Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (32 page)

He said they threw it away.

Part Four

Piling On

Chapter Twelve

It’s Coming on Christmas

I
t was nearly Christmas now, and every day the postman brought holiday catalogs. In 2001, American companies sent out seventeen billion of them—fifty-nine for every man, woman, and child in the United States—weighing a total of 7.2 billion pounds. Only six of the seventy-four catalogs surveyed by the advocacy group Environmental Defense used recycled paper in the body of their mailings. Switching to just 10 percent recycled content, the group said, would save enough wood to run a six-foot-high fence across the country seven times.

Dutifully, I sent letters and telephoned “opt out” services that removed my name from mailing lists. But what about the green groups? They (including Environmental Defense) kept pitching me credit cards. “Use our affinity card to make purchases,” they said, “and we’ll give a percentage to save herons or hemlocks.” It made no sense to me: why did organizations that purported to understand the limits of our natural resources, never mind the problems inherent in waste disposal, make it psychologically and financially easier to buy more stuff? I expected green groups to critique consumerism, not promote it. (The cards themselves are made of PVC, which releases harmful synthetic chemicals—including dioxin, a carcinogen and hormone disruptor—into the environment during both production and disposal. According to Greenpeace, which pitches its own card made of Biopol, a “benign plastic made of cereal plants,” consumers in the United States scrap fourteen million Visas and MasterCards a year.) Order something from those catalogs and it arrived swaddled in plastic air pillows, blister packs, or polystyrene peanuts and double-wrapped in cardboard. Onto the recycling pile went the paper, but the other material went straight to the dump.

Despite the many thousands of curbside recycling programs that accept paper, paper and other packaging waste still account for between 35 and 40 percent of the household waste in North American landfills. Americans don’t care enough about recycling, it seems, and packagers have all kinds of incentives for wrapping things up in paper and plastic: to prevent theft (shoving a CD in a foot-long plastic bubble down your pants is a lot trickier than secreting just the disk), to facilitate self-service, to protect products from tampering, to provide a canvas for stickers that say “New!” or “Improved!”

Even the righteous European Union, which has a 53 percent overall recycling rate for paper, metal, plastic, and glass, is unable to keep pace with the growing tide of packaging materials. Waste generation is linked to economic growth, said a 2004 European Environment Agency report (no surprise there), and waste is increasing as more and more food, packaged for long-haul transport and longer shelf life, moves throughout the union. (In Europe, as in the United States, hyperwrapped convenience foods are becoming more common as potential household cooks go outside the home to earn a living.) The agency also cited the rising emphasis on health and safety for a surge in food packaging.

During a recent visit to Rome, where sanitation workers in stylish jumpsuits daily emptied the mini-Dumpster outside my friends’ apartment building (at the laid-back Mediterranean hour of two-ish), I was struck by how far things had come. Twenty years ago, a Roman baker had handed me a bare-naked pastry: today, that pastry was placed on a cardboard tray, swaddled in more paper, and then hygienically bagged. My hosts’ kitchen trash can was twice the size of my own, and they needed it.

On my first day in Italy, my friend dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a McDonald’s for lunch. The largest fast-food chain in the world, McDonald’s had in recent years tried to clean up its garbage act: it bought recycled paper, switched to lighter-weight packaging, and made big public donations to Environmental Defense. But the chain’s waste, which was nearly as standardized as its food, the world o’er, was still staggering. In his documentary film
Super Size Me,
Morgan Spurlock ate only McDonald’s fare for an entire month. During his McDiet he saved all his McTrash; he even mailed it home to himself while traveling. The result was thirteen large sacks—a six-foot-tall pyramid—of paper cups, lids, straws, ketchup packets, napkins, paper bags, burger wrappings, ice-cream cups, and french fry boxes. (Pressured by well-meaning consumers, Mickey D’s gave up polystyrene clamshells for paper wrappings in the United States but continues to use them in other countries.) “Divide that by 90 (average number of meals) and then multiply by 46 million (number of people McD serves every day) and you get enough garbage to fill the Empire State Building,” Spurlock wrote to me when I asked about his trash. “And that’s just one fast-food company in one day.” (It was also just the greasy detritus dumped on customers: Spurlock wasn’t counting the bulk packaging left behind the counter.)

