Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (33 page)

Persuading Americans to consume less stuff, probably the single best thing we could do to save the planet (besides promoting energy conservation and zero population growth), isn’t a big part of the environmental agenda. Instead, we are exhorted to buy green. Buy products—cleaning solutions, building materials, organic socks, paper goods—that are free of toxins in their manufacture, use, and disposal. Buy products that don’t generate greenhouse gases, that can be refurbished and reused, that are minimally packaged. Green purchasing tells us to vote with our wallets, but it ignores a third choice: not buying at all. I resist the green buying message because I hate to think our strength is based in consumption, not in moral clarity.

The Buy Nothing message is, at any rate, politically taboo, and has been for some time. In 1930, the editor of
House & Garden
wrote, “The good citizen does not repair the old; he buys anew.” To shop is American: to forgo consumption, unpatriotic. (These ideas were linked explicitly after September 11, when President George W. Bush urged the country to get out and buy, buy, buy.) Source reduction, the first in the three-R hierarchy, receives little attention, perhaps because it implicitly critiques the production side of the economy.

But consumers
can
make a difference. Frito-Lay, Heinz, and Kraft have added organic products to their lines solely in response to consumer demand. Pressured by custodians and other large-scale users, manufacturers of cleaning supplies have switched to less-toxic ingredients. But eating organic food and cleaning without dangerous chemicals are primarily perceived as health issues, with their environmental benefits only secondary. We are all used to reading nutrition labels, but what kind of nutcase checks the percentage of pre- and postconsumer recycled content on a package or whether its plastic container is recyclable in their community curbside program before committing to buy?

“You’d be surprised,” Arthur Weissman, president of Green Seal, a nonprofit environmental audit firm, told me. “People are very concerned about landfills spilling over.” (Then again, he added, they also load their SUVs with recyclables to drive the ten miles to the transfer station.) According to Natural Business Communications, a consulting firm that tracks LOHAS consumers (that is, folks who practice “Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability”), sixty-three million American adults spent $226 billion on eco-conscious goods in 2000. I wanted to like those products, but sometimes I lost patience with their manufacturers’ piety. They were still producing, marketing, and packaging a lot of overpriced, nonessential goods, then sending them around the country on trucks that burn fossil fuel. It was the treadmill logic of capitalism applied to a freshly identified green market segment.

In April of 2004, Wirthlin Worldwide, a consulting firm, reported that 82 percent of the consumers it surveyed said “corporate citizenship” had at least some influence on their buying decisions. But answering a marketer’s survey is easy: spending the extra dough is hard. Seventh Generation, manufacturers of “earth friendly” household products, holds the barest sliver of that category’s market share. Fair Trade coffee accounts for only 5 or 6 percent of premium coffee sales. Tom’s of Maine claims about 2 percent of the enormous toothpaste market. (The craze for disposable cleaning products impregnated with harsh chemicals, meanwhile, seems to be spreading: the supermarket shelves are crammed with one-use toilet cleaners, dish-washing pads, dusters, floor sweepers, and mops.) Getting consumers to think systematically about their impact on nature, let alone landfills, isn’t easy: the most immediate hurdle, for most shoppers, is the higher price of “green” goods. What spurs them over the hurdle is guilt about their planetary impact. “A brand can help us feel good,” said Marc Gobé, author of
Citizen Brand
. “If you buy this yogurt, you don’t have to make any other effort. You just buy it.”

It is the same with scrupulous recycling. I could spend all day wrapping up my free AOL discs for a recycler in Green Bay, Wisconsin, organizing my polystyrene peanuts for another niche buyer, and baling my unwanted textiles to be shredded for felt. But these activities—virtuous as they might make me feel—are mostly a distraction from far more threatening issues. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which made exhaustive studies of consumers’ environmental impacts, the things that make the biggest difference to planetary health are transportation, housing, and meat eating. It isn’t worth it, they said, to get worked up over paper versus plastic at the grocery store. (For the record, the bags come out nearly equal in life cycle analyses.) The perfect, in the realm of recycling, is the enemy of the good.

