Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (3 page)

I was now dumping the trash on Lucy’s blue plastic toboggan before sorting it, and that kept the floor cleaner. The sled was a mess, though, and it took a few tries till I learned how to rinse it in the kitchen sink without dumping a quart of water on the floor. I considered buying a composter for all the food waste, or at least the coffee grounds, which coated everything in the kitchen bag. But I didn’t have a garden in which to use the finished product, and cultivating rotting food outside my brownstone would surely alienate my neighbors. Or so I thought at the time.

As the Garbage Project discovered, “Garbage expands so as to fill the receptacles available for its containment.” (Project researchers called this Parkinson’s Law of Garbage, after the original law formulated by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British civil servant based in Singapore: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”) My house had one trash can in the kitchen, a tiny one in the bathroom, and two more in bedrooms. By making it easy to toss things away, was I was abetting garbage mindlessness?

It’s hard to imagine, but 125 years ago the kitchen trash can didn’t exist. Until municipal collections were organized, in the late 1880s, the stove was the principal means of disposal. But the oven door wasn’t opening and closing all day long, like a kitchen trash can. Food scraps went to farm animals. Individually packaged consumer goods were rare and expensive. Tin cans were saved for storage or scoops, jars for preserving food. Old clothes were repaired, made over into new clothes, or used for quilting, mattress stuffing, rugs, or rags. Plastic was unknown. As late as 1882, reports Susan Strasser in
Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
, a manual on teaching children household economy had to
define
a wastebasket for readers: “It is for collecting all the torn and useless pieces of paper, and should be emptied every day, care being taken that nothing of value is thus thrown away.”

But what was valued? In the days of household economy manuals, almost all castoffs and scraps could be used as barter. Today, my aluminum cans had cash value to a scrap metal dealer in New Jersey, but my wine bottle, which the city no longer recycled, was dead weight in the garbage truck. Those fourteen ounces were still a commodity, though: the more weight the city buried in landfills, the more money landfill owners pocketed.

There are other types of value assigned to trash. Artists see beauty in certain forms of litter; parents of preschoolers imbue their offspring’s every mixed-media collage with sentimental value. For composters, organic waste is a treasure trove of nitrogen. To some, litter is a tool of anarchy.

Most Americans keep multiple wastebaskets in their homes, but I decided to quantify only my kitchen trash. In the interest of full disclosure: my bedroom trash was almost entirely paper. I tried to write on both sides, then recycled the larger pieces. The bathroom trash was used tissues, stubs of soap, dental floss, and, once a month, evidence of menstruation. Now and then I’d empty the little bathroom basket into the kitchen bag, but it added at most a few ounces. I didn’t mind picking through my own used tissues, but I had little interest in picking through others’, even those of people I love. And here was another universal garbage truth: other people’s waste is always worse than your own.

October 10. Two plastic wrappers from magazines, plastic from cheese, plastic from a bill of lading, 1 plastic box from fresh pasta, 1 Ziploc of slimy parsley, 1 plastic box from Fig Newmans, 1 foil-lined paper bag from mint Milanos, Lucy art (tempera on paperboard), Lucy art (collage of wax paper, tinfoil, and Saran wrap), 1 half-gallon juice carton, 1-gallon plastic milk bottle, 1 paper towel (used to clean up previous garbage sort), 6 paper napkins, 1 plastic tape dispenser, 2 stained cloth napkins, 2 stained place mats, apples, coffee grounds, onions, green-pepper trimmings, pea pods, lots of grapes, spoiled cherry tomatoes, fines.

Total weight: 4 pounds, 2 ounces.

Every week or so I had cause to throw out some sort of textile, and each time I jotted it down, history jabbed me in the ribs. As someone minding her footprint, I ought to have saved my stained napkins for rags. But rags weren’t scarce in my house: I had enough to wash every window in the neighborhood. I realized that using old clothes or napkins as disposable dust rags merely postponed their trip to the landfill. So why do it? Because using a rag meant I wasn’t using a paper towel, which spared a fraction of a tree from being milled and a fraction of a river from some toxic papermaking discharge.

