Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (24 page)

In Europe, EPR is booming. In 2003, the European Union adopted a directive that requires producers of electronics to take responsibility—financial and otherwise—for the recovery and recycling of e-waste. In Switzerland, which has far surpassed the goals of the EU directive, the cost of recycling is built in to the purchase price of new equipment. Consumers return e-waste to retailers, who pass it on to licensed recyclers. In the United States, almost half the states have active or pending e-waste take-back legislation: the proposals, naturally, cause electronics manufacturing trade groups to howl. Still, Maine—which has no tech industry to speak of—recently passed a law that requires manufacturers of computer monitors, video display devices, and televisions to establish and finance a system for their environmentally responsible reuse and recycling. (Previously, the state had let residents stuff computers into their household trash if they could prove, through laboratory testing, that they were nonhazardous. Those who opted out of the expensive testing—and it’s hard to imagine that anyone opted in—brought their e-waste to transfer stations, which paid recyclers to haul away and dismantle them.) Now Maine’s computers will be delivered to consolidation points and sorted into mountains destined for their makers: Toshibas over here, HPs over there. What those companies will do with them is, at this point, unclear. As Angel Feliciano said to me about the computer recycling world, there is weirdness.

What about other high-tech waste? Every month, according to the Worldwatch Institute, more than forty-five tons of CDs become outdated, useless, or unwanted. Responding to the glut, dozens of companies have sprung up to wipe clean compact discs, laser discs, and digital videodiscs. If the plastic discs can’t be reused, they are shredded and blended into automobile parts, office equipment, and other products. (Meanwhile, the Disney Company is working in the opposite direction, selling DVDs that erase themselves after two days’ exposure to air. Instead of renting a rewatchable disc, consumers buy something they use on Saturday night and slip into the trash on Monday.) Entrepreneurs degauss VHS tapes (and sell them for surveillance work) and collect and remanufacture ink and laser toner cartridges. (Other companies promote a green agenda but set the bar fairly low: Epson America collects ink cartridges from schools and other nonprofits, but instead of refilling them, a collection agency “converts [them] to energy through an environmentally sound incineration process at a licensed waste-to-energy recycling facility.”)

Another set of entrepreneurs is scrambling to collect the tens of millions of cell phones that are stuffed into drawers when their owners switch services, or jilted when thinner models come along. Phones are refurbished, sold overseas, or programmed to dial 911 and donated to the elderly and to women’s shelters. It is economies of scale that make these recycling efforts go, but the junked electronics in household waste streams are often too few and far between to make municipal collections worthwhile. For example, it takes between 40,000 and 44,000 pounds of compact discs, about 1.2 million CDs, to make one standard container of shredded, sellable plastic. So while it
feels
as though I have enough promotional AOL discs—they arrive every few weeks in the mail—to make it worth New York City’s while to come and collect them, I don’t. And neither does anyone else.

When I heard that a Sony Electronics vice president had, at an industry trade show called Waste Expo, proposed dumping electronic waste into open-pit hard-rock mines, I thought he’d been at the minibar too long or was only being poetic: from minerals came these monstrous hybrids and to minerals they would return. But the Sony exec was serious. One mine, he said, would hold seventy-two billion PCs, enough to make the crushing of waste and the extraction of copper, gold, iron, glass, and plastics profitable. Electronic equipment is often richer in rare metals than virgin materials, containing ten to fifty times more copper, as a percentage of weight, than copper ore. A cell phone contains five to ten times more gold than gold ore itself.

While waste traders salivated at this idea, the antimining crowd quivered. Wouldn’t deep pits of computers add insult to a system that is already, environmentally speaking, injured? Was this an invitation to dump stuff in a hole and forget about it? Would high-tech miners, wearing biohazard suits instead of Levi’s, extract the valuable stuff using cyanide and arsenic, then walk away from what remained? The notion got a little bit of play in the waste world, then cranky recyclers grabbed the microphone. Industry was condemned, and the idea of dumping unholy alliances of metals and plastics into the ground, to be mined another day, slowly sank.

