people to engage with both the affective and somatic dimensions of waste through these works of art. The artworks are reflective, energizing, even if they strike us with the grief and overwhelm of ecological catastrophe. I would like readers to come away knowing how intelligent and generative the realm of contemporary art really is. So many people think of art as an unnecessary extravagance. I could not disagree more. This is a symptom of how cheap the capitalist orientation is, and how much it demands that we deprive ourselves of what is exuberant in life. Contemporary art may be extravagant, but we need its form of criticism and insight. Artists show us perspectives of the global condition that are often denounced or diminished because they sit at odds with the calculated ways in which we visualize the world. I see this as a sign of how deeply entrenched economic thinking has become. I hope this book goes some distance towards showing that we cannot envision a future without artistic visualization; and that artistic visualization might find us a way of being that breaks with the capitalist mindset. This is a hope not just for the public at large, but for scholars too. Capitalism impoverishes people from all walks of life. Precarious times can make people think cheaply and forget the energies and aesthetic dimensions of planetary life. The artists in this book have not forgotten, however, and want to remind all of us how much we need to waste to live, and to waste well. To understand that statement as an ecological one, however, you would have to spend some time reading the book!