Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (34 page)

At last we made it into the park. Istrefi hit a button, and his truck spilled its fragrant load onto the ground. “One hundred and nine, one hundred and ten,” a volunteer counted while others dragged evergreens to a whining wood chipper. The area was crowded with happy Park Slopers, their children and dogs. Everyone was friendly, filled with a sense of environmental correctness and unlimited free cocoa. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden had set up an information table, staffed by a master composter. Though I was tempted to ask him about worms, I decided it would be best not to get started.

Istrefi went off to find more trees, and a U-Haul rented by the volunteers glided in and dumped forty-four more. An elderly gentleman with a homemade “Africart,” a wagon bed atop bicycle wheels, exchanged his tree for a load of mulch. An extrovert in greenface held a sandwich sign: “Hey Buddy, Can you spare a pine?” “You want some mulch?” asked a young man standing by the chipped pile with a shovel. My compost bin could use the carbon, I thought, and I liked the idea of