In a 2002 survey by
Packaging World
magazine, only 30 percent of the respondents, who made food, personal care, and pharmaceutical products for consumers, said that environmentally friendly packaging was “very important.” When asked if consumers would pay a premium for green packaging, 61 percent said no. In the developed world, customers expect premium goods to come in premium packages. Cosmetic companies, which charge a lot of money for very small products, were the first to understand that cool packaging bespeaks cool contents.

I wasn’t immune to the allure of the shiny and new, especially when it came to clothing, which I believed had some transformative power. It was the ceaseless marketing of, and the status seeking through, new possessions that I found anathema. The United States consumes far more stuff than any other developed country. According to the biologist Edward O. Wilson, if the rest of the world consumed at our levels—with existing levels of technology—we’d require the resources of four more planet Earths. (This extrapolation raises a question: before the last megafills are full, will we run out of stuff to put in them?) According to the United Nations “Agenda 21” report, “The major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialized countries.”

The flip side of consumption and production, of course, is wasting—consigning expired and unwanted goods to their fates in a landfill or incinerator. Why is there so much of it? Scholars offer various reasons. There is functional obsolescence (brought about by technical improvements); there is style obsolescence, also known as fashion; and the plain economic fact that it is often cheaper to buy something new than to repair something old. Wendell Berry wrote, in 1987, “Our economy is such that we cannot ‘afford’ to take care of things: labor is expensive, time is expensive, money is expensive, but materials—the stuff of creation—are so cheap that we cannot afford to take care of them.” A lack of connection between those who make goods and those who use them contributes to the ease with which we turn our backs on our possessions. It is easier, for example, to throw out an ugly ceramic pitcher made in a Taiwanese factory than it is to throw out an ugly ceramic pitcher made by a well-meaning aunt or even an anonymous local craftsperson. Increasingly, handwork is not part of the equation.

The holidays are a perfect time of year to get across the source-reduction message. According to Inform, the environmental research firm, Americans produce an additional one million tons of trash per week between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. (Waste watchers in college towns, however, note dips in garbage generation during this period and attribute it to the departure of students. Those cities’ trash spikes come when students leave in late spring.) I found it hilarious that the city of Austin, which charges residents for each bag of garbage they set on the curb year round, offers a post-Christmas amnesty. “So you can throw out as much as you want and not be penalized for celebrating a Christian holiday with intense commercialism and the attendant cast-off crap,” my Austin friend Spike Gillespie said to me. I knew that my city’s holiday trash would find a place to settle, that it wasn’t headed on a winding
Mobro
-style journey. There was plenty of room in the nation’s supersized landfills. Even Fresh Kills had twenty years’ worth of space when it closed. But in
Natural Capitalism,
author and entrepreneur Paul Hawken notes that for every 100 pounds of product that’s made—product that hits the store shelves—at least 3,200 pounds of waste are generated. According to William McDonough and Michael Braungart, in
Cradle to Cradle,
“What most people see in their garbage cans is just the tip of a material iceberg: the product itself contains on average only 5 percent of the raw materials involved in the process of making and delivering it.” In other words, we throw out stuff just to make the stuff we throw out.

It’s been said that to make a dent in our garbage problems, source reduction has to acquire the rhetorical currency of recycling. One could argue that the currency of recycling isn’t exactly robust, but at least it doesn’t fly in the face of the holiday media messages one encounters at every turn. Inform offers loads of “greener” holiday tips, but they seem timid, dull, and rote. Give rechargeable batteries, a low-flow showerhead, a membership in an environmental organization. Yawn. Shop at thrift stores, send electronic instead of paper holiday greetings. Ho-hum. Clearly, source reduction has a PR problem. Compared to the sirens of high-end emporiums luring us to buy, Inform is a gray-haired spinster with an admonishing finger.

