Ruskin associated the proliferation of waste with the mass production attendant on the growth of suburbia, and hence with the despoliation of the countryside and increased alienation of labor. This essay considers the relationship between the environmentalist and the aesthetic strains in Ruskin’s thinking, focusing particularly on his hatred of various forms of waste. It begins with Ruskin’s essay “The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art, and Policy” and traces his obsession with iron railings and fences. Ruskin reviles the ubiquitous Georgian iron fence because it embodies waste in its use of raw materials and its exploitation of alienated labor (in the form of mass-produced cast iron). The very form of the fence also suggests another structure that functions as an emblem of a troubling modernity: the arcade. The final section of the essay considers the function of the iron fence, for Ruskin, as an architectural excrescence—or a parergon in the sense used by Jacques Derrida in The Truth in Painting.