Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (2 page)

At the Third Street Bridge, we hauled up a fish trap and counted four fillies, grayish minnows about two inches long. Once, Balan found 115 in a single trap. On other days, the Urban Divers had hauled up silversides, toadfish, tomcod, sea robins, flounder minnows, and pipefish. I wrote “4 fillies” in Balan’s log and started handing him his tools. The water temperature today was 15 degrees Celsius. The pH was 7.5—a little acidic. Salinity was 23. To estimate water clarity, we lowered a Secchi disk—a white plastic circle about the size of a Colonial-era Gowanus oyster—and got a reading of four feet. Anything over five feet was considered pretty good, with declines in transparency typically due to high concentrations of suspended solids: sediment, plankton, and the aforementioned poo-poo.

Next, Balan dropped a stylus filled with electrolytes over the gunwale. “We could be in dead water,” he said gravely. “A normal dissolved oxygen level is five point eight parts per million. We’ve got point two.” I suspected faulty equipment, but Balan suspected the pump. “Dissolved oxygen levels drop in about a day when it’s broken,” he said.

The occasional failure of the pump is, according to some, intentional. If the canal becomes too clean, certain businesses may no longer be welcomed here. Today, the canal is a sacrifice area, a series of brownfields zoned for industry, and not a few manufacturers want to keep it that way. The pump is at the heart of the matter. When it’s broken, floating debris and chemical spills aren’t flushed; when it’s operating, everything looks and smells better. Many canal activists credit the pump with bringing wildlife back to the canal. First came the oxygen, then plankton, then fin- and shellfish (oysters, mussels, and crabs), and then waterfowl. In 2002, Balan’s group documented thirty-eight species of birds around the canal, and a couple of Jet Skiers in it, too. But like a federally listed endangered species to a strip mall developer, the idea of a cleaner, greener Gowanus is anathema to some.

A few months ago, Balan and his wife, Mitsue, had collected eighteen large bags of trash from a grassy patch between the canal and the Pathmark supermarket, by the Hamilton Avenue bridge. They had asked the store to take the full bags, but they’d refused. So did the Brooklyn South 6 sanitation garage, even though it was just one avenue away and the guys were over here constantly (the Dunkin’ Donuts adjacent to the supermarket was open twenty-four seven). Eventually, the Balans themselves hauled away the sacks. The tiny lawn they had cleaned was now a carpet of vibrant green shadowed by a birch in full autumnal splendor. It would have been a nice place to sit and look at the water, but for the racket of traffic overhead.

A Columbia University agronomist once told me that coffee-drinking habits in the New York metro region had the potential to affect the hillsides of faraway coffee-growing nations. We ran through a lot of beans in the city, she explained: almost 204 million pounds a year, based on a conservative average of 1.7 cups per person per day. If all those beans were grown in, say, El Salvador, they’d dominate the country’s harvest. Of course, New Yorkers bought beans from many different countries, but the professor had made her point. The choices we make have repercussions far and wide. Buying shade-grown coffee that conserves forests for other species and supporting fair labor practices could have a salutary effect on people and places we’ll never see.

William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, regional planners in Canada, developed the ecological footprint concept as a way to measure the sustainability of our lifestyles. Basically, a footprint totals the flows of material and energy required to support any economy or subset of an economy (coffee drinking, for example), then converts those flows into the total land and water surface area that it takes to both provide those resources and assimilate their waste products. For residents of densely populated cities, that surface area extends well beyond our borders, into the hinterlands. We don’t grow much, and our water and energy come from afar. Measuring our coffee footprint, or any other footprint, isn’t necessarily about good and bad; it is about making informed choices.

But lattes were just the beginning. Mindful of our consumptive lifestyles, I imagined the city had a garbage footprint bigger than any in the world. We were eight million people, we consumed and threw out a lot, and we had very little nearby space in which to dump our discards. For nearly fifty years, New York City relocated its trash—a peak of thirteen thousand tons a day from houses and apartments, plus an additional thirteen thousand tons a day from commercial and institutional buildings—to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, our least-populated borough. In 1986, Fresh Kills became the largest dump in the world. It rose two hundred feet above its surrounding wetlands and formed the highest geographical point along fifteen hundred miles of eastern seaboard.

