AbstractThis research shows the changes of the landscape in the presence of waste, reality that invades the territory in many different surprising ways in time and space. At first, the issue of garbage is faced according to language of creativity and in a second moment on how the inevitable accumulation of garbage designs new landscapes, how waste becomes a place. Then, through a list of projects for more or less controlled recovery altered areas, it is explained how the present territorial dimension is inexorably besieged by garbage and consequently of how it is exposed to a substantial environmental, cultural, economic and political transformation. In this way, a sort of ‘indicative atlas’ takes form, where synthetically some interesting and model recovery plans are illustrated. So the statistical, quantitative ‘numerical’ aspects concerning the production of waste in order to highlight the surprising conditions that today the modern city is presented and therefore the reasonable need to investigate. With a careful, knowing eye it describes, through a cartographic survey, the present conditions and the effective distribution of plants for waste disposal and collection on the Italian territory, in particular and generally on the European one. Then it is singled out a territorial section touched by the phenomena: The Lombardy region, and then the territorial morphology so altered and the inevitable environmental transformations. The study becomes more and more detailed, pro-active and conscious of the state of needing corrections, substantial improvements and experimental developments.