Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (21 page)

It was hard to talk this close to the Prolerizer. Every time a car hit the blades there was a loud
thunk,
which we felt through our boots. The motor roared constantly, overlaid with the pleasant
tink-tink
of falling glass and the clatter of much-abused metal. Shinn pointed into the billowing steam and shouted into my ear: a grate was positioned below the blades, he said, and under that was a vibrating pan. The grate was made of cast iron, eight inches thick. Over the course of a month, it withered away to just four. He showed me an old grate lying on the ground, but the rest of the Prolerizer’s guts I had to imagine—the rotating magnetized drum that pulled steel from the first cut, the shakers and screens that drew off debris. From here on, everything moved over conveyors, which rose and fell in ramps all around us. They separated and came together in Ys, trundling their loads to magnets and eddy currents that dropped material onto other belts, at right angles and oblique angles, that brought them somewhere else. Always, piles were forming.

Leaving the Prolerizer, we came to a monadnock of shredded ferrous scrap. “Wow,” I said, impressed.

“You think this is big?” Shinn said. “This isn’t big. It’s about thirty thousand tons.” Over the course of a month, the Jersey yard bought and processed about 125,000 tons of metal, or one and a half million tons a year. “It sounds like a lot, but it’s not a whole elephant,” Shinn said. “It’s spoonfuls of an elephant.”

The scrap pieces in the mound of the moment were roughly the size of a football, twisted and torn and thoroughly three-dimensional. Naively, I had imagined shredded metal as generally even as Kellogg’s cornflakes. Here I saw whole rotors, cans, a crankshaft, and a hubcap that had made it through the Prolerizer more or less intact. All the stuff in this pile was here for the same reasons: it was broken, it had failed, it had become obsolete, someone was tired of it, no one could find another use for it. The pile was the very definition of garbage. I especially liked the democracy of the heap: everything here, no matter where it came from or what purpose it had served, was going to end up in a crucible, melted and reformed into railroad tracks, reinforcing beams, wastepaper baskets, gardening sheds, and the roofs of Ford Focuses and Rolls-Royces that would one day be carted back to a scrap lot.

In the Jersey City purgatory between their old life and their new, cars presented all manner of headaches for Shinn. There were the explosions, of course, which could damage the Prolerizer. And there was mercury that leaked from headlamp switches onto the ground, along with brake and transmission fluid that escaped collection, and then seeped into the water. And then there was solid waste. Here and there on the lot towered thirty-foot-high piles of shredded automobile residue that had rained down from the Prolerizer onto a belt: glass and plastic and rubber and foam and plain old dirt. The pile was dirt colored and dirt textured: it looked uncannily similar to finished compost.

According to the EPA, the United States scraps ten million cars a year, leaving auto shredders with approximately five million tons of residue, or “fluff.” Shinn bent down to grab a handful of the stuff. “See these tiny wires? That’s copper. We’re trying to find a way to get this out. It’s worth fifteen cents a pound if it’s insulated, twice that if it’s uninsulated.” Again, like any businessperson, Shinn didn’t want to discard—or pay to discard—anything with potential value. (A year after my visit to Jersey City, I learned that Hugo Neu was trying to site a 130-acre, 350-foot-high auto fluff landfill in Navassa, North Carolina. When citizens of the community, which is mostly poor and black, learned that auto fluff contains mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, polyvinyl chloride, and PCBs, they organized to fight the fill, which had already been rejected by another economically depressed community, in South Carolina.)

Leaving the automobile residue behind, we walked toward the channel, where towering blue cranes waited to load fifty-thousand-ton ships that were bound, more often than not, for Asia. In 2002, Hugo Neu exported about 80 percent of its scrap. (The company was, in fact, the largest scrap exporter in the United States.) According to industry figures, exports of scrap iron and steel reached 11.9 million tons in 2003, almost double the tonnage of 2000. China was the largest importer, accounting for 3.5 million tons—about 30 percent—of the exports. Meanwhile, domestic use of scrap iron and steel has been holding steady at about seventy million tons a year.

In 2003, China became the first country ever to import more than $1 billion of American scrap, according to the newspaper
American Metal Market
. Chinese fabricators offered more money for scrap metal than could American companies; Chinese laborers wielding hand tools and working for cheap would disassemble the jumbled chunks, shape the metals into valves and faucets, then sell them back to the United States at prices American labor couldn’t beat. In response, steel industry trade groups were asking the government to temporarily limit scrap exports.