“Don’t worry or feel guilty about unimportant decisions,” concluded the UCS. “Buy more of those things that help the environment.” Does cruelty-free Aveda lipstick count, or Body Shop bath gel? No. But low-flow showerheads do, and Energy Star refrigerators, and hybrid cars, or converting your regular rig to biodiesel. So does buying anything that has already been recycled and that substitutes for something new, including aluminum cans, paper products, plastic wood, and toothbrush handles extruded from used Stonyfield Farm yogurt cups.

On my first post-Christmas pickup day, I ran downstairs to watch the garbage fairies at work. It was a new crew, and the guys told me that their routes, so heavy this week, had been halved. (Winter storms compounded the problem: because san men had been deployed with snowplows, our neighborhood had missed a trash pickup.) One of the workers, a weary-looking blond, sidled in between the parked cars and climbed over a dirt-crusted mound of snow. “Some people cut a little trail from the street to the curb for you,” he said. “But then there’s always someone who blocks it with a car.” (Other residents formed the opposite of a trail: they piled sidewalk snow into an unhelpful ridge parallel to the curb.) He heaved a bloated black sack into the hopper and returned for a television. As he lifted it over his head, he slipped and fell on his back, hardly bobbling the TV. “You okay?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “Happens all the time.”

Earlier, I’d asked my regular guy Billy Murphy about seasonal changes in garbage. “In January, the weights go down,” he said. “There’s less to throw out because there’s no money left.” I’d wanted to pump my fist in the air when I heard his simple analysis. It didn’t take a lot of garbage theorists and environmental pointy-heads to make the connection between having a lot of money and discarding a lot of stuff. In general, more wealth equals more waste. (If Nantucket didn’t have a median income of around $75,000, it might not need a digester to divert waste from its landfill. A major fraction of the island’s trash is yard waste, from landscaping, and construction and demolition debris, from home renovation.)

I snooped around the ’hood, noting toy boxes, wrapping paper, gift cards. I saw evidence of new clothes, kitchen equipment, tools, linens, furniture, office supplies. Spilling from trash cans and blowing down the slushy streets, the detritus fueled my spiraling negativity. Then suddenly, spurred by nothing tangible, I experienced a change of heart. The hundred million tons of refuse compacted under Fresh Kills’ waving fields of fescue didn’t have to speak of loss and greed, of excess and ignorance. Fresh Kills could stand also as a monument to generosity, to kindness and indulgence. We are creatures with aesthetic sensibilities: we surround ourselves with nice objects. The contents of the landfill say that we are rich, we have choices, we can afford to buy new sheets when we want to, not just when we need to. A century ago, refuse was an issue of poverty; now it is a sign of abundance, of economic vitality. A grubby doll’s arm poking from a trash can wasn’t sad, in this view. It was happy. The doll had been offered to a child out of love. The doll had
been
loved, and tossed away only when it was outgrown or broken.

The killjoy in me hissed, “Hey, why don’t you fix up that doll and pass it along?” The mellower me shrugged and said, “Hey, let it go.”

Until very recently, New York’s Department of Sanitation sent dedicated trucks around the city to collect old Christmas trees from the curbs. Perhaps residents didn’t understand, or care, exactly where their Scotch pines were headed, because many set them out wrapped in plastic, with skirts, tinsel, and decorations still dependent. The trees were bound for the chipper in Fresh Kills’ compost yard, but Robert Lange, in the department’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling, had never been satisfied with the program, which cost $1.5 million. “The packer trucks would compress all these trees, and they came out in fifteen-by-twenty-by-ten-foot cubes. You couldn’t pull the trees apart. A crane moved it to a chipper. The end product was not a useful horticultural product.” This year, because of budget cuts, DSNY planned to collect trees along with regular waste and truck them out of state.

The first Saturday after New Year’s, I joined a group of volunteers in front of Katina’s, a local coffee shop, where a large red packer truck on loan from a private paper-carting company idled. The volunteers were mostly young, wearing beards, natural fibers, and “No War on Iraq” buttons. Our plan was to collect Christmas trees from the curb and bring them to Prospect Park, where they’d be chipped into earth-nourishing mulch. The city would save on tipping fees, and those far-off landfills would save some space.

The volunteers began dispersing around the neighborhood to pluck trees from the side streets and drag them to the avenues to meet the red truck. Who would stay with Adrian Istrefi, the driver of the big rig, and act as a liaison? “Me!” I called, excited to finally ride in a garbage truck. (DSNY let no one but employees ride their fleet.)

