Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (17 page)

William McDonough, author with Michael Braungart of
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,
bases his entire design philosophy on the notion that waste equals food—that the end of one product’s usefulness should nurture the birth of another. McDonough and Braungart break waste into three categories. “Consumables” are things we eat or use that would eventually biodegrade, including shampoo bottles made of beets and fabrics free of toxins, mutagens, and endocrine disruptors. “Durables,” like TVs and cars, would be returned to their manufacturers as technical nutrients and used as food in their manufacturing systems. “Unmarketables,” like nuclear waste, dioxin, and chromium-tanned leather, would no longer be produced or sold.

Mulling over the waste streams that left my house, I saw that sometimes they intersected—as food and sewage did at the wastewater treatment plant—and sometimes they came apart—at a recycling facility, for example. The line between compost and the majority of material at a landfill is all too thin. City planners on Nantucket, faced with a leaking landfill that threatened marshes, wildlife, and the island’s aquifer, recognized this years ago. Decreeing that they would brook no net gain of landfill space, island residents approved installation of a 185-foot-long horizontal digester. Household waste is loaded into the first of five compartments in a rotating steel tube. (Recyclables, including mattresses and textiles, tires, white goods, furniture, and shoes, have already been harvested.) In two to three days, the temperature of the organic material reaches 160 degrees and the remaining nonorganics—plastic bags and the like—are removed. The rough compost is cured indoors for twenty-one days on a ventilated floor, then moved outdoors, screened, and mixed with chipped brush and yard waste to cure for another three months. Waste Options, which runs the program, claims that the island’s diversion rate, the amount of garbage that isn’t getting buried, is 86 percent.

To handle the remaining inorganic fraction of household waste, Waste Options built a new state-of-the art landfill, complete with a double liner. To meet the island’s no-net-gain-in-landfilling mandate, the company plans to mine one cubic yard of the island’s leaky old landfill, and run it through the digester, for every cubic yard it puts into the new one. Eventually, the much-reduced old landfill will be capped and covered with fresh compost, reclaimed not for strip malls or condos, but for native plants and animals.

If food waste disposers represented cleanliness and modernity, my own system continued to point in the exact opposite direction. Every few days, I dumped my kitchen trash onto my daughter’s blue plastic toboggan, squatted next to it on the floor, and weighed its components on a kitchen scale that, afterward, I barely managed to wipe, let alone “sanitize.” The process felt primitive, Luddite even, and I liked that. Not for me the tyranny of modernity, the hysteria of hygiene. Picking through my trash felt subversive: it ran counter to the media message that household dirt should be whisked quickly into a compactor or garbage pail lined with a lemon-scented bag, preferably via single-use mops, disposable dust cloths, and paper towels, which would protect my family from the germs that festered in my kitchen sponge. Composting my organic matter, reclaiming my own mess, was beginning to feel political.

One morning, eight months after I began composting, I went outside with a small container, hoping to collect some potting soil from the bottom of the compost bin. I’d never opened the sliding hatch before, so I had no idea what was happening at the business end of this thing. As gently as possible, I lifted the door, expecting the cascade of “rich, dark, soil-like material” promised by the Garden Gourmet booklet. What I saw instead was a wall of compressed brown crab apple leaves. I poked around with my finger, trying to see if there was any loamy soil, and ran instead into a small gray mouse. It scampered toward my hand, faked right, and dove left, back into the leaves. That was a surprise, though it shouldn’t have been. The rodent screen wasn’t really attached to anything.

I considered digging around with the potato fork to see what else was going on in the bin, but I didn’t want to impale the mouse or its inevitable relatives. The EPA has a regulation, called 40 CFR, Part 503.33, concerning “vector attraction reduction” in soil enhancements. Obviously, I was out of compliance here. The mouse could potentially transmit disease, but I couldn’t help giving my little vector the benefit of the doubt. He was cute, and vegetarian. Setting aside the potato fork, and noting with admiration the dryer lint with which the mouse had sealed his hidey-hole, I slid his front door closed.

