Is your job a pointless job? Does it make a meaningful contribution to the world? If your job was eliminated, would it matter to anyone? These are some of the questions that David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, examines in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & Schuster 2019). It has been estimated that across the developed world up to 40 percent of workers-especially those in administration, finance, and the legal professions-saw their jobs as a form of meaningless toil analogous to the Greek myth of Sisyphus. These white-collar workers covertly think that their jobs are not only useless, but sometimes harmful to society. With increased automation, a fifteen-hour workweek is not unachievable, but on average working hours have increased rather than decreased over the past few decades. In this book, Graeber examines this epidemic of futility, and offers a theory for human freedom and social liberation.

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In China many petrochemical plants are adjacent to residential areas. Despite this, the people who live in these areas appear indifferent to the threat of toxic pollution and chemical explosions, even though they are aware of the danger. Building on historical and social studies of ignorance, I show how residents in a southern Chinese city live with the threat of petrochemicals by practicing what I call the "art of unnoticing," a contrived form of ignorance that enables them to live with the reality of pollution and reclaim their agency in face of the unavoidable. In light of this, I reflect on the limit and complexity of the global environmental justice when willful ignorance is at work. The next step forward is to understand what it is that people are unnoticing, as well as what unnoticing can do to people's lifeworlds. [ignorance, toxicity, chemicals, risk perception, industrial pollution, fenceline communities, environmental justice, fatalism, China] A s my driver Dong drove past the petrochemical plant in Huangpu District, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, I tried to take a few photos of the industrial landscape. 1 "What are you shooting?" Dong asked. "I'm trying to take some photos of the petrochemical plants," I responded. "The petrochemical plants? What's special about them?" he asked casually. I know he was not being sarcastic. As someone who had lived in Huangpu all his life, Dong was genuinely curious about why an industrial district full of factories and wharves, connected to yet far from the glamorous new town of Guangzhou, would interest anyone."Well, don't you think the petroleum structures are pretty striking? The refineries, the oil tankers, the chimneys. They're right in front of you. You can't not notice them, can you?" To my surprise, Dong said rather matter-of-factly, "I don't notice them. They're always here. They've been here before me." Really? I thought to myself, perplexed. As I gazed at the red-and-white chimney outside the window (see Figure 1), Dong told me about the financial benefits and health risks of working for Sinopec, China's major state-owned oil and gas company, which is now the world's largest petrochemical conglomerate. He learned about these from his best friend from primary school, whose entire family worked for Sinopec.The next afternoon, when I headed out for another day of fieldwork, I passed by a branch of the China Construction Bank, housed in a building undergoing renovation. Although I was standing far away, the smell of formaldehyde was so pungent that I felt a burning sensation in my eyes, nose, and tongue. I should have left immediately, but I was captivated by the scene of a renovation worker taking a nap on one of the dusty work tops. His shirt was covered with paint, and he wore no safety helmet, no face mask, and no protective clothing. He seemed unbothered by the formaldehyde smell (see Figure 2). Immediately, this scene brought me back to when my driver Dong said, "I don't notice them."

As Hong Kong's landfills are expected to reach saturated conditions by 2020, the city can no longer rely on landfilling alone as the sole solution for waste treatment in the long term. Drawing on five months of archival research at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Public Records Office (PRO) in 2016 as well as 17 months of fieldwork conducted between 2012, 2013 and 2016, this article provides a muchneeded overview of why sustainable waste management has always been such a challenge for Hong Kong. Focusing on the city's dependence on landfills and its failure to integrate alternative waste management technologies, namely incineration, into its current waste management regime, we explicate Hong Kong's waste management predicaments from the 1950s to the present day. Through a historical lens, we argue that Hong Kong's waste problems have a historical root and that they are unlikely to be resolved unless the government is willing to learn from its past mistakes and adopt a much more proactive approach in the near future.