Chapter Nine

Satan’s Resin

I
n the sixties, you could always insult a guy by calling him “plastic.” It meant he was phony or superficial. The opposite of plastic was “real.” In Mike Nichols’s 1967 film
The Graduate
, the hopelessly straight Mr. McGuire, a friend of the Braddock family, offers career advice to the recently graduated Benjamin Braddock. “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? . . . Plastics.” The word became a kind of shorthand for a suburban life of conspicuous consumption and upward striving. It stood for a rejection of old ways and an embrace of modernity, which included the throwaway culture made possible by the expanded use of plastic. Where the
bricoleur
of a century past (that is, an odd-job man who worked with his hands, using the
bricoles,
or odds and ends, that lay at hand), or even Benjamin Braddock’s grandparents, had understood metalworking and woodworking, plastic—this wondrous new material—was a mystery. As Susan Strasser writes in
Waste and Want,
“Nobody made plastic at home, hardly anybody understood how it was made, and it usually could not be repaired.” Which explained, in part, why there was a pink plastic flashlight pen with a retractable monster tongue sitting in my kitchen waste can.

Across the nation, recovery rates for almost all recyclable materials have declined over the last couple years. But the recovery rate for PET plastic (polyethylene terephthalate, that is, marked by a number 1 surrounded by chasing arrows), the most widely collected type, has fallen especially hard, from a high of 39.7 percent in 1995 to a low of 19.9 percent in 2002, when 3.2 billion pounds of PET bottles were buried or burned. Number one water bottles have an even worse recycling rate than number one soda bottles. In 2002, only 11 percent of plastic water bottles were recycled in the US. And as the market segment grows—and it is growing, faster than any other segment in the US beverage market—the problem is bound to get worse. In 2003, Americans consumed 13 billion liters of bottled water, much of it in half-liter servings, and global bottled-water sales reached 155 billion liters.

Recycling experts link the drop to the rising number of beverages consumed away from home—in offices, parks, cars, and other places that lack a handy recycling bin. The lower recycling rate is a loss for the environment, but it also represents a lost opportunity for PET processors and end users that can’t expand their operations or have gone out of business. Had all those bottles been recycled, the Container Recycling Institute reported, “an estimated 6.2 million barrels of crude oil equivalent could have been saved, and over a million tons of greenhouse gas emissions could have been avoided.” After e-waste, plastics are the fastest-growing portion of the municipal waste stream: according to the GrassRoots Recycling Network, Americans trash more than forty million plastic Pepsi bottles a day.

Early one morning, I drove out to Farmingdale, Long Island, to see how my yogurt cups, which I had delivered to my local food co-op, were transformed into seawalls and lumber. American Ecoboard sat at the dead end of a bland industrial park, the sort of place where, in heist movies, ne’er-do-wells plan robberies in empty warehouses. I walked through a sad-looking collection of plastic-wood picnic tables and knocked on a metal door. No one answered, so I walked into a vestibule the size of a large port-o-san, calling out a hello. I got no answer, so I let myself in to the inner office.

Calling out “Hello? Hello?” I eventually raised a harried-looking man named Ron Kwiatkowski from a back office. The president and CEO of American Ecoboard, Kwiatkowski was stocky, with a rounded face. He wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and he had a mustache and the sort of beard that’s mostly shaved, with just a thin line of dark hair around the perimeter of his jaw. We talked for a while about the plastic recycling business—he’d spent ten years working for Coke—and then we walked down a narrow hallway toward the manufacturing floor.

For no good reason I had expected a plastic recycling plant to be filled with bubbling cauldrons of toxic goo. I had imagined white-coated chemists with thermometers in their pockets, test kits at the ready, and beakers lined up on shelves. Instead, Ecoboard’s manufacturing floor was dimly lit and populated with large, low-tech machines. It smelled like melting, but not burning, plastic, and the workers, many of whom spoke Spanish, were dressed in jeans and black hoodies. Dust caught in my throat as I watched forklifts scoot gaylords of ground-up plastic across the plant floor. The confetti-sized bits went into a hopper, where they were blended with pigments, anti-inflammatory agents, UV protectors, and fiberglass, for added stability. “It’s like making a cake,” Kwiatkowski said. “We have a basic model, then we make cakes with different characteristics—reinforced for structural materials, different colors for decking.”