A century and a half ago, I might have saved my stained shirtwaists for the local peddler, who sold textiles to paper companies. Peddlers also relieved households of ashes, old metal, bones, and rubber, delivering them to soap manufacturers, tinsmiths, button- and boot-makers. The peddlers, in turn, supplied housekeepers with manufactured goods. This two-way trade—the earliest form of household recycling—allowed housewives to acquire goods without cash, and it was essential to the development of certain industries in the mid-nineteenth century.

Returning raw materials to manufacturers to be refashioned into other goods looked like Yankee thrift. But it was also a form of nascent consumerism, Strasser notes, a way to acquire products not grown or otherwise created at home. My situation, a hundred and fifty years on, was just the opposite. Like most people, I tended to do right by the environment—whether avoiding disposables or scrupulously turning off lights—mostly when it saved me money.

Picking through garbage was smelly and messy and time-consuming, but it was revelatory in a way. I hadn’t realized my diet was so boring. Anyone picking through my castoffs would presume my family survived on peanut butter, jelly, bread, orange juice, milk, and wine. And, largely, we did. It occurred to me late one night, as I sat peacefully on the floor surrounded by the remains of the day, that I knew something about where all this stuff had come from (particularly if it was food; the nation’s heightened health consciousness inspired a lot of ink on the provenance of foodstuffs) but almost nothing about where it went after it left my house. Much has been made, in certain circles, of humanity’s connection to the natural world. Enlightened consumers, we don’t want to eat endangered fish or buy rare hardwoods. We care about animal rights and clean water. But it wasn’t fair, I reasoned, to feel connected to the rest of the world only on the front end, to the waving fields of grain and the sparkling mountain streams. We needed to cop to a downstream connection as well. Our lifestyles took a toll on the planet, and that toll was growing ever worse.

October 24. One
Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees
video, 1 plastic shopping bag, 1 plastic bread bag, 1 plastic veggie bag, 1 cardboard egg carton (not in paper recycling because there’s a broken egg in it), 5 paper towels (from cleaning up broken egg), 2 one-pint ice cream containers and tops, Saran wrap, 1 bakery bag with leftover bialys, 1 butter paper, 4 plastic lids from coffee cups (would a careful observer surmise, from the lack of coffee grounds, that the household ran out of coffee and for two days purchased lattes, at twice the cost of a pound of coffee beans?), 1 foil packet of soy sauce, half a peanut butter sandwich, carrot peels, onion skins, lemon rind, 1 chicken carcass, soggy chicken bedding in Styrofoam tray, couscous, orange rind, bread, fines.

Total weight: 10 pounds, 6 ounces, of which 7 pounds, 8 ounces is recyclable (7 wine bottles, 1 half-gallon juice carton, 1 one-liter plastic bottle from olive oil, 2 jars).

The only time I really dreaded quantifying garbage was after dinner parties. I waited until the last guest was gone, then wearily hunkered down on the kitchen floor to extract the items that less footprint-minded friends had tossed into the trash: the brown bag from a wine bottle (to the recycling pile), a rubber band from a bouquet (to the odds-and-ends drawer), a beer bottle (to Willy).

Parties made my kitchen garbage wet, heavy, and smelly. I blamed the meat. A hundred years ago, I’d have handed over my leftover chicken carcass—probably with far less flesh on it—to the local “swill children,” who supplied rag- and bone pickers with material that they in turn sold for buttons and knife handles. The fat rendered from bone marrow would have gone to factories for lighting and lubricating; gelatin was used in making glue and in processing food and photographs. Bones also made excellent fertilizer, a commodity that became increasingly important to farmers as untilled land became scarce after the turn of the nineteenth century. If I wanted to recycle my chicken here at home, I could have made candles from the grease now coating the trash bag, or soap, by combining it with lye that I made by dripping water through wood ashes. (For one Martha Stewart-ish moment I considered this. Like many brownstones in my neighborhood, mine had a working fireplace. But I’d need several pounds of ashes to get started, and the heating season was young.)

Looking at the postprandial mess arrayed before me, I assumed that I was generating far more waste today than I would have fifty or a hundred years ago. For one thing, there were no triple-wrapped Fig Newmans or mint Milanos back then. But in fact, if calculated by weight alone, I was doing pretty well. According to Daniel C. Walsh, a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering who examined a century’s worth of city garbage records, per capita rejection in New York peaked in 1940 at 2,068 pounds a year, or 5.66 pounds per day. It dropped to a century-low 712 pounds a year in the midseventies (the economy was in poor shape) and by 1999 rose to 928 pounds. The rate, he reported in
Environmental Science & Technology,
has been fairly steady since 1980. (Walsh attributed this nearly flat line to reductions in the weight of bottles and cans, and the advent of deposit bills. We may actually have been throwing out more, he implied, but the more weighed less.)

