Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (31 page)

“Do you compost?” I asked just before we said good-bye.

“My wife won’t let me. Also, the development doesn’t allow it.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure. There are probably vector control issues. And the development can’t control what people put into their compost.” Ditto with the city and its sludge, I thought.

I said good-bye to Scorziello and got onto the next train. Within moments of sitting down, though, I realized that something was terribly wrong. With my every movement, my down jacket released a puff of eye-wateringly rank air. People were actually moving away from me. After riding three trains, the longest commute of my life, I arrived in Park Slope. My husband got a whiff of me and pulled a bad face. “I’m taking a shower and washing all these clothes,” I said.

“Good idea,” he said, and quickly closed his office door.

I was lucky to live in a neighborhood that flushed and forgot its sewage. I didn’t live within smelling range of the Gowanus Canal, the Owls Head treatment plant, or the pelletization plant in the Bronx. I’d probably never breathe the noxious dust of New York’s pelletized excrement in Ohio or Florida. That I had only a vague notion of my waste’s impact on others troubled me. It was easy to shrug off those effects if they weren’t harming you personally.

What could we do better? Arcata, in northern California, opted out of building an expensive sewage treatment plant and spreading its sludge on farm fields. Instead, it constructed an artificial wetland within the city limits. Untreated waste flows through a series of plant-and-animal-filled ponds and comes out the other end purified. The marsh is a beauty spot, where locals come to jog or to sit on benches and watch more than 160 species of birds. The city of South Burlington, Vermont, did something similar, in a pilot project, inside a greenhouse.

Wetlands probably aren’t practical for most big cities. We have a lot more sewage to treat than Arcata, we’ve already filled in most of our natural wetlands (with garbage), and it is unlikely that the city or private landholders will give up space to create sewage-treating marshes. But there is one place in New York where space is seriously underutilized: our rooftops. We have thousands of acres of them! Several city groups are working to establish green roofs atop residential, commercial, and government buildings. The advantages of green roofs are numerous: they keep buildings cool in the summer and warm in the winter, they clean the air, they mitigate the city’s heat-island effect, and they absorb storm water and slowly release it into the atmosphere. This is no minor point. Scientists have recently warned that the rising global climate will soon bring more storms and higher sea levels to New York City, both of which will threaten our already crumbling infrastructure, including our wastewater treatment plants. By 2100, say climate specialists at the Columbia Earth Institute, the probability of a one-hundred-year storm (one so drastic that it occurs, on average, only once in a century) could be, in a worst-case scenario, one in every four years. A 14.5-foot storm surge produced by such an event would bring the Gowanus Canal within a few avenues of my house.

The more storm runoff we can keep out of the sewer system, the better. But some visionaries take this a step further: they imagine miniature rooftop wetlands that also handle the building’s gray water and process its sewage into food for plants. It sounded utopian to me; I liked the idea. But it wasn’t coming to my building soon. (Why not? Because it would void my roof warranty, and it would take far too long to recoup my investment.) Rooftop wetlands aside, is there any good place to put ever-increasing mountains of sewage sludge? In developing countries, sludge is sometimes fired to form bricks or composted for farm fields. But developing nations have only a fraction of our problems with contaminants. I’ve always been fond of the Clivus Multrum, a waterless composting toilet in which solid waste, mixed with sawdust, is reduced by microorganisms to 10 percent of its original volume. A tiny battery- or solar-powered fan directs any bad smells out a roof stack. The end product is an odorless humus, perfectly safe to use on home gardens.

I wasn’t quite ready to dismantle my toilet, though thousands are moving in this direction. More and more people, living off the grid or not, have recognized how little sense it makes, when our population is so large and our clean water supply shrinking, to dilute our solids with water and then, at great expense, separate the two. The more I learned about the potential value of things that we call waste—and the more I was dealing with my waste instead of sending it out of sight—the more blurred the lines became, in my mind, between sewage and garbage, sewage and compost, and garbage and compost. Once again, waste was looking a lot like food.