In a few more months, my chest-high compost bin would brim with the organic castoffs of my family, my neighbors, their garden, and the tree in our front yard. The volume was a reminder that while packaging makes up 35 percent of household waste in the United States (by weight), yard waste and food scraps make up another 25 percent. The fraction hasn’t always been so high. Between 1920 and 1990, the volume of organic matter in the American residential waste stream rose fourfold. Some of that increase was due to population growth, some to increased consumption, and some to more efficient collection. But the expansion came also, writes Susan Strasser in
Waste and Want,
from “a new willingness to define leftover food . . . as unwanted.”

Ironically, although we yearly bury or burn fifty million tons of energy-rich yard waste and food scraps (contributing significantly to the production of greenhouse gases) we continue to pump fossil fuel from the ground to produce commercial fertilizer. According to Richard Manning, in
Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization,
it takes an average of five and a half gallons of fossil energy, converted to fertilizer, to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land. Nitrogen from this fertilizer (but not from compost, which releases its nutrients slowly) leaches into and pollutes water; the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, has been attributed, in part, to nitrogen runoff. Every single calorie we eat, writes Manning, “is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten.”

Is it possible to take the energy from an urban population’s green waste and return it, safely and efficiently, to the earth? In 1895, Colonel George E. Waring found that transforming New York City’s organic waste to fertilizer and grease was easy enough, if you had a cheap and willing labor force and neighbors who didn’t protest the stench. But getting residents to separate this stuff, and hang on to it until the collection truck came ’round, was an uphill battle. The city’s more recent experiment with kitchen scraps and garbage trucks revealed a similar reluctance to separate, at least in multifamily dwellings. San Francisco collects and composts organics (which include oily pizza boxes, greasy waxed-paper bags, and Chinese food cartons), but only from restaurants and smaller residences. In Oregon, the Portland International Airport composts food scraps, but it is a tiny and self-contained operation. Seattle, for all its green consciousness, green markets, and green lawns, does not compost residential food scraps, though it is planning to start a commercial program. Europe, as usual, is more enlightened: in the Netherlands and in Germany, residents of single- and multifamily dwellings routinely scrape bread crusts and orange peels into bins for municipal collection and composting.

Because food waste presents a different set of recycling challenges than metal cans and dry newspapers, solid-waste managers are keen on pilot projects that test different types of containers and collection schedules. One size doesn’t fit all. Residents in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, are currently experimenting with food collection, as are five neighborhoods around Minneapolis and St. Paul. It is obvious to me that front-yard composting bins aren’t going to work for the majority of New Yorkers, but that doesn’t mean that our food waste—especially the food waste from large institutions and processors—can’t be composted. All it would take is political will and the resources to make it manifest. Someday, I suspect, there is going to be gold in green waste. But not today.

Chapter Six

Forward into the Flexo Nip

I
n 1967, the city of Madison, Wisconsin, was running out of dump space. To stem the flow of garbage, the city hooked special racks onto its garbage trucks and sent them driveway to driveway, collecting newspapers from residents. It was the nation’s first curbside recycling program since the forties, when communities had collected material for the war effort. In 1973, the city of Marblehead, Massachusetts, launched its own curbside program, which included bottles and cans in addition to newspapers. The program had been inspired by Earth Day, inaugurated by the League of Women Voters, and was funded, in part, by the nation’s first EPA recycling grant.

The curbside habit started to spread, but not quickly. By the late eighties, there were still just a few hundred programs across the nation, but garbage consciousness had reached a critical mass. Teachers had begun writing recycling curriculum, and the media hyped the plight of the barge
Mobro,
which wandered the high seas for nearly two months trying to offload three thousand tons of Long Island’s garbage. In 1988, the EPA announced a goal to recycle 25 percent of municipal trash, and the following year Andie MacDowell, in the opening scene of
Sex, Lies, and Videotape,
nattered to her shrink about a crisis in landfill capacity. By 2003, there were more than nine thousand curbside recycling programs across the country.

