Garbage: The Saga of a Boss Scavenger in San Francisco

Garbage is a memoir of an exceptional trash collector from the streets and wharves of San Francisco. This is a rollicking first-person narrative that recounts an incredible life led and has amazing nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout its pages.

Stefanelli was trained to be a scavenger by his uncles in the 1940s and 50s in a city where rampant discrimination prevented Italian immigrants and their families from pursuing any other career. From there, he became a ‘boss scavenger’, married a garbage man’s daughter, and climbed the ranks of the Sunset Scavenger Company where he eventually took part in a corporate shakeup that made him the company’s president at only 31 years old. As one of the men at the helm of this booming industry, he became the chief advocate for increasingly innovative recycling and waste management practices in the Bay Area, and a foremost leader of environmentally-conscious business in the world.

Stefanelli’s lively memoir will enlighten readers to the waste management business, an industry that was once considered the lowest rung on the social ladder, but will also show his unparalleled capacity for transformation and vision.