I heard about a graduate student in agriculture at the University of California, Davis, who had built himself a home gray water treatment system. Perhaps the most important prerequisite for such a labor-intensive undertaking, I learned when I phoned Tim Krupnik, was having a laid-back landlord. Krupnik was living in a group house in North Oakland when he basically “took a Sawzall trip under the house.” Cutting through Sheetrock and beams, he unhooked the shower drain and diverted it to his backyard. “Our model was a natural wetlands,” he said. “The water flowed into a pit, a little wider and deeper than a bathtub, lined with gravel of different sizes.”

Krupnik first planted the pit with cattails that he’d collected along with spoonfuls of microorganism-rich mud from San Francisco Bay. The plants got their phosphorous from Krupnik’s biodegradable soap and shampoo and their nitrogen from skin and hair in the runoff. Then he installed more aquatic plants, including taro. “I know it’s nonnative, but I wanted to see how it would do.” It did well, reaching six feet tall.

From the tub, Krupnik’s gray water spilled into a secondary cleaning system, a concrete basin set into the ground. “I put some water hyacinth in there—they have a complex fractal root system, a lot of surface area, space for microorganisms to live and reproduce.” He hooked a pump to his solar panel and aerated the basin. Then he added goldfish, to eat the mosquitoes that were soon breeding there. The fish did well for months and months without the addition of fish food. “But we had eight or nine people in the house, and if someone took a very hot or very cold shower . . .” Krupnik’s voice trailed off, but I got the picture: fish are temperature sensitive. He used his gray water to irrigate the yard and fruit trees, but not vegetables: “If there are pathogens in the water, they’d concentrate in the stalks.”

“I heard that you’re recycling more than shower water.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Krupnik knew what I was talking about. “Ah,” he said. “Now you’re getting into the realm of taboo.”

After setting up his gray water system, Krupnik decided to go a little further. He built a table about the size of a nightstand. The top opened to a toilet seat; underneath was a two-and-a-half-gallon bucket. “It was only for feces,” he said. “And I added a cup of sawdust each time to keep the smell down and soak up water.”

Every few days, when the bucket was full, Krupnik carried his humanure—that was the word he’d decided on—outside to compost it with red worms in a bin. “The worms eat half their weight every day,” he said, echoing the enthusiasms of Christina Datz-Romero, of the Lower East Side Ecology Center. “It’s your typical thermophilic compost. The idea is to let it reach 120 to 160 degrees for several days. That kills the pathogens.” To conserve moisture, keep out flies, and add carbon, he worked strips of newspaper into the surface. “I had a two-to-one carbon-to-nitrogen ratio,” Krupnik said. In less than two months the bin was filled with high-quality compost.

Krupnik kept his toilet in his bedroom. “People would come over to watch a video and they’d put chips and salsa on the nightstand,” he said. “They’d sit on the couch and reach over. They never knew what was going on. I’m a vegetarian, and because I monitor my carbon-nitrogen ratios closely and keep a lid on the bin, I’ve never had any problem with odor.”

He used his finished product on ornamental plants and fruit trees. His red apples, he said, were delicious. “Trees protect their seeds and fruit. I wouldn’t use the compost on something like lettuce, though. It’s a lot of biomass to go into that kind of plant.” He warned against composting excrement lightly. “You need to do it with care,” he said. “There could be E. coli in it if you’re sick. You need to read up on it, watch what you eat.” He suggested
The Humanure Handbook,
written by a former roommate’s father, Joseph C. Jenkins. “That’s undoubtedly the best resource.”

I looked up the book on Amazon. Thirty-eight customers had reviewed it, giving it an average rating of five stars. “The best book since the Bible,” wrote one reader. “I can’t wait to build my own sawdust toilet and finally add my own poop to nature’s cycle, the way I’ve wanted to since I was six years old!” wrote another. Someone else wrote, “I found the book to be a life changing force, in that you just cannot flush the toilet anymore without thinking about all the wasted water or toxic chemicals going into that act.”

