Kait Galweigh must find a path to hope when a long-cherished prophecy shatters, leaving its believers, the only people who can battle an evil returned from centuries of hiding, crushed and despondent. Life feeds on waste. You eat plant life and, in a natural system, your excretia becomes the mulch that feeds the plants you eat. Trash is a product Life knows how to use.
Life grabs opportunities.
Excess trash of any kind will make an opening for any new form of life that can figure out how to use it. Expect, within the next few thousand years or so, the arrival of the Huggies Monster and the Tire Mound Scavenger. Life likes volatiles. Stable elements like nitrogen are never going to be the basis of a life form. You need unstable stuff, that Life can mix and match like tinkertoys.