Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (27 page)

Exactly,
I could hear the plastics industry murmuring as I made the case for Satan’s resin.

Part Three

Flushing It Away

Chapter Ten

Downstream

M
y garbage had a peculiar smell, a smell it hadn’t had in two years. It wasn’t the slimy vegetable bags or the moldy sour cream, which I should have flushed down the toilet, but a tightly wrapped 9.5-ounce plastic triangle of human waste, courtesy of a visiting three-year-old. I’d been feeling fairly good about my garbage recently, but all of a sudden it had plunged back into the offensive zone. It occurred to me that I never would have started quantifying my garbage if my daughter were still in diapers. Her embrace of underpants was not only a benchmark along the path of child development, it was also a banner day for my garbage. I wasn’t sure which aspect of the event thrilled me more.

Disposable diapers occupy a special place in the cultural history of landfills. As the burning Cuyahoga River woke the nation to the deplorable state of our urban waterways, the perception that disposable diapers were clogging our dumps acted as a clarion call in the late eighties. Whether disposable diapers actually
were
busting out of landfills didn’t matter: they made a convenient symbol. Because they saved parents time and gave them freedom, they underscored our laziness and selfishness. Because they were filled with shit, they added currency to our general disgust with garbage. The alarm sparked a wave of cradle-to-grave studies evaluating the environmental impact of disposables versus reuseables. The conclusions fell, predictably, along the lines of who funded the research.

The diaper issue continues to absorb a good bit of researchers’ energy, but EPA data reveal what may be a tempest in a teapot. Disposable diapers (for both infants and adults) constituted 1.9 percent, by weight, of total US landfill discards in 1995. In 1996 and 1997, the percentage held steady at 2.0 percent, then rose in 1998, the last year for which data are available, to 2.1, when 3.4 million tons of disposables were buried. Were Pampers, which according to the pro-cloth lobby could take up to five hundred years to decompose, poisoning an otherwise pristine environment? Hardly. The Garbage Project noted that landfills already receive about 20 percent of the sludge from America’s sewage treatment plants. This last factoid gave me pause: maybe it didn’t matter whether I put my used tissue in the trash or in the toilet: it all ended up in the same place. Or did it?

Since I was traveling with different kinds of things that I disposed of, it was only fair, I reasoned, to follow that tissue down the bathroom pipes. This particular journey began when Phil Heckler, who’d recently retired from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, double-parked his blue minivan outside my house early one Sunday morning and pushed open his passenger door.

The first thing Heckler did, after we shook hands, was open a thick roll of inflow and infiltration maps. He pointed to the spot where my private effluent moved into the public domain—more or less right under the van. The maps showed the street grids and block numbers, the dimension of pipes, the location of tide gates and diversion and regulator chambers, the depths of pipes, and the elevation, below mean high water, of sewage interceptors. “Let’s see where your line starts,” he said, shifting the van into drive.

Heckler pulled over where Seventh Street ended, at Prospect Park West. The Brooklyn underworld was guarded at this spot, Cerberus style, by a triumvirate of utility manholes: one belonged to the DEP, representing sewers and water; one belonged to ConEd, in charge of electricity; and one belonged to Keyspan, the local god of natural gas. Under the DEP manhole lay a sewage pipe cast sometime in the late 1800s of vitrified clay. At the start of the line, the pipe was just twelve inches in diameter, an insignificant twig compared to the mighty branch it would eventually become. Within half a block of my house, the pipe would grow by three inches; before it ran into the treatment plant, three miles away, the pipe would be nine feet in diameter.

“Sewer pipes are designed to flow at a rate of two to three feet per second,” Heckler noted in his quiet, patient way. He tended to explain mechanisms with drawings, and I liked that. He had a scientist’s precision but was careful not to overexplain. “You need a bigger sewer when the terrain is flat. You don’t want the material to settle out.” “Material” was anything that went out of the house in a pipe, flowed into the system from a storm drain, or trickled in through cracks. Heckler began writing, in engineer-neat script,
V
for velocity,
Q
for flow settling, and
S
for steepness—variables that determined appropriate pipe diameter.