At the 2003 World Water Forum in Kyoto, where government ministers and water experts discussed ways to meet a United Nations target of halving by 2015 the number of people in the world who lack clean drinking water and modern sanitation, scientists recommended that communities in developing nations compost their biosolids rather than invest in sewer hookups, which would empty into rivers and create public health disasters. At the meeting, the United Kingdom’s former “chief drinking-water inspector” said that if Britain were planning sewage disposal from scratch today, “we wouldn’t flush it away—we would collect the solids and compost it.”

Composting human excrement, I was coming to realize, was far more than a gardening issue: for many, it was political as well as environmental. There was a growing constituency out there that wanted nothing to do with what they considered a wrong-headed system, in which clean water was sullied with excrement, the valuable nutrients in human waste were combined with industrial toxins, and municipalities picked up the tab for disposing of industry’s mess. Raw sewage—a biological nutrient—belonged to the people, in this view. Composting was one of the most subversive things a citizen of the modern world could do with his own waste.

I asked Krupnik what had inspired him to make humanure. “I wanted to see if I could do it,” he said. “And because I’ve been in recycling for a number of years, I wanted to practice what I preach. I get a big sense of personal gratification from being able to connect myself to a system. You eat the apple, you metabolize it, it goes into the toilet, you compost it, and you put it back on the apple.”

I identified completely with that sense of connection—I felt it every time I put some carrot tops in the compost pile and imagined that Lori and Simon, who lived in our building’s garden apartment, would grow something nice to eat with it. Krupnik continued: “I like being part of a productive system. I like being able to live in Oakland as if I’m living in the mountains.” But people living in the mountains, I pointed out, probably spent a lot less time worrying about their environmental impact: lower population density meant they had less impact, and the impact probably wasn’t right under their nose. I wondered if Krupnik’s fussing with his shit was yet another example of self-indulgence, the luxury of a guilty urbanite with sufficient time to ponder his outsize environmental footprint. But at least he was doing something about it.

Garbage and excrement are linked on the dark side of human nature. Freud suggested we are drawn to touching excrement precisely because it is taboo. Waste products are primal, and although they clearly stand for the back end, for death, they are also linked inextricably to life. Animal waste feeds new plants and new animals. Nutrients from the dead, abetted by fungi, bacteria, and other agents of decomposition, jump-start life. The nitrogen cycle goes on and on. People who visit landfills are struck by their suggestion of death, but the landfill is also a place of resurrection: gulls and other wildlife live well off food scraps, and human scavengers, if they are allowed in, give new life to objects carelessly tossed—from furniture and clothing to building materials and VCRs.

In the winter of 2002, the
New York Times
ran a half-page story on an art exhibit in SoHo. The installation was called Cloaca: it consisted of a thirty-three-foot-long machine that replicated the human digestive system. A cloaca is a conduit that carries away sewage or surface water; it’s also the common cavity into which the intestinal, genital, and urinary tracts open in vertebrates such as fish, reptiles, birds, and some primitive mammals. I read that twice daily an attendant fed Cloaca’s mouth nutritious meals donated by fancy restaurants, restaurants apparently unafraid of being associated with shit. Twenty-seven hours later, Cloaca’s back end excreted fecal matter onto a conveyor belt. I told Lucy about Cloaca, and she was eager to see it.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art was crowded when we arrived. Cloaca wasn’t due to defecate for another twenty minutes. Lucy could barely contain her excitement. “Where will it come out?” she asked. She claimed a seat on the floor near the anal sphincter and stared at the glass vats, pumps, pipes, and tubing. Enzymes were injected from small tanks; liquid was siphoned off into a separate container. Cloaca wasn’t all that different in function from the Owls Head treatment plant.

I was surprised to find the entire machine encased in Plexiglas. I asked the guard why. “When it first came it wasn’t enclosed, but people complained,” he said. “Oh boy, you shoulda smelled it in here.” When I later asked the artist, Wim Delvoye, what had happened, he said the change was made at the demand of the museum because “the staff feared for its health. It’s a pity, because the smell in fact is part of the piece.”

When Cloaca finally defecated, about ten minutes late, Lucy was disappointed. “That’s it?” she said. “It’s not very big.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “It looks like something you’d find in a litter box.” I asked the guard what they did with it.