This work examines how state and nonstate actors in Morocco understand and negotiate environmental politics through rhetoric and quotidian interactions around garbage. While many forms of environmental politics may seem abstract and distant, trash is tangible and intimate. Interactions with garbage are highly sensory and informed by deeply held notions of order, cleanliness, and disgust. Waste is an inevitable byproduct of all human life, but in our contemporary moment of global capitalism, trash is an increasing source of social, economic, and political anxiety. During the 2015 garbage crisis in Beirut, trash piling up in the streets of the capital served as a catalyst for – up to that point – unprecedented cross-class and cross-sectarian mobilization. While such instances of disruption and chaos can serve as formative moments of societal reckoning and collective action, trash both shapes and is shaped by political action through a host of quotidian interactions. Moments of system breakdown paint only partial pictures of the systems themselves and the slow violence (Nixon 2011) enacted when they are working exactly as intended. This project builds on theoretical traditions that considers the political impact of nonhuman actors/actants (Mitchell 2002; Latour 1996; Bennet 2010), as well as foundational anthropological work (Douglas 1966) and recent ethnographic research (Robbins 2020; Ayuero & Swistun 2009) that considers how trash and toxicity shape political action. This paper draws on preliminary research conducted in Morocco 2019 and analysis of an original corpus of Arabic media, government reports, and material from nongovernmental organizations related to trash management in the country.