Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (20 page)

In her twenties and unemployed, she came to work for Hugo Neu. Her father, a marine surveyor for Lloyd’s of London, got her the job: the scrap metal company was one of his clients. John Neu had advised Wendy against taking the job. “He said, ‘There are no women here; you’ll have to deal with Greek sea captains, with foul language.’ I said to him, ‘I’ve been with working with sex offenders and murderers in group therapy, working with death row inmates.’”

Wendy laughed and popped a crescent of clementine into her mouth. “I started in the traffic department, writing letters of credit. I was the first woman here who wasn’t secretarial. Then Hugo sent me on the road, to look at equipment. When he got sick, I worked for another gentleman, selling nonferrous metals all across the country. After a couple of years I thought it was time to do something else, but John took me out to dinner and asked if I’d stick around. I didn’t even like him at first. I liked his father. But we got involved, and he talked me out of quitting.”

After Wendy and John married, she enrolled in law school: she wanted to work in prisons as a public defender. “I decided after three months of school that I’d make a lousy lawyer,” she said, “but I stuck it out.” The prisons never got Wendy back, but the Hugo Neu Corporation did.

Of all the materials recycled in this country, metals have the longest history of being collected and refashioned into new goods. The market for scrap has always been strong: Alan Greenspan is said to look at its price as a leading economic indicator. Recycling scrap is cost-effective, and working with clean recycled steel in electric arc furnaces, instead of virgin ore in blast furnaces, requires a third as much energy (because it avoids mining, processing, transporting, and converting ore to iron), cuts air pollution by more than 85 percent (because all that digging, transporting, and transforming produces large amounts of greenhouse gases), and cuts water usage by 40 percent (because iron ore isn’t being cleaned and cooled).

According to the Steel Recycling Institute, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh and likes to frame things in terms of local football, the steel saved by recycling more than forty-six million appliances (the number recycled in 2003) would build 189 stadiums the size of the Steelers’. More than two appliances were recycled for every NFL fan who attended a regular season game in 2002 (put in less convoluted terms, 85 percent of appliances got recycled). All very good news, because every ton of steel that is recycled saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal, and 120 pounds of limestone—the amount of materials it would take to mine and refine new steel. Over the course of one year, the steel recycling industry conserves enough energy to power about eighteen million homes (some of which, no doubt, contain Steelers fans) for twelve months. All that, and recycling reduces landfilling and incineration, too.

Recycling aluminum also generates huge savings: it takes five million tons of bauxite ore, and the energy equivalent of thirty-two million barrels of crude oil, to produce a million tons of beer or soda cans. Make new cans from the old ones, however, and all that bauxite, plus significant amounts of petroleum coke, soda ash, pitch, and lime, stays in the ground. By averting the transformation of these materials into new aluminum, recycling cuts energy use by more than 94 percent and avoids the same amount of air pollution.

Making new metal out of old metal sounds green and right thinking. But the mental image conjured by Earth Day, of cheerful volunteers plucking tin cans from fields of wildflowers, has little to do with the reality of a scrap yard, as I realized on a Friday morning in May. It was a textbook day for visiting a metals handling facility—not too cold, not too hot, a little breezy, no rain. But still it was obvious: processing old metal was a dirty job—labor intensive, highly polluting, noisy, dusty, and ugly.

Steve Shinn greeted me in his office at Hugo Neu’s Jersey City scrap yard, which was set alongside Claremont Channel, a brown rectangle of water that led out to Upper New York Bay. Shinn, the plant manager, was an athletic-looking six-footer in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and work pants. While I examined a series of strange-looking lumps on his desk, a mini-museum of ore, Shinn said, “Scrap is the first feedstock of a steel mill, not virgin. Scrap is cheaper, and the industry has evolved to supply the mills with enough of it, at the right quality and the right price.”

In 2003, about seventy million tons of steel scrap were recycled in this country, of which five million tons were exported, from six facilities, by Hugo Neu. The company’s mandate was simple: it bought steel and shredded it; it bought shredded steel and shipped it; and it bought steel that it didn’t shred but only cut into pieces and shipped.

I picked up a five-pound “knuckle” of iron, a rounded blob in a dullish silvery gray. “That’s probably from a car,” Shinn said. I turned over a lump of HBI, or hot briquetted iron, which weighed less than the knuckle, and a lump of HMS, or heavy melting steel. “We don’t shred that, we cut it. It’s made from pieces of machinery, metal stairwells, that kind of thing.” I assessed a chunk of copper, from cooling pipes, and a chunk of brass, from decorative work. They were similar in color, but the brass was a lot heavier.

