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This paper aims at showing how contemporary literature allows us to highlight our complex relationship to waste. In Le pays où les arbres n’ont pas d’ombre (The country where trees have no shadow), Katrina Kalda’s attentive descriptions of waste illustrate the meaningful and careful interactions the characters develop with discarded objects. The narrative non-fiction Yucca Mountain, by John D’Agata, reveals with a distanced and ironic tone the fictions and lies inherent to public discourses about nuclear waste. Finally, I focus on a research-creation project on microplastics that I have recently conducted. In Solaris, by Stanislas Lem, I have found unexpected help to express the uncanny effects of microplastics on our thoughts and on the way we relate to our environment.