Fresh Kills closed in March of 2001, and for the first time in its history, the city had no place within its boundaries to bury or burn all the stuff its residents no longer wanted. Now the city exports almost all its solid waste to outlying states. Our footprint, which has always been big, has suddenly become a lot bigger. And New York isn’t the only city spreading its garbage toes.

Since 1960, the nation’s municipal waste stream has nearly tripled, reaching a reported peak of 369 million tons in 2002. That’s more stuff, per capita, than any other nation in the world, and 2.5 times the per capita rate of Oslo, Norway. The increase is due partly to increased population but mostly to the habits of average residents, who now throw out, says the EPA, 4.3 pounds of garbage per person per day—1.6 more pounds than thirty years ago. According to the Congressional Research Service, the biggest producers are California, followed by New York, Florida, Texas, and Michigan.
BioCycle
magazine and the Earth Engineering Center of Columbia University reported in their “State of Garbage in America” report for 2003 that every American generated 1.31 tons of garbage a year. Slightly less than 27 percent of the aggregate mess was recycled or composted; 7.7 percent was incinerated; and the overwhelming majority, 65.6 percent, was buried in a hole in the ground.

After paddling the Gowanus, I became increasingly curious to learn what sort of impact my own 1.31 annual tons had as it meandered through the landscape. To do that, I had to go on a garbage tour, of sorts. But before I started my far-flung travels with trash, I decided to acquaint myself, like Thoreau in Concord, with the extremely local, and take a close look inside my own kitchen waste bin. Like fossils, ancient kitchen middens, and Clovis points hewn by early man—evidence scrutinized by scientists peering into our past—the stuff we reject today reveals a great deal about human beings and how they live. What would my garbage say about me? What exactly was I throwing out, and how much of it was there?

My voyage of self-discovery, like so many voyages, began with an acquisition. I unwrapped my Polder 2 in 1 Gourmet Add N’ Weigh Digital Scale & Kitchen Timer and settled the white plastic disc on my counter. Battery-operated and sleek, it could handle a maximum of seven pounds. “Surely I won’t generate more than seven pounds of trash a day,” I told myself naively. An empty wine bottle, I’d learn that very night, weighs about one pound.

I couldn’t wait to begin digging through my garbage. After dinner I collected my tools on the kitchen floor: the scale, a notebook, a pen, an empty plastic bag. I sat down and tightly tied the full trash bag—a plastic grocery sack—to keep it from toppling off the scale. After weighing, I untied the sack and started removing items one by one, writing down their names and placing them in the new bag. This sounds straightforward, but it wasn’t. My pen got sticky; coffee grounds spilled onto the floor. My daughter, Lucy, who was three at the time, was instantly at my side offering help. Halfway through, I washed my hands and put on a pair of rubber gloves, which made writing difficult. My data for the first day looked like this:

October 3. Foil packaging from Fig Newmans, empty box of sandwich bags, waxed paper bag from muffin shop, 2 plastic bags from vegetables, plastic bread bag, coffee grounds, receipt from grocery store, grapefruit and watermelon rinds, misc. food scraps from dinner, 1 slice stale bread, 1 banana peel, 5 basil stems, 1 half-gallon plastic milk bottle, 2 half-gallon juice cartons, 1 beer bottle, 1 jelly jar, 1 wine bottle, 1 half-liter plastic bottle of chocolate milk, 1 peanut butter jar, miscellaneous “fines.”

Total weight: 7 pounds, 9 ounces.

I was a little embarrassed about the contents of my trash, especially the chocolate milk container. It had been a treat for Lucy. I didn’t usually buy individual servings of anything: they were expensive and their packaging created more trash. William Rathje, founder of the University of Arizona’s Garbage Project, which was established by archaeologists to study both human discard habits and the inner dynamics of landfills, insists that refuse reflects truth. Garbage sorting reveals that “what we do and what we say we do are two different things.” We underestimate how much booze we drink; we overestimate our leafy greens. I resolved to be more careful about chocolate milk containers, though I reckoned I’d have a hard time explaining it to Lucy.