Shinn filled two or three ships a month, sometimes with scrap and sometimes with five-foot lengths of steel cut by guillotinelike shears. “The beams from the World Trade Center were too thick even for the shears,” Shinn said. “We had to cut those with a torch.”

To reach Jersey City this morning, I had driven south down the New Jersey Turnpike. Traffic was light, and I had time to contemplate the absence of the twin towers on the lower Manhattan skyline. Hugo Neu had won the contract with the city to recycle the towers’ steel. Working around the clock, workers had hauled beams straight from the Fresh Kills landfill and into Claremont Channel. The company also sent its barges directly to Ground Zero. Those chunks of copper and brass that I’d plucked from Shinn’s desk? They had once been part of the towers.

“We had to handle the steel very, very quickly,” said Wendy Neu, when we’d spoken in her office. “It was a gargantuan effort; we had never handled anything like that. We had to lease equipment and hire crews. Trucks were bringing ten thousand tons a day. We were operating twenty-four hours a day, and we had to keep selling it, to make room.” Ultimately, the company bought 225,000 tons of steel—about two-thirds of the total—probably for between seventy-five and a hundred dollars a ton. Cut and shipped to Asia, the steel would easily have fetched at least twice as much. Asked about the company’s profit, Shinn would only say, “We didn’t make a lot; our profit came from the volume.” (After the World Trade Center material was sold, the price of scrap steel started to rise, reaching more than three hundred dollars a ton by 2004, according to the Emergency Steel Scrap Coalition.)

Admittedly, the WTC wreckage had far more emotional resonance than your average load of steel, and yes, the Hugo Neu Corporation had efficiently met a need, removing debris quickly so the city could recover. But there was nothing heroic about the company’s efforts. Hugo Neu had, in the end, done what it always did. It profited by trading waste.

Driving home, I realized that I hadn’t seen any tuna cans in the Claremont yard. I called Shinn, and he assured me they were there. Some of them were surely mine. Every Wednesday morning at about 7:00 a.m., a packer truck from the Brooklyn South 6 garage grunted and hissed up my street. Usually it was James Sheehan and Dominick Basso on truck CN210. One of them drove while the other stepped off the back and quickly tipped my building’s plastic barrel, which was a quarter filled with metal cans, into the hopper. (When glass and plastic recycling returned, in two years, our fifty-gallon barrel would, each week, be full, and thirty pounds heavier.) Sheehan and Basso switched every few blocks. The work seemed especially monotonous, if not particularly strenuous. No brownstone’s metal-recycling bin weighed more than a few pounds.

“It’s a lot of work,” Sheehan said to me one day. “The route is an entire section now.”

“How long is that?” I asked. Sheehan gave me the san man’s salute, a two-shouldered shrug. (There was another salute, a more Seinfeldian movement in which the right hand was raised and then flipped downward in a “fuggedaboutit” gesture. You’d use it, for example, in a mongo situation. “You want this VCR?” Hand gesture: “Take it! I got one a-reddy!”) Without plastic and glass in the recycling bins, the guys on metal could go for eight hours and never pack out. The next shift took the same truck, and when it held four or five tons—after two or three days—it was relayed to the Hugo Neu scrap yard in Long Island City, in Queens.

There, just as in Jersey City, a grapple would drop my tuna can onto the conveyor belt, and the can would dive into the whirring Prolerizer, then fall onto a pan and then onto another conveyor belt, which would send it past the pickers, who would ignore it. The can would drop down to recombine with another stream, travel up a stacking conveyor, and plink down on a pile of shredded scrap. When the pile got big enough, it would be barged to Jersey City and loaded onto a ship, along with shredded cars and washing machines, bound for Asia.

I didn’t buy soda, and if I did I’d surely redeem my aluminum cans for nickels, much to the Neus’ dismay. Nationwide, beer and soda cans are the most-recycled consumer product. But their rate of return fell from a peak of 65 percent in 1992 to a twenty-three-year low of 44 percent in 2003, when 820,000 tons of aluminum cans were trashed. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that more than a trillion aluminum cans have been buried in landfills since 1972, when industry started keeping records. The amount is nearly equal in weight to the world’s entire annual output of primary aluminum ingot. If all those cans were dug up, according to the Institute’s Jenny Gitlitz, they’d have a value of $21 billion at today’s scrap prices. The entombed cans have raised the issue of landfill mining, which might become common practice as natural resources disappear. Until then, waste managers will bury cans, and aluminum manufacturers will fight bottle bills while busily digging new bauxite mines and refineries, and adding smelter capacity in Iceland, Mozambique, and Brazil.

