Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (22 page)

“And what about the other hazardous stuff?” I asked. “What do you do with that?”

“We recycle it.”

“How?”

“You’d better call public information,” he said. “Whatever information is public you can find out.” Oh, how I wished. Either the city didn’t know what happened to the solvents and thermometers and lead batteries (banned by landfills in twenty-nine states, including mine) dropped off in the boroughs or it didn’t want to say. For weeks my messages went unanswered, and I started to wonder if my efforts to keep waste from the municipal stream were worth it. Was I diverting stuff from place A only to have it return, after a circuitous journey, to place A?

I started calling stores that sold rechargeable batteries, the little black packs that make our cordless shavers, drills, camcorders, cell phones, and remote-control toys go. Retailers that partnered with the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (stores like RadioShack, Staples, Wal-Mart, and Target) were supposed to collect this stuff and ship it to a metals reclamation company. But I suspected, because no one gave me a straight answer, that harried clerks often slipped these small nuisances into the trash. Still, despite my suspicions, a fair percentage of batteries did make it back into the system. Over the past decade, the RBCR claims to have kept more than twenty million pounds of nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride, lithium ion, and small sealed lead batteries from landfills and incinerators. Where did they go instead? To a factory thirty-five miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

Inmetco was a quiet and unassuming place, at least according to its manager of environment, health, and safety, John Onuska. “We don’t have any dead geese hanging on the fence or toxic lakes,” he offered. Inside the plant, battery packs were smashed apart, to remove the plastic from the battery cells, which were then dried out and heated in a crucible. Cadmium was vaporized, condensed to a liquid, and chilled to form flattened pellets, called shot. Inmetco sold the shot to battery manufacturers and to fine-glass makers, who used it to make bright red and yellow pigments. The nickel and steel that remained in the crucible were cooked up with steel dust and other mill scraps in a smelter to produce a “remelt alloy,” which was sold to manufacturers of stainless steel.

Recycling precious metals, like much of the recycling industry, is a dirty business, the absence of dead geese notwithstanding. But it spares the earth the far larger insult of mining virgin metals, with all its attendant energy use and pollution. Extracting one ton of copper, for example, requires miners to move an additional nineteen tons of rock. According to a Commission on the European Communities report on battery recycling (the EU, having embraced the precautionary principle, is way ahead of the United States in formulating policies to avoid and recycle high-tech waste), working with recycled cadmium and nickel requires, respectively, 46 percent and 75 percent less primary energy compared with the extraction and refining of virgin metal. Using zinc recovered from alkaline batteries consumes 22.5 percent less energy than extracting it from primary resources.

Would I be breaking the law if a rechargeable battery slipped into my kitchen trash can? The EPA’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act regulates the hazardous constituents of batteries, but the law offers some latitude. Commercial enterprises that handle these metals are required to dispose of them in landfills designed for hazardous waste, but small businesses and households are exempt. The EPA cares less about alkaline batteries, since manufacturers agreed, in the late nineties, to phase out their use of mercury. (Still, the double-A’s in your Walkman and the C’s in your flashlight represent 80 percent of all batteries manufactured today, and they each contain trace amounts of mercury. Worldwide, manufacturers produce more than ten billion of these cells a year, creating hundreds of millions of pounds of solid waste.) “Are we supposed to take those batteries? No,” Jim White, at the American Ref-Fuel plant in Newark, New Jersey, told me. “Might one possibly make its way past our inspectors? Yes.”

In sixth grade, I attended a four-room schoolhouse with a wide-open basement. Mischievous children used to sneak downstairs at recess and comb through school supplies. Supervision was lax, and so after discovering a box of thermometers one rainy afternoon, we had nearly an hour in which to roll tiny balls of liberated quicksilver from hand to hand, bowl them across the floor, and lob them at one another’s shirts. Eventually we got busted, but no one seemed concerned that the element with which we’d been playing so merrily was poisonous. Even the ancient Romans knew that mercury was bad news: they got convicted criminals to extract it from cinnabar ore, then they mixed it with gold to gild objects. These miners lasted an average of three years before they lost their hair, their teeth, and eventually their sanity.