I returned to my diary entry.
Fines,
a word used by Rathje in his garbage sorts, included floor sweepings, dust, strands of hair, coffee grounds—all the tiny stuff that settled to the bottom of the bin. I noted the cardboard box from the sandwich bags. That had been a mistake: I’d been too lazy to bring it out to the paper-recycling pile on my landing. I didn’t feel so bad about the beer bottle: I had weighed it, but it wasn’t going to the landfill because New York was a bottle bill state. I’d put it on the sidewalk for a homeless guy named Willy, who’d redeem the container at the local beverage center for the nickel deposit.

I couldn’t have begun quantifying my garbage at a more confusing time in New York’s recent history. If I’d started my project four months earlier, I would have been recycling four pounds, one ounce of my total weight (or 51 percent) and been sending just three pounds, eight ounces to the landfill for two days in the life of my small family. But years ago, our Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani had promised the overwhelmingly Republican residents of Staten Island that he would close Fresh Kills. Now, instead of paying about $40 a ton to dump waste within the city limits, we paid $105 a ton to export it. Facing a tight budget, our current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had recently suspended the recycling of glass and plastic, claiming that it cost too much to collect and process. City environmentalists were outraged, and so was I. My project had barely begun and already it was complicated by politics.

I didn’t want to let this blip in the history of New York skew my data. Bloomberg had promised that plastic recycling would return in one year and glass in two. (He was persuaded by environmentalists to keep his hands off the metal and paper streams, which continued to bring revenue to the city.) I considered putting my project on hold, if only so I’d have a chance of beating the national average. The decision to include or exclude became morally freighted. Ultimately, I decided to weigh my glass and plastic separately, just so I’d have the data, then total my garbage both with and without these materials.

When I was done combing through my trash, I put a new bag in the empty kitchen can and brought the full sack down to the mother bin in my brownstone’s front yard. Then I washed my hands and reviewed the first night’s lessons. I noted that food waste, the wet stuff, really messed up my garbage. That wine bottles were heavy. That Peter, my husband, had thrown away a hunk of moldy cheese that he could easily have trimmed (if he didn’t have a phobia about mold). That I had left small bits of paper in my trash. That I could probably do a much better job of shrinking my garbage footprint.

There was something else I noticed, too. The plastic sack with which I’d just lined my trash can was no longer empty. I’d turned my back for five minutes, and already the waste was accumulating. Was there no relief from it? Did the flow ever stop? I wondered if sanitation workers ever felt a sense of futility. They cleaned one street after another after another, until the district was officially clean. But no sooner were the bins tipped than they immediately began to fill. Emptiness—cleanliness—was a condition so brief as to be nearly undetectable. “You can’t think about that,” one of my sanitation workers (or san men, as both men and women called themselves) told me. “You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

In two days’ time, the kitchen bag was full. Again, Lucy sat on the floor next to me, wearing a rubber glove that was twelve sizes too large. Coffee grounds speckled her thigh as she sorted plastic from glass and held up objects for identification.

“Having fun?” I asked.

“It’s a little smelly,” she answered. “Daddy, what’s this?” She held aloft something soft and red.

“That’s a chicken liver,” Daddy answered from his position at the stove.

Turning toward me, Lucy asked, “Why do we have so much trash?”

I gave her the proximate answer. “Because we keep throwing things out.”

“Why do we throw things out?” She handed me a plastic milk cap and answered herself. “Because they get yucky.” Did she mean yucky before they hit the can or after? I sang a little song to her: “It really isn’t garbage till you mix it all together. / It really isn’t garbage till you throw it away. / Just separate the paper, plastic, compost, glass and metal, / And then you get to use it all another day.”

“Mommy,” she said, “will you sing ‘Stewball’?”

After a week of sitting by my side, Lucy lost interest in combing through garbage. She was lucky to live here, in the grand ol’ USA. In many developing nations, entire families pick through municipal dumps together in search of materials—fabric, metals, paper, glass—that can be exchanged for cash. The work is hierarchical: the highest-ranking families have rights to the most valuable stuff, usually metals. Rooting through my garbage, I wondered briefly which items I’d keep if I had to live off this waste. Then I realized I wouldn’t have bought most of this stuff in the first place, or thrown most of it out, had I been in that position.