The material that Hugo Neu bought from New York’s Department of Sanitation—about 6,200 tons a month of bulk and household metal—amounted to barely 5 percent of the company’s business, a mere 74,400 tons a year. It was nothing, really. And yet the ratio echoed history: by the beginning of the twentieth century, when the scrap metal business was already very well organized, dealers welcomed all manner of small household goods, but the bulk of their trade consisted of the same feedstock it did today: rails, train cars, machine parts, beams, pipes, and tanks.

My personal contribution to Hugo Neu was tiny, but my efforts, along with those of other city residents, brought $2.2 million a year to city coffers. The low numbers of cat food cans and cookie sheets didn’t discourage John Neu: he was convinced he could get more metal out of households. “We need better education,” he told me. “We’ll do it ourselves, and we’ll try to get some nonprofits involved as well.” He spoke highly of San Francisco’s much-vaunted recycling program. I reminded him that San Francisco, which Wendy Neu and I had heard so much about at the recycling roundtable, and which I would soon visit, charged citizens to throw away garbage, while recycling was absolutely free.

Before I left Claremont Terminal, I had asked Steve Shinn if he wanted the metal tops from my peanut butter jars. “Yes, but not if they have a plastic coating.” I assured him my brand did not. Tuna and pet-food cans have a plastic liner to protect food, he said, and the plastic could, in large volume, alter the chemistry of the melted steel. But, again, Hugo Neu wasn’t handling a lot of cans as a percentage of the whole, so it was okay.

“Do I need to take paper labels off cans?”

“No. It’s pretty hot inside the Prolerizer. It takes the paint off, too.”

“How about my beer tops, do you want them?”

Shinn considered for a moment, then said, “It would go through the shredder. It would follow the process and probably end up in the suck-and-blow system, in the cyclone. A beer cap is light. It would be pulled into the vacuum system, to the stream of raw, nonferrous debris. From there it would be separated from the nonferrous material, picked up by a different magnet, and returned to the steel scrap pile.”

“That sounds fairly circuitous,” I said.

“Yep,” Shinn said, not sounding daunted in the least. He was, after all, a man who sought value in tiny copper wires, in pennies that fell from heaven.

Chapter Eight

Mercury Rising

F
or some months now, I had been diverting dozens of pounds of bottles, cans, paper, and kitchen scraps from the landfill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, though the folks at IESI probably had not noticed. Now I turned my attention to household hazardous waste, a category that, were IESI following the letter of the law, they’d surely appreciate my efforts to divert from their tipping floors, trucks, and landfills. “Hazardous waste” conjured leaking casks of picric acid and loose bundles of TNT, neither of which I had on hand, but once I started looking around my house, I came upon all kinds of noxious materials. There was rubber cement and superglue in my junk drawer (they contain a handful of chemicals listed by the EPA as hazardous), an ionizing smoke detector on my hallway ceiling (it was made with a small amount of americium-241, which has a radioactive half-life of 458 years), a broken thermometer in the bathroom cabinet (mercury is a potent neurotoxin), paint thinner in the basement (turpentine and mineral spirits are both flammable and toxic), a bottle of windshield wiper solution in my closet (it contains methanol, which damages the nervous system, liver, and kidneys), and rechargeable batteries all over the place (they contain heavy metals, like cadmium and nickel, plus flame retardants that outgas poisons). None of this stuff was supposed to go into the regular garbage, but I had a sense that very few people knew or cared about this detail. San men aren’t bloodhounds (except when it came to fine jewelry or bodies wrapped in rugs), and most of those items are small and easy to hide.

In the fictional world of a trash-conscious New York, residents would, with a spring in their step, collect this hazardous waste and deliver it to designated drop-off sites within their boroughs. When I telephoned the sanitation garage near my drop-off site (which didn’t have its own phone number, and only the vaguest of addresses) and asked what they did with old paint, a san man suggested I just stick something absorbent in my cans and send them out with the regular trash. I had a sneaking suspicion he was offering me, over the phone, the official san man’s salute.