Wildfires and volcanoes produce about a third of the mercury in today’s atmosphere. Coal-fired power plants and incinerators that burn mercury-containing wastes (like household batteries and thermostats and computer circuit boards) generate the rest. (According to a study by Barr Engineering for the EPA, coal-burning electric utilities emitted an estimated forty-eight metric tons of mercury into the atmosphere in 2000.) Again, the problem with mercury is that once it becomes airborne, it mixes with rain and snow, then settles on lakes and waterways, where bacteria convert it to methylmercury, which works its way up the food chain. Over time, exposure to elemental mercury causes permanent, and sometimes fatal, kidney and neurological damage (plus, of course, hair and teeth loss).

Still, mercury abounds in consumer products—in fluorescent lamps, gauges, car light switches, and dental amalgams. In the United States alone, citizens innocently discard some seven million thermostats a year, each containing three to four grams of mercury. Thermometers contain a half-gram of mercury. That doesn’t sound like much, but the element is extremely potent. One Sweet Tart-sized mercury battery is enough to put a six-ton load of garbage over the fed’s allowable limit for solid waste. In landfills, mercury leaches into groundwater, where bacteria transform it to the evil methylmercury. According to a study widely quoted by the EPA, it takes the settling of just one gram of vaporized mercury upon a lake of twenty acres to unleash a yearlong fish consumption advisory on that body of water. As regular as fishing season’s opening day, state agencies issue mercury warnings for thousands of lakes across the nation.

The industrial world bristles with entrepreneurs jostling to get their hands on mercury from household products and industry. Chlorine producers who have given up mercury in favor of new technologies, for example, have vast quantities on hand. But the hopeful quicksilver merchants aren’t neutralizing neurotoxins: they are spinning a liability into a commodity bound for developing nations that haven’t banned its use. China, for example, relies on mercury for gold mining. India also imports large quantities for use in medical instruments and other manufacturing processes. Some environmentalists claim that this overseas trade keeps mercury prices artificially low, which increases its use in places that lack environmental regulations. One solution is to halt the sale of mercury and stockpile the old stuff in repositories. The United States currently stores 4,890 tons of mercury (in steel flasks inside thirty-gallon steel drums) at four Department of Energy warehouses in New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee. The Pentagon is agitating to consolidate it all in one location. Until then, shifting our mercury overseas keeps developing nations from mining virgin mercury. But while the commodity flows in one direction—from nations that enforce environmental protections to nations that do not—its hazards are multidirectional. The element vaporizes with ease, and so its poison drifts with the breeze. The local hazards of mercury are global.

One Saturday morning, I cleaned out thirty cans of paint and painting paraphernalia from my basement and set out to find, with my neighbor Tony and his fifteen pounds of spent batteries, Brooklyn’s hazardous-waste drop-off site. It was supposed to be near Brooklyn’s Sanitation Garage 11, in the Gravesend neighborhood, but when we finally found that garage, the san men enjoying an outdoor smoke told us the drop-off site hadn’t been open for a year.

“What are we supposed to do with all this poisonous stuff?” Tony asked.

“Throw it in the trash,” a burly guy suggested. While Tony fumed, I asked another worker where the drop-off site had been—I just wanted to see it—and he pointed toward a small trailer parked in an adjacent lot. “Good luck saving the earth!” trilled the first san man as we drove away.

After winding around parked snowplows and mounds of winter salt, we came to a chain-link fence. On one side was a crowd of angry Brooklynites; on the other, the trailer and a wispy-looking san man who claimed he couldn’t open the gate. “I could squeeze through with my paint cans,” I proposed.

“We’re closed,” he answered, then radioed his boss for help.

“The sign says you’re open,” said a young man in a Yankees cap. He had a liter of hydrofluoric acid in his trunk and he didn’t feel like carting it back home.

The name of the acid should have rung alarm bells with the san man, but he kept a poker face. In 1996, a drum of this acid, which is used to etch glass and clean aluminum, exploded from under the packing blade of a garbage truck and showered san man Michael Hanly, a twenty-two-year veteran of the force. He died, from inhaling the fumes, that day in the hospital.