Next came a rough chunk of slag that had been scraped from the crucible of a steel mill’s electric arc furnace, then a few ounces of shaley, shiny-looking aluminum. Shinn’s phone rang, and my eyes wandered around the office, settling on a large map of the eastern United States on which every city with either a steel mill or a shredder had been marked with an arrow. On another wall was a panoramic photograph, matted and framed, of Claremont Terminal: it depicted a loaded barge, warehouses, preening cranes, conveyor belts, and a cyclone, a tower that sucks dust from the shredding system. The tones were pink, gray, and brown, and the water was the same murky color as the air.

Shinn’s scrap yard, which covered about twenty-five acres, buzzed, hummed, and beeped with the comings and goings of trucks, trains on a rail spur, ’dozers, loaders, and lifters. Steel dust and road dust and diesel dust floated on the breeze; my front teeth, after a few minutes, tasted of metal. Shouting at each other to be heard, Shinn and I threaded our way through a line of eighteen-wheelers queuing for the scales. All the surfaces here, paved or not, were muddy: a spray truck circulated several times a day, wetting everything down. My first impression of the yard was that it consisted of random heaps of stuff connected by dirt roads and conveyor belts. That impression changed little over the course of my tour. “We make big piles, then we move the big piles to make more piles,” Shinn said happily.

We approached a fifteen-foot-high mound of fuzzy reddish clumps. “We call those meatballs,” Shinn said. (Like a short-order kitchen, the scrap business devised colorful names for standard offerings: copper wire was “barley,” yellow brass was “honey,” and number 1 copper tubing “candy.”) The copper meatballs were armatures from electric motors, possibly from washing machines, and were entangled with spaghetti lengths of BX armored cable. Hard by the meatball stack was a pile composed of stainless steel—sink fixtures, gears, bolts—that looked dull and gray. It had all been handpicked from a conveyor belt.

“We want zero waste,” Shinn said. Indeed, his people searched desperately for every last bit of value in the endless stream of discards, much as the city’s rag- and bone pickers had a century earlier, and the highly organized dump scavengers in developing nations did today. Anything that didn’t have value to Shinn was a liability: it cost him money to dispose of things he couldn’t sell. Until recently, employees at the scrap yard were required to scrounge for coins that fell from cars headed into the shredder. The effort netted the company thirty thousand dollars a year, but management decided the amount didn’t justify the worker hours. (Now one of the biggest quality-of-life issues at the Jersey plant was the soda machine, which was messed up because employees fed it quarters that they picked up in the yard, coins that had barely made it through the six-thousand-horsepower shredder and its violently vibrating screens.)

I’d be hearing more about zero waste in the months to come, but not from the perspective of industrialists who abjure waste on economic grounds. (That is, unless they are industrialists who tolerate waste as a negligible expense or because they can pass those costs along to someone else.) Rather, I’d be hearing about Zero Waste, capitalized, from recycling activists who envision a future in which waste has been designed out of systems, in which nothing is buried or burned. Zero waste at a factory, mill, or scrap yard saves money; Zero Waste as a philosophy saves the earth.

Shinn and I moved on to a thirty-foot-high pile of HMS. “This is ISRI specification size 201 or 202,” Shinn reported, between three and five feet long. In the jumble I spotted car wheels, motor parts, gears, metal gates. There was a tramp amount of junk in here, too—paper, aluminum, wood—that would have to be picked out and, yes, recycled. Shinn regularly bought big stuff that he cut into 201 or 202, like the rusted-out grain hopper that sat off to the side. If I’d noted the hopper in a farm field, I’d have considered it a blight on the landscape, symbolic of death or failure. Here, though, big derelict equipment was just marking time until it could be sold, shipped, and reshaped into something shiny and new.

“What’s that smell?” I asked Shinn, sniffing.

“We’ve got a contract with a fragrance manufacturer. We’re shredding perfume drums.” A whole quadrant of the yard smelled like
Glamour
magazine. I took a step backward and blinked up at a yellow monster rising three stories over my head. Its caterpillar treads were seven feet high, and it had a sixty-foot arm and a grapple claw that looked capable of lifting a small house. “That’s a material handler,” Shinn shouted proudly over the din of trucks and an insistent clanging. “I converted it from a hydraulic excavator.” I’d gazed down upon similar goliaths at the paper plant and the incinerator, but this was my first time getting a scrap’s-eye view of such a machine. It made me feel soft-shelled and puny. The grapple could hoist six tons at a time, and it weighed 225,000 pounds. Next to it sat an excavator with a fifty-five-foot arm that ended in a magnetic fist, a disc six feet across.

