Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (28 page)

We continued south toward Bay Ridge, scanning the horizon for gulls. Heckler wasn’t sure where the Owls Head treatment plant was—his map didn’t cover it—but the birds find plenty to scavenge around primary treatment tanks and so make excellent mobile beacons.

The gulls led us to a collection of ochre-colored concrete buildings that jutted from the shoulder of the south Brooklyn shoreline. Owls Head was oriented toward the open harbor and afforded great views, from the poop deck of its settling tanks, of the Verrazano and Brooklyn Bridges, the Statute of Liberty, and the southern tip of Manhattan. In aerial photographs, Owls Head looks slightly military, like an aircraft carrier but paved with treatment tanks instead of runways. A splotchy cloud of brown scum floated in the water near the plant, which was just a couple hundred yards north of a fishing pier. I once asked some anglers there if they knew what went on in the plant and whether they ate the bluefish and stripers they caught. The answers were yes and yes. “If the fish’s tongue is black, I throw it back,” one of them told me.

Owls Head had been built in the 1940s and in 1995 upgraded to meet the Clean Water Act’s “secondary treatment” standards, which meant the plant removed 85 percent of biochemical oxygen demand—a measure of how much oxygen is being consumed by microorganisms—and discharged fewer than thirty milligrams of suspended solids per liter of water. Every day, 120 million gallons of sewage flowed into the plant and was separated, through a process of settling and digestion, into two physical states: liquid and solid.

Heckler flashed his ID at the plant’s entryway and parked the minivan around the back of a low building, in the shadow of several concrete tanks. We let ourselves into a long, narrow room filled with control panels, computer screens, switches, dials, and a lot of green and red lights. “How you doing?” Heckler said, reaching for the outstretched hand of Lou Gibaldi, a jowly engineer dressed for Sunday in a sweatshirt and two days’ stubble. Heckler introduced me, then asked, “Before we get started, could I use the facilities?”

Left alone for a moment in the electric control room, I pondered the question: what would “the facilities” look like in a place like this? Like a litter basket in the cab of a garbage truck, a toilet in a wastewater treatment plant seemed superfluous. Heckler reappeared, and we went off to explore. We strolled past a pump and an eight-cylinder engine, which ran on homegrown methane, then came upon a forty-foot-deep chamber set into the concrete floor. Grayish green water coursed through at a rate of two feet per second. It was an impressive sight—this raw effluent so casually racing by, the gash in the floor surrounded by the sparest of iron railings. I thought of the Augean stable, filled with thousands of cows. On orders to muck the place out after thirty years’ neglect, Hercules cleverly bent two rivers to flow through the stable and swept the filth straight out. New York’s forefathers envisioned a similar system a century and a half ago when they diverted pure drinking water from upstate rivers, via aqueducts and reservoirs, and sent it through the city’s pipes and then out again—much, much dirtier—into the harbor.

I watched as a coarse screen and then a fine screen lifted debris from the sluiceway and deposited it in a Dumpster, bound for the landfill. I spotted apple cores, tampon applicators, condoms, and what appeared to be a calamata olive stuck to the grate. Though relatively few New Yorkers have disposals, a fair amount of food ends up in the system anyway. Just last week, I’d dumped some spoiled yogurt into the toilet: dairy couldn’t go into the compost, the cup was recyclable at the food co-op, and I didn’t want to slime the garbage in my kitchen trash can, knowing that I’d soon be picking through it.

“I don’t think that’s an olive,” Heckler said.

“I guess not,” I admitted, as the reality of exactly where we stood sunk in.

From the grate, the sewage flowed into a thirty-foot well; five pumps lifted the flow up and out into four primary settling tanks outdoors, where it stayed for an average of one hour and six minutes, or 1.1 hours in engineer speak. “You get settling action in the primary tanks,” Heckler explained as we walked across the parking lot and up a short flight of stairs to the long rectangular pools. The water that circulated here was flat and brown, except where plastic straws, coffee stirrers, pens, caps, and more tampon applicators clustered in an off-white froth. Gulls pecked at the edges of the tanks; the air smelled of hydrogen sulfide. It wasn’t too bad on a breezy winter afternoon; I imagined things were probably a lot worse in the dog days of August. Wooden flights—long thin planks of redwood—slowly skimmed across the top of the pools, pushing grease to one end, then dove down fifteen feet and traveled in the other direction, scooping solids to the next stage of processing.