When the supervisor appeared at the chain-link fence, the rain of abuse from a growing crowd of residents who’d been told this site was open was redirected toward him. “I’ll take the latex paint and the batteries,” the super said to me. He wouldn’t take the Yankee fan’s acid or a jug of windshield wiper fluid. “Call the DEP about them liquids,” he said, easily sliding the “broken” gate open. (A Department of Environmental Protection employee later directed the Yankee fan, apologetically, to a private disposal company in Queens, which offered to pick up the acid for about three hundred dollars, or charge him fifty dollars if he’d drive it over himself. He chose the latter.)

Wade Salvage, based in Camden County, New Jersey, would eventually collect the latex paint I left at the drop-off site, along with a number of other household hazards. When I asked Andrew Wade, the company’s president, what he did with these materials, he revealed as little as possible. “I’ve got twelve locations,” he said. “I’ve got recycling and reprocessing customers.” Could he be more specific? Only after Wade realized I wasn’t “one of the weirdos” that continually hounded him did he disclose that batteries ended up at Inmetco (the recycling plant without dead geese, near Pittsburgh); that liquid mercury went to retorters who processed the element and sold it for reuse in various switches; and that fluorescent light bulbs went to a recycler who crushed the tubes and sent the glass to cement factories, the aluminum ends to metal scrappers, and the phosphorus powder to a retorter who extracted the mercury for resale and sold the phosphorous for filler. Paints, transmission fluid, and solvents were blended into an “alternative” fuel for paper and cement factories (it burns far hotter than coal or oil). Oil filters were banged into scrap metal. So-called poisonous waste, like insecticides, was tipped at incinerators permitted to accept household hazards.

Like any businessperson, Wade saved up his little piles of waste until he had piles big enough to sell on the open market or pay to have shipped and tipped. New Jersey didn’t make it easy to store this stuff—the state’s Department of Environmental Protection was partly funded with fines and fees—so my paint cans and batteries traversed the Garden State to land at Wade’s “consolidation site” in Philadelphia. From the City of Brotherly Love, Wade told me with an air of great mystery, “it goes out to my various customers.”

When Tony and I got back to Park Slope, I stacked eighteen cans of enamel paint, turpentine, and sealant in the bottom of my trash can. The san men, on pickup day, took everything piled on top but left the painting supplies. The clerk at the Brooklyn 6 garage, when I phoned to complain, advised me to open the cans, let the paint dry out, then put them on the curb for the next pickup. I set up my paint farm, but after a week nothing had solidified. Beginning to get annoyed, I started randomly asking san men for advice. Finally, I had a consensus. After checking to make sure that no one was looking, I banged the cans shut, hid them inside a tightly tied black plastic sack, and closed the lid on my pail.

Every day of the week except Sunday, New York’s san men heave computers, cathode ray monitors, printers, cell phones, fax machines, and other electronic paraphernalia into the back of their packer trucks. The bigger components lie on the sidewalks before pickup, sometimes for days, and are incorporated into the street life of the neighborhood. Construction workers take cigarette breaks perched atop seventeen-inch monitors; a CPU becomes a plinth for an azalea. This stuff, when the garbage truck comes around, isn’t mongo: it is junk, likely less than two years old (according to the alarums of environmental advocates) and already obsolete.

Across the nation, electronic waste is accumulating faster than anyone knows what to do with it—almost three times faster, in fact, than our overall municipal waste stream. According to the National Safety Council, nearly 250 million computers will become obsolete between 2004 and 2009. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have predicted that at least 150 million PCs will be buried in landfills by 2005, and by the following year, predicts the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), some 163,420 computers and televisions will become obsolete every
day
. Where will all these gizmos go, and what impact will they have when they get there?

Before I started to poke around my garbage, I had no clue that the computer sitting so innocently upon my desk, a virtual extension of my body, essential to my work and increasingly useful for buying more stuff, was such a riot of precious but pernicious materials. The average desktop monitor contains nearly four pounds of lead. (Electronic waste is the largest single source—about 40 percent—of lead in municipal dumps.) Printed circuit boards are dotted with antimony, silver, chromium, zinc, lead, tin, and copper. Cell phones have their own periodic arsenal: arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, and zinc. Exposure to these metals has been shown to cause abnormal brain development in children and nerve damage, endocrine disruption, and organ damage in adults.