We headed north on Seventh Avenue, scanning the curb for Christmas trees. I was filled with a sense of do-goodism. We were rescuing organic material bound for the landfill! We were saving the city either $66 or $105 a ton on export costs, depending on whom you asked and when! We were going to capture the trees’ nutrients and recycle them into a valuable horticultural product!

When we didn’t spot any trees on the first block, I was sanguine. By the sixth block without trees, I was beginning to feel discouraged. Silly, even. But I tried to keep my spirits up. “It’s okay,” I told Istrefi. “It’s early.” I had a feeling he was just along for the overtime his company had offered. We were doing a good deed, but he had no illusions about its environmental impact: we were covering a minute fraction of the city.

We turned onto Union Street, where our eyes simultaneously locked on two discarded trees. I leaped from the cab with an apprentice’s enthusiasm. “Whoa, take it easy,” Istrefi said in his Rocky-like accent. He was half Italian, half Albanian, and he spoke four languages. One tree was small, and I easily tossed it into the hopper. We did the bigger one together. I wondered what the evergreens would be like “up top,” in the houses where ceilings ran to fifteen feet. “Those people put out some enormous trees,” John Sullivan, my san man, had told me. “They fill up your truck fast.”

On the next block, Istrefi let me pull the cranks on the hopper—one for down and one for in. It made me feel tough but not particularly cool. Operating heavy machinery had never been a childhood fantasy of mine, as it had been for many san men. Still, I smiled while I cranked, and the folks on the street smiled, and the trees smelled really great, like a Christmas tree lot but more fragrant for the crushing. On President Street, a building superintendent pulled several firs from his basement for us. He seemed inordinately grateful, though I doubt he knew who we were or where his trees were headed. “Hello?” I called to a woman toting an infant in a backpack and dragging an eight-foot Scotch pine. “Can we have your tree?” “Sure,” she said, looking confused. Everywhere, the Subaru station wagons were out in force, their roof racks laden with balsams and firs.

As the morning wore on, I got a minitaste of the san man’s life. It wasn’t easy getting in and out of the truck repeatedly. Istrefi bumped into a garbage can and spilled food waste all over the sidewalk. Dogs peed on the Christmas trees. I stepped in shit. Cars honked at us for blocking the road.

Istrefi stayed calm, never shifting above second gear. He compared the city workers with the privates as we trolled for trees. “There’s competition and there’s camaraderie between us,” he said. “But city workers do six tons in eight hours. We
work
. They finish early and sit around. We go back out. At the dump, the city cuts in line. Because they work for the city, they think they own the city.”

On a side street, we stood behind the truck and Istrefi smoked a Marlboro while we waited for a super to drag out some trees. I mentioned a story I’d recently read about a chain-smoking truck driver who accidentally ignited his load and burned for five hundred miles. “It’s no joke,” Istrefi said, unimpressed. “That happens all the time.” Mostly it was cigarettes, he said, but sometimes batteries sparked themselves. “Once a guy behind me called my cell to say, ‘I think you’re on fire.’”

“What did you do?”

“I dumped my load and called the fire department,” he said with a shrug.

On Third Street, we saw a white minivan filled to the gills with Christmas trees, topped by Christmas trees, and pulling Christmas trees behind in a travoislike arrangement. “I’ve got thirty-five,” the driver told us. He was a Boy Scout leader, and his troop collected trees every year. We nodded approvingly, but I was jealous of his haul. And I felt a bit like an arriviste, coming late to the mulch party.

Istrefi and I headed east toward the park to empty the truck and got stuck behind Gloria Pabon, the only female san man at the Brooklyn 6 garage. She was dumping barrels and slinging bags into her truck but leaving behind the trees, on orders from the boss. After Pabon and her partner turned the corner, we got stuck behind a Parks Department pickup loaded with Christmas trees. “This is ridiculous,” I thought, perhaps out loud. We were competing for trees with the Boy Scouts, the Department of Sanitation (workers had been told to leave the trees for volunteers today but to collect them on Monday), the Parks Department, and any nonallied individual dragging a conifer in an easterly direction. Our effort seemed puny and our enthusiasm naive. Our diesel truck—so big and shiny—was an affront to the grassroots spirit, to say nothing of the neighborhood’s air quality.