If the reality of an environmental conscience (as opposed to the idea of it) isn’t chic, at least it is wholesome: it speaks to a connection with the natural world. We are all, pollutocrats and composters alike, children of the universe. And nature, as everyone knows, brooks no waste. That notion gets a lot of play in liberal recycling and design circles. “Consider the cherry tree,” write McDonough and Braungart. “It makes thousands of blossoms just so that another tree might germinate, take root, and grow. After falling to the ground, the blossoms return to the soil and become nutrients for the surrounding environment. Every last particle contributes in some way to the health of a thriving ecosystem.” It happens on every scale: large animals die, and their carcasses feed smaller animals, fungi, and microbes, which in turn make possible the feedstuff of larger organisms. The building blocks of life cycle endlessly, just like the nature shows that deliver this message without cease.

But do animals actually produce trash? Well, leaf-cutter ants carry dead workers from their underground nests, tipping them onto outdoor mortuary piles. They haul dried-out leaf fungi from garden chambers down trails to compostlike piles. (Both are exploited for nutrients by insectivores and herbivores.) Underground, kit foxes feed their young throughout the winter months. They pay the piper in the spring, when an entire season’s worth of bones, fur, and feathers has to be excavated and placed on the equivalent of their curb (these scraps become food or shelter for other creatures). Prairie dogs, like humans, continually drop skin flakes and discard food in their burrows. Fleas, mites, lice, and other bottom-feeders constantly vacuum this stuff up: when the live-in maids become too populous, the original inhabitants clear out. Perhaps the animal most like humans, in its dealings with trash, is the pack rat. The desert rodents live in five-foot-high dens built of just about anything they can find (including branches, cactus pads, newspapers, cow pies, cans, and rags). When they periodically clean house or renovate, they create trash middens nearby. Varnished by coat after coat of pack rat urine, these heaps persist for ages in the dry desert. Just as William Rathje and his archaeology students analyzed landfills to suss the habits of Americans who lived a half-century earlier, scientists at the Desert Research Institute, in Nevada, examine the radioactive fingerprints of crystallized pack rat urine and scrutinize seeds and pine needles to learn about climate and plant communities up to 25,000 years ago.

Could humans learn something from nature’s constant cycling of resources? Sure, but there is a crucial difference between Homo sapiens and other species. In the natural world, no organism self-sacrifices for the good of the environment. Plants and animals steal whatever resources they can, heedless of fellow creatures and the future. Nature is both terrifically efficient and terrifically wasteful, all at the same time. Green thinkers like to focus on just one aspect of this equation. It’s a feel-good idea. But nature isn’t wise or farsighted. Recycling, however, is wise precisely
because
it’s farsighted. Unfortunately, it isn’t likely that we’ll become truly efficient about resource recovery until we’ve exhausted all our raw materials (at which point the planet will be a fairly dismal place to live). Recycling is the name we’ve given to resource recovery before it’s profitable. Only later, when recovery becomes a profitable necessity—because all the new material is gone—will we really be living like the animals.

The puffy winter coats we all wore as we made our shopping rounds—some jackets filled with feathers, others with flaked polyethylene terephthalate—only slightly disguised something else I had been thinking about. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly two-thirds of adult Americans are overweight, with 22 percent qualifying as obese. For those who design and sell consumer goods, this is a whole new marketing niche to exploit. To accommodate bigger people, manufacturers make bigger clothes, couches, movie seats, and food portions. Doors are wider; so are church pews and caskets. Even regular-size people are buying bigger houses, television sets, and cars. Luxury recreational vehicles, with king-size beds and fireplaces, stretch to forty-five feet; houseboats—equipped with trash compactors—have reached 2,400 square feet. Architects design medicine cabinets as large as walk-in closets. Of course, all this bigger stuff requires more raw materials to make it, more fossil fuel to transport it, and more space in which to ultimately bury it. With every new product, more trees are cut, more metal is mined, more fuel is extracted and then burned.