According to “The State of Garbage in America” for 2003, western states had the highest regional recycling rate (38 percent), and the Rocky Mountain states had the lowest (9 percent, with Colorado at a dismal 2.8 percent). The top states were Maine, Oregon, Minnesota, Iowa, and California, but they seemed to compete on uneven ground, calculating diversion from the landfill using different criteria. Should the stuff rejected by recyclers count as being recycled? Should measurements be taken in volume or weight? Should commercial construction and demolition debris, which was diverted from the landfill, be included with the residential figures?

New Yorkers began recycling paper on a voluntary basis in 1986; it became mandatory with passage of the city’s first recycling law, in 1989. From the start, the city relied on a “dual stream” system: one truck picks up metal, glass, and plastic; another truck handles paper. Most US cities use this system, though “single stream,” in which all recyclables are thrown into one container and sorted at a MRF, is now getting play in San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles, and Palm Beach County, Florida. This system cuts truck traffic in half and, because it makes recycling into a no-brainer for citizens confused by chasing arrows and the material properties of juice cartons, could ultimately net more stuff for processors to sell. On the other hand, mashing all kinds of materials together into one barrel, then compressing them in the back of a truck, can take a toll on quality: the paper gets dirty, say the paper people, and the plastic start to glitter with glass shards.

Seven days a week, I set aside paper for the weekly pickup: newspapers, junk mail, and, if I could get away with it, draft versions of Lucy’s artistic masterworks. My magazines went on the slippery pile, along with my Band-Aid wrappers and shopping lists, receipts and tea bag tags, toilet paper tubes, egg cartons, rinsed out ice-cream containers, and boxes from Belgian waffle mix, Mr. Bubble, baking soda, and butter. It added up to at least twelve pounds a week, and every bit of it earned the city money.

Unsolicited take-out menus and advertising circulars are an almost daily fact of life in New York, and every time a hired hand dropped another one on my stoop, I heard in my head Judy Goodstein’s Queens-accented cackle: “Keep the junk mail coming. Ha-ha-ha. If you can tear it, we can take it.” Goodstein was the recycling manager of Visy Paper, on Staten Island. The company processed more than 180,000 tons of New York’s residential and commercial paper a year, and it was looking for ways to capture an even higher percentage of what she called “the urban forest,” a phrase the company had actually trademarked.

With her heavy makeup and shag hairdo, Goodstein was a fixture on the garbage scene. She cultivated a hapless mother-hen personality. “Do you know what this meeting is about?” she’d whispered to me on more than one occasion. “I hope I don’t have to speak.” But this reticence was a put-on: Goodstein wasn’t the least bit shy. In fact, she was eager to reel off the company boilerplate: how much paper Visy took in, how much corrugated (she pronounced it “carra-gated”) linerboard it produced, and how many trees all this saved. Depending on the audience, she would plaintively express her hope that the Department of Sanitation not abandon dual-stream collection. Paper bundled inside plastic bags was bad enough (the city allowed bags because they were easier than tying up paper with string), but glass and metal in the mix would be hell.

My paper arrived at the Visy plant crammed inside DSNY truck CN231, which was loaded on Wednesday mornings by Jack McLean and Jorge Toro. McLean was a muscular black man from North Carolina, a former printer who liked being outdoors, working without a boss, and meeting new people. Toro, who pronounced his first name “George,” was a worn-looking Puerto Rican, a former corrections officer from Brooklyn who didn’t seem to like much of anything. McLean, known around the garage as Clever Jack, had eleven years on the job; Toro had four, though his relative inexperience didn’t stop him from acting as a sanitation sociologist.

“We get between ten and eleven tons of paper on an average day,” Toro told me one bright morning as he dragged paper-filled bags and cans from the curb to his truck. “But look at this! It’s wet from rain. It’s heavy. They’re supposed to keep the tops on the cans. People use rubber bands on thirty pounds of paper—in affluent neighborhoods! Yeah, even over on President Street, where the professionals live. On windy days, oh, that’s the worst. The paper blows right out of your truck. I don’t like new phone book time. Some people save them and throw out a hundred pounds of phone books at once.”