In the past few years, environmentalist approaches to the study of the Middle East have grown, with studies looking at the general state of the environment (Mikhail 2012) to those discussing the greenwashing of settler colonialism (Makdisi 2022). Development has also taken place in waste studies, with many critical works exploring the implications of waste in the region. Whether it is the study of literary litterscapes (Olszok 2019), waste as siege infrastructure (Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2019), or waste as bound up in notions of national identity and nation-(re)building, waste is becoming a central actor in the modern Middle East. Drawing on these studies, this presentation aims to show that waste is critical to the understanding of contemporary issues in the region, focusing in particular on marginalized bodies, or “wasted lives” (Bauman 2004): the poor, refugees, the undocumented, migrants, the disabled, and the dissident. In particular, the presentation focuses on three films to discuss garbage as a physical, obstructive boundary marking spatial marginalization and social and political disempowerment: Yomeddine (dir. Abu Bakr Shawki), about a Coptic man who had leprosy as a child, and so was abandoned to live in and off a garbage dump; Costa Brava, Lebanon (dir. Mounia Akl), about the establishment of a landfill in the mountains of Lebanon, a location that problematizes space-based myths of Lebanese identity rooted in Mountain Romanticism; and Capernaum (dir. Nadine Labaki), which highlights the lives of the poor and documented who live off the debris of the city. Waste, as non-human agential matter, eludes responsibility, and so the garbage, dirt, and debris that are inextricable from one’s abode emphasize disempowerment, lack of accountability, and evasive responsibility. In such an environment, the question of what is left for such “wasted lives” lurks in the unsatisfying ending of each of the films. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Polity Press. Makdisi, Saree. 2022. Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial. 1st ed. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2ks6v99. Mikhail, Alan. 2012. Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa. Cary, UNITED STATES: Oxford University Press USA - OSO. Olszok, Charis. 2019. “The Litterscape and The Nude: History Escapes in Mansur Bushnaf’s Al-ʿilka (Chewing Gum).” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743818000478. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. 2019. Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.