A civil engineer, Heckler had spent twenty-seven years working for the DEP, an enormous agency with tentacles that reached beyond the city limits to upstate watersheds and downstate beaches. The DEP’s Bureau of Wastewater Treatment had 2,000 employees who operated 14 sewage treatment plants, 89 pumping stations, 8 dewatering facilities, 490 sewer regulators, and 6,000 miles of intercepting sewer pipes. They also tested water quality at 80-odd monitoring stations along 425 miles of shoreline and inspected and cleaned more than 137,000 catch basins (it took three years to make the rounds of them all).

Before we met in person, Heckler and I had talked on the phone about my catchment. We assumed that my sewage flowed west and was then pumped north to the Red Hook treatment plant, which wasn’t actually in Red Hook, but in Williamsburg, a little farther north. Before that plant went on line in the 1980s, Park Slope’s sewage had run directly into the Gowanus Canal. In fact, our maps still indicated that there were plenty of pipes discharging into the canal. “It was very common to end the line at the water instead of sending it into the system,” Heckler said.

I’d been visiting the Gowanus off and on for some time now, on my own and with community groups. At low water, we dragged canoes over rotted wooden bulkheads impregnated with raw sewage. At high water, it was easy to imagine that oysters could once again flourish here, even if you’d never in a million years want to eat them. I felt geographically connected to the Gowanus because I lived on a hill and the canal was the low point on my western flank. My raw sewage, if I’d lived here twenty years ago, would have settled into the muck at the canal’s bottom. I was explaining all this to Heckler when he interrupted my reverie of downstream interconnectedness.

“Your effluent doesn’t flow into the Red Hook plant,” he said. Instead, it took a sudden turn on Third Avenue and ran south to Owls Head, a facility at the southern tip of Brooklyn. And so to Owls Head we went, following the unidirectional arrows on the inflow and infiltration map to Sixth Avenue, where the pipe hopped up to eighteen inches, then on to Fifth and then Fourth Avenue, where the pipe leaped to seventy-eight inches as the sewage of my many neighbors commingled with mine.

At Third Avenue we turned south, driving in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The neighborhood was more commercial here, filled with businesses dumping bad stuff into their pipes and sewers. From gas stations came brake and transmission fluids, from restaurants came grease. These establishments were required to install grease traps that they regularly emptied, but violators were plentiful and came from every social stratum. Domino’s Pizza made the DEP’s list of Significant Noncompliance; so did the swanky Tavern on the Green. A little more than a century ago, grease and fat were hot commodities that factories turned into candles, soap, and lubricants. During World War II, Americans were exhorted to save kitchen grease for explosives. I called American Waste Products, a local service provider, to see what became of the french fry oil they collected from Brooklyn restaurants. Like so many others in waste management, the company exercised its right to remain silent. I had no luck with two other grease recyclers, then reached an employee at Filta-Clean who admitted they offloaded their stuff at A&L Cesspool Service, in Queens. “I think they turn it into soap and cologne,” he said in a tone that reeked of Male Answer Syndrome. When I asked A&L to confirm this, they hung up on me.

Heckler thought recycled grease had something to do with lipstick. I had hoped for something more
en vogue
: biodiesel. Alternative-energy experts estimate that forty million gallons of this nonpolluting fuel, which can be made from virgin soybean, corn, canola, coconut, or peanut oil, or by filtering and processing used vegetable oils, courses through the combustion systems of retrofitted vehicles nationwide. (And, of course, through the garbage and recycling trucks of Berkeley, California.) Biodiesel is substantially cleaner than regular diesel. According to a 1998 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, it reduces emissions of carbon monoxide by 43 percent, hydrocarbons by 56 percent, particulates by 55 percent, and sulfurs by 100 percent.

My brother, who lives in Maine, introduced me to a friend who drives a 2001 Golf that smells, just faintly, of french fries. “I collect grease at four local restaurants,” Don Hudson, its owner, told me. “We make fuel in the warm part of the year, when the restaurants are busy with tourists, then we use it year ’round in the Golf, in an old Volvo, and in two fifteen-passenger vans.” The vans and the Volvo, which sport bumper stickers of a large soybean dripping oil, belong to Hudson’s Chewonki Foundation, which focuses on environmental sustainability and prefers its biodiesel “neat”—that is, unsullied by any fraction of fossil diesel. Producing the stuff is simple: in a barn, Chewonkians heat the grease on a glycerin-burning stove, then mix it with sodium hydroxide, a.k.a. lye, and ethanol, which they make from local corn. “Converting to biodiesel was the quickest way to lower the foundation’s total carbon emissions,” Hudson said. “We’d already done all the insulating of buildings we could do. Tackling transportation was obvious.” By Hudson’s reckoning, he’d kept fifteen thousand gallons of fry oil out of landfills so far. As his operation expanded, with a partner, he aimed to convert one million gallons a year. It was a heartening thought: so long as human beings ate fried food, biodiesel would qualify as an alternative energy source that was sustainable.

Heckler and I passed a squat brick building surrounded by an iron fence. The place looked derelict, with tall weeds and graffiti, but Heckler assured me its pumps were busy hoisting sewage up from fourteen feet below street level to minus two feet, then sending it on its way again. At Twenty-eighth Street, the pipes graduated from 78 to 108 inches in diameter. “We picked up another sewer,” Heckler said, examining the map. The new line came from the Metropolitan Detention Center, a bleak-looking federal prison that rises between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and New York Harbor. “There have been some problems here,” Heckler said. His concern was “extraneous material” being flushed down the toilets. “The inmates flush rags and ketchup packets,” he said. “It’s their way of protesting.” We drove another mile and turned onto First Avenue, where, eight feet down, my 108-inch pipe and another 60-inch pipe fed into a regulator. During a hard rain, this contraption directed my untreated sewage straight out into the harbor.

Humans have done all kinds of interesting things with their waste through the ages, including burning it for fuel and composting it, but sewage treatment itself is a fairly young science. It wasn’t until the midnineteenth century that European health officials made the mental connection between sanitation and public health. Engineers in modern cities had already laid pipes to shunt storm water to rivers; it was a small leap to envision the same pipes carrying waterborne sewage. Until the 1930s, all New York pipes ended at waterways; so did pipes in Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and around the Great Lakes. As populations grew and the fouled waters became hard to ignore, treatment plants began to come on line. But it was a slow process. As recently as the seventies, New York was still discharging 450 million gallons of raw sewage a day into the waterways surrounding the five boroughs. Until 1986, the entire west side of Manhattan, north of Canal Street, discharged its sewage into the Hudson.

Improvements to the system decreased discharges, but they have never ceased. During heavy rainstorms, runoff from the street joins sewage in the pipes and overwhelms the system: the excess is shunted, untreated, through a local regulator and out into the rivers. In a big storm, nearly 40 percent of the flow that enters the city’s sewer system exits that system untreated. “The system is called a CSO, for combined sewer overflow,” Heckler said. “And most large, old cities have them.”

According to a report from the NRDC and the Environmental Integrity Project, older sewer systems in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes dump an estimated 1.3 trillion gallons of raw sewage into community waterways each year. In Hamilton County, Ohio, a single sewer annually discharges as much as seventy-five million gallons of untreated sewage into Mill Creek, including during summer months, when children swim in the river. As little as a half-inch of rain in Washington, D.C., can cause sewers to overflow into the Anacostia River, which runs through the heart of the city. In Indianapolis and surrounding Marion County, CSOs occur sixty-five days a year, discharging a total of seven billion gallons of raw sewage into the White River. In 2001, Michigan reported 463 CSO events, dumping a total of thirty-one billion gallons of sewage into state waterways.

About 490 regulators dot New York City’s waterfront. That is 490 places where combined sewage outflow joins the waterways. An additional 250 outfalls dump only storm runoff, which doesn’t sound too bad until you consider that rainwater scours from city streets and parking lots a toxic stew of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—a group of more than a hundred chemicals formed during incomplete combustion—industrial metals, volatile organic chemicals, motor oil, copper from brake linings, lead from paint, zinc from the corrosion of galvanized steel, illegally dumped restaurant grease, and a liberal peppering of street litter and dog droppings. Heckler tried to be reassuring: “We made huge strides by making small changes in the system—removing bottlenecks and putting more people on in wet weather to pick out debris and monitor the flow. In 1930, we captured zero percent of the city’s wet-weather flow. In 1987, we captured eighteen percent. Now we’re at sixty-two.” You had to take his word for it.