The big difference between then and now is our fuel sources. Approximately 34 percent of the 3.5 billion tons of refuse generated over the twentieth century was coal and wood ash. Looking just at the century’s first four decades, the ash fraction was even higher: a full 60 percent. By 1950, the use of coal for heating had declined to the point where paper replaced it as the largest proportion of the city’s residential waste stream. I laughed when I read Walsh’s hopeful prediction that paper would ultimately be replaced by more economic digital technologies: I’d read his paper online, then printed it out.

According to Walsh, the mass fraction of food in the (ash-free) waste stream dropped from 65 percent in the early 1900s to 13 percent in 1989, thanks to improved refrigeration, the increased use of chemical preservatives that lengthened shelf life and reduced spoilage, and the increased availability of frozen food, which resulted in the sale of fewer untrimmed vegetables. While food waste went down, however, packaging waste went up. Americans had become more prosperous, and thanks to the evolution of technology behind consumer goods, there was far more stuff available for them to buy.

The advent of different types of plastic, between the thirties and the forties, radically altered how Americans kept house. Polystyrene made refrigerators more affordable, for example, and Plexiglas reduced the cost of manufacturing headlights, lenses, windows, clocks, and jewelry. Manufacturers began hyping disposable products—sanitary napkins, paper towels, plastic cups—as scientific, modern, and hygienic. Tapping into class prejudices, ad campaigns suggested that the old ways, linked to poverty and recent immigration, were dirty. (A Kotex ad in 1927 claimed that “80% or more better-class women have discarded ordinary ways for Kotex.” “Ordinary ways” were reusable cloths.) The new disposables were touted as time- and labor-savers that would boost women into the leisure class. To resist the siren call of the new, writes Strasser in
Waste and Want,
was to risk being branded backward and fearful.

Before New Yorkers burned or buried their waste, they pitched garbage out their windows and onto the city streets, where it was consumed by scavenging pigs and dogs. It was the same in any large American city. Still, there was always more refuse than animals, swill children, and ragpickers could handle. By the 1800s, the filth in lower Manhattan had accumulated to a depth of two to three feet in the wintertime, when household waste and horse manure combined with snow. My brownstone in Park Slope, like others built in the late 1800s, has a stoop leading to the second floor, which let residents clamber above the mess (though it still seeped into the ground floor during storms and when snow melted). For much of the nineteenth century, trash removal was a private, not municipal, service, which made garbage an issue of social class. I don’t know who lived in my building a hundred and twenty-odd years ago, but it’s likely they paid someone to take their ashes and food scraps away, to be dumped with other wastes into the Atlantic Ocean.

Periodically, but usually spurred by outbreaks of disease, city officials made concerted efforts to clean the streets. It wasn’t a simple matter. Even when Manhattan’s population was less than a million, in the mid-nineteenth century, city horses dumped 500,000 pounds of manure a day on its streets, in addition to 45,000 gallons of urine. These were hardworking beasts, and their average life span was just two and a half years. In 1880, according to historians, 15,000 dead horses had to be cleared from city streets. A single carter couldn’t lift a horse, so the carcasses often lay around until scavengers and the elements reduced their mass. At this point they were unceremoniously tipped into the river, along with household refuse, or sold to “reduction plants” on Barren Island, out in Jamaica Bay, where they were steamed and compressed to produce grease, fertilizer, glue, and other unguinous by-products.

In 1895, a reform mayor ousted Tammany Hall, Manhattan’s popular Democratic political machine, and appointed a crusading new commissioner of street cleaning, Colonel George E. Waring Jr. Working under the auspices of the Health Department, Waring put an end to sporadic cleanup efforts, instituted regular trash pickups, and required New Yorkers to separate their garbage into three curbside bins for fuel ash, dry rubbish, and “putrescible” waste (this quaint label for the wet stuff is still used by the Department of Sanitation today, though it now refers to anything that’s headed for the dump).