We watched a front-end loader shove a pile of “white goods”—hot-water heaters and washing machines—into a tidy hill. A second grapple unloaded tire-free automobiles from the car carrier. Presquashed at other junkyards, they all had the low profile of convertibles. “The cars we get are about eight to ten years old,” Shinn said. “They provide about half of our feedstock.” Like a cat toying with a mouse, the grapple dangled its prey delicately, aligning each car with the conveyor belt that would move it steadily upward into the furiously beating heart of the operation, the steaming, clanking Prolerizer.

“What the hell is a Prolerizer?” the radio program
Car Talk
once asked. “You remember that wood chipper from
Fargo
? Take that, and make it about fifteen hundred times bigger. Add hammers and teeth. And start the process with a conveyor belt and a seventy-five-foot plunge. Beginning to get the picture? That’s a Prolerizer.”

Invented by Hymie, Sammy, Izzie, and Jackie Proler—brothers who ran a Houston-based scrap company and formed a joint venture with Hugo Neu in 1962—the Prolerizer has a six-thousand-horsepower synchronous motor and enormous blades that can convert whole cars to fist-sized chunks of scrap in thirty to sixty seconds. “There are six of these machines in the world, and Hugo Neu operates four of them,” Shinn said as we stood fifty or so feet from the shredder, which from my view was just a red metal shed at the top of the eight-foot-wide conveyor belt. The cars rose at a forty-five-degree angle and then disappeared behind a rubber curtain. Billowing steam obscured the entrance, lending the scene an ominous Mordor feeling. Behind the curtain, Shinn said, cars plummeted onto the shredder’s spinning rotor, which bristled with thirty-two bow tie-shaped blades that weigh three hundred pounds each. Shinn called the blades hammers. They were thirty inches long, and though made of a steel-manganese alloy, they lasted a mere twenty-four hours, such was the ferocity of their labors.

The Prolerizer had stood the company well, and Shinn spoke of the machine with some warmth. But soon he’d be saying good-bye. “We’re getting two MegaShredders in here,” he said. “Their hammers weigh twelve hundred pounds, and they can handle two and a half times the Prolerizer’s capacity on an hourly basis.” I felt a pang for the old shredder: the future was passing her by.

“What will you do with this one?” I asked.

“Sell it to a competitor far, far away.”

Less than a quarter mile to the north, across the bulkheaded walls of Claremont Channel, a row of pastel-colored condominiums, originally offered with individual yacht berths, lined the waterfront. They were expensive homes, with panoramic views of Manhattan, landscaped grounds, and ferry service to the financial district. On the Hugo Neu side of the channel, a fifty-five-foot-high sound barrier made of vertically hung conveyor belts blocked the condos’ view of the Prolerizer, but that’s all. Swells who lived on the south side of the complex had an unimpeded view of everything else—the mountains of scrap, the trucks, sheds, and machines. It was an unapologetically, fully functioning industrial landscape.

“Do you hear from them much?” I asked Shinn, cocking my head toward the condos.

“All the time,” he said. “But mostly when there’s an explosion.” Explosions were not uncommon. Sometimes auto processors incompletely drained gas tanks, and sometimes a discarded propane tank snuck through the inspection process. “It’s just a bang,” Shinn said. “It’s a nuisance, but it’s not a big deal.” Water sprayed continuously inside the shredder, to cool the blades, to control dust, and to extinguish any incipient conflagrations.

“So there are no flames or anything?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Shinn said, shrugging. “There are flames.”

We poked into the mill motor room, adjacent to the shredder. In the dim light, I made out the Prolerizer’s enormous flywheel. Upstairs, a computer monitor was built into a shabby wall, anachronistically modern in a greasy junkyard shack. The computer said the shredder’s rotor speed was 400 rpm. “Kinda low,” Shinn said, sounding annoyed. Actually, the speed was high, which meant the shredder’s productivity was low: nothing was in its maw. We went up a different flight of metal steps, behind the shredder. It felt dangerous to approach this barely contained beast that made mincemeat of metal, but Shinn didn’t blink. Imagining shards of steel zinging through the air and flames leaping from fumaroles, I slid my safety glasses back up to the bridge of my nose. Apparently no one worked close to the shredder, except for a grease-smeared employee picking meatballs from a conveyor belt thirty feet downstream. In his scrap-patched cubicle, he seemed oblivious to his proximity to apocalypse.