After it was mixed for several hours, the batter ran through a series of pipes into extruders, or twenty-five-foot-long tubes, electrically heated to 400 degrees. After the molds were water cooled, an extruder screw pushed the finished product out the end. Beams were cut, just like lumber, and stacked.

“It’s very simple,” Kwiatkowski said, shrugging. He and his partner had built all this stuff themselves. At first they thought it would take two men to run each of the four lines, but with some tweaking they realized only one worker per line would suffice.

Ecoboard got some of its plastic from groups like food co-ops or local Boy Scouts, but most of it they bought from brokers or MRFs. The company didn’t have to buy the odds and ends that showed up on its doorstep, but it paid between fifteen and twenty cents a pound—or four hundred dollars a ton—for the loads they picked up by truck. “This is a pennies business,” Kwiatkowski said. “And you can make or lose millions with pennies.” The previous year, the pennies had added up to a $3 million profit.

I asked how much plastic Ecoboard used in a year. “In 2003, we’ll exceed eight million pounds,” Kwiatkowski said. I had pulled a couple yogurt cups, which weighed three-eighths of an ounce each, from my recycling bin for Kwiatkowski, just to leave my mark on this place, but now I felt a little silly adding them to the pile of containers waiting to be ground up.

Before the city cut back on recycling, my plastic (minus the yogurt and cottage cheese cups, which, for complicated reasons having to do with polymer chemistry, were problematic for many recyclers) was picked up once a week by san men from the Brooklyn South 6 and dropped off at a MRF run by Allied Waste in Greenpoint, at the northern reaches of the borough. With only minimal hassle, I got the site manager on the phone. Daren Dutchin immediately set himself apart from all my other sources by inviting me out to tour his facility at my earliest convenience.

I didn’t wait more than a day before picking my way through the unfamiliar industrial neighborhood. There were a lot of trucks on the roads here, a lot of honking traffic and diesel exhaust. Scott Avenue was lined with corrugated-metal fences and men in jumpsuits hosing sidewalks. At the avenue’s dead end, where the MRF was located, someone had planted a row of linden trees and painted their trunks bright yellow, for safety. One tree lay at a right angle to the sidewalk, severed at truck bumper’s height.

Inside Allied’s office, the Formica desks were bare and boxes cluttered the floor. Before the recycling suspension, Dutchin had 190 employees handling 550 tons of mixed metal, glass, and plastic a day. Now he had just ten employees, who worked at transferring commercial solid waste from packer trucks to eighteen-wheelers. Once you were established as a waste hauler, it seemed, it was a simple matter to switch your target material. While waiting for Dutchin, a Guyanan with a lilting accent, to get off the phone, I counted no fewer than five wall clocks. Each ticked, but none told the correct time, in any time zone. I read the posters. “Allied Waste Wants You to Improve Our Margin, Protect Our Assets.” My favorite safety message said, “Keep in mind: a truck on fire causes low productivity.”

Finished with his call, Dutchin led me into the warehouses adjacent to his office. They were dim, oily-floored places with indistinct ceilings. The high windows were broken, and the air was damp. Scores of small blue Dumpsters were clustered together, like a herd of empty ice cube trays. Milk jug caps and flattened juice cartons littered the ground. I shivered and pulled my jacket tighter.

“It was warmer in here when the MRF was running, wasn’t it?” I asked Dutchin.

“Not really,” he said.

As we strolled through the deserted plant, Dutchin explained the former operation. The packer trucks backed in and tipped their loads of plastic, metal, and glass onto the floor. A grapple pulled out any bulky material and fed the rest onto a conveyor belt that trundled it up, at a forty-five-degree angle, to a trommel. The trommel was a thirty-foot-long rotating horizontal barrel divided into six sections with different-sized holes. Broken glass came out first, dropping onto a conveyor that delivered it to a bunker, or holding bin, then to a hammer mill, where it was pounded into a material that gave recycling proponents agita.

“The glass was nonprofit for us,” said Dutchin. “We crushed it and used it at our landfills as alternative daily cover.” The cover, which was mandatory, kept down dust and odors and discouraged rats and birds. But because crushed glass was ultimately buried, it allowed the antirecycling crowd to claim that recycling is a waste of time, that all those containers “just end up in the landfill.”