“Where does the stuff from on top go?” I asked.

“To the scum concentrator,” Heckler answered. He described a machine that squeezed out water and reduced grease to the density of congealed bacon fat. The concentrated scum, larded with bits of plastic, was sent to the landfill. Just the name of the contraption nudged me over my personal gross-out threshold, and I was almost grateful that Heckler didn’t have time to show it to me.

One of the settling tanks was empty, with a long-handled scrub brush leaning against its blue-painted side. Hand-cleaning these encrusted tanks was probably one of the worst jobs in New York. When Gibaldi first came to Owls Head, he had told me, he was on the bottom-most rung of the status ladder: he cleaned. Seventeen years passed, and now Gibaldi was philosophical about his career. He enjoyed giving tours to schoolchildren. “I tell them whatever they see here started out as clean water.” He smiled earnestly. “You know, if this place wasn’t here you could
walk
to Staten Island.” It took me a second to grok what he meant, that New York Harbor, in the absence of sewage treatment plants, would eventually be solid with human waste. Gibaldi’s transparency was a breath of fresh air, and it made me wish that landfill managers were equally enlightened. I had a feeling, though, that the issues surrounding sewage treatment were far less complicated, at least politically, than those that swirled around trash. Soon this feeling would fade.

“I tell the kids to think of the sewage treatment plant as a giant human body,” Gibaldi continued. “It’s a digester, really.” He explained how the same microbes that attack food in our stomach and intestines, that break it down into simple substances and create methane, attacked sewage at the plant. Owls Head was simply concentrating and accelerating the decomposition that would naturally take place.

Heckler and I moved from the primary tanks to the aeration tanks, where the bacteria that had ridden in with the waste, enlivened by a jet of air, ran wild with the food and feces. When sated, these microbes fell to the bottom. As the solid waste settled out of the liquid, it was drawn to final settling tanks, where heavier particles and other solids again sank to the bottom and more liquid was drawn off. A small part of this sludge was recirculated to the aeration tanks as “seed” to stimulate digestion of the newly arrived waste; the remaining solids moved inside the plant, to thickening tanks, for further processing. The wastewater extracted at each stage was treated with sodium hypochlorite—a.k.a. liquid bleach—to kill pathogens and then discharged into Upper New York Harbor.

The quality of this effluent is open to interpretation; it meets federal and state standards for fecal coliform (bacteria that inhabit the intestinal tracts of mammals) and other pathogens, but chlorination does nothing to break down hormones and antibiotics in the waste stream. Doctors routinely advise patients to flush unused or expired prescription pills down the toilet, and hospitals do the same with drugs unused by discharged patients. But scientists have become increasingly alarmed about the effect of excreted pharmaceuticals, including birth control pills, steroids, antibiotics, pain pills, and Prozac, on wildlife in and near our nation’s waterways. Within the last decade or so, endocrinologists have correlated deformities and behavioral changes in fish, amphibians, and birds to high levels of endocrine disruptors that flow, with urine, into and then out of wastewater treatment plants.

Leaving the rectangular tanks, Heckler and I ducked into a windowless building filled with four open cone-shaped thickening tanks, sixty feet across. Huge feed lines and ducts led in every direction. Skylights dimly illuminated the passageways. There wasn’t an employee in sight: the whole plant ran, on rain-free weekends, with a crew of just seven. It was spacious and warm in the tank building, and a quiet pumping sound filled the air. If you could forget for a moment that you were in a concrete shithouse, the place seemed almost tranquil.

We climbed to the building’s highest level, where I ambled out onto a metal catwalk over a thickening tank. Below me, a ring floating atop the swirling brown batter reduced turbulence while rotating scrapers pushed liquid to the edge and solids to the bottom. Heckler called this mixture, which was 97 percent water, “dissolved solids.” I noticed an orange life-saving ring hanging on a nearby hook and experienced an unpleasant moment of vertigo. The catwalk was awfully narrow, and the guardrail mighty thin.

After two hours of thickening, which reduced water content by 1 percent, the sludge was pumped to six thirty-eight-foot-deep tanks called digesters, which worked with centrifugal force. Here, as in the aeration tanks, old sludge was mixed with new as a microbial starter. The bugs in the digester, much like those in a human stomach, preferred a temperature of 95 degrees. Decomposition at this stage was anaerobic, and it produced the methane that ran the engine I’d seen at the start of my tour. The engine drove a generator that produced electricity for the plant.

Heckler and I wandered around the digester building, up metal stairs and down, around concrete columns and under huge ducts, trying to locate the exit. It was like that scene in
This Is Spinal Tap
where the band can’t find the stage. As we walked, Heckler explained the end game. The sludge continued to cook in the digester for fifteen days, then it was pumped toward the shore, where a tanker pulled up once a day. The boat, which held ninety thousand cubic feet of finished product, pumped its load into a holding tank at a dewatering plant on the East River. After spinning around a centrifuge and accepting a dose of polymers, which encouraged clumping, the sludge went up to 26.5 percent solid. In its next move, the sludge would exit the province of the public and enter that of the private. Soon it would have some value.

Eventually Heckler and I found a door and emerged into bright sunlight on the north side of the plant. We were on Harry Smutko Walk, according to a street sign. Heckler didn’t know who Smutko was, but later I called the plant manager, Bill Grandner, who told me that Smutko had worked at the plant in the late sixties. “Unfortunately, he died in the facility,” he said. “He either fell or he tripped, after a heart attack—forensics weren’t so good back then.” What did he fall into? I asked. There was a slight pause before Grandner answered: “It was a final tank.” Indeed.

Chapter Eleven

In the Realm of Taboo

O
wls Head was the end of the line for the water I flushed from my apartment, but the solid portion of my effluent had miles to go. Somewhere between the treatment plant in Bay Ridge and a factory on the South Bronx waterfront, my sewage was transformed, semantically, into “biosolids.” The neologism had been forged in the crucible of public relations and fired by the potential for profit.

For decades, the DEP had dumped twelve hundred tons of sewage a day from a tanker parked twelve miles off the city’s shore. But in 1985, the EPA pronounced the waters near the Twelve-Mile Site officially dead. The only shellfish that remained were contaminated with bacteria and heavy metals. Fish showed accumulations of metals and toxic chemicals. In 1988, the city switched to a new site, 106 nautical miles southeast of the harbor. The sludge tankers, which couldn’t make the hundred-hour trip, were converted into pumper vessels that filled newly built long-haul sludge barges. Before long, though, commercial fishermen who worked near the 106-Mile Site began to complain of decreased catches and sick fish. Other old and densely populated cities have had similar problems disposing of their sludge. Starting in 1878, Boston’s sewage was held on Moon Island: on the outgoing tides, the facility’s gates swung open and the untreated waste was flushed into Boston Harbor. Congress made this nasty habit illegal in 1988 with the Ocean Dumping Reform Act. Boston waited until 1991, when the ban went into effect, to quit dumping its 400,000 daily gallons of sludge into the ocean; New York’s last load chugged out of New York Harbor, aboard the
Spring Creek,
on June 30, 1992.

Where would all that sludge go now? Onto farm fields, said the EPA, which had recently reclassified the material, after it was treated to reduce pathogens, from a hazardous waste to a “Class A” fertilizer. The new rules governing sludge policy, dubbed Part 503 by the EPA in 1993, raised the acceptable exposure limits to such toxins as lead, arsenic, mercury, and chromium so that most of the nation’s sludge could be classified as “clean.” With this regulatory makeover, a new era of “beneficial use” for sludge began. But first, the product needed a new name. Who in their right mind wanted to spread municipal sludge around his backyard? The sewage industry’s main trade and lobbying group, known today as the Water Environment Federation (WEF), decided to sponsor a naming contest. (The group also dreamed up the Select Society of Sanitary Sludge Shovelers, which honors workers who go above and beyond the call of duty. Members, who wear tiny silver shovels on their left breast pockets, have a special handshake and a password derived from the first letters of the society’s name, pronounced “Sh-h-h-h.”) According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in their excellent book
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!,
WEF members made more than 250 name suggestions for the contest, including “purenutri,” “bioslurp,” “black gold,” “geoslime,” “sca-doo,” “the end product,” “humanure,” and “hu-doo.” In 1991, the name change task force settled on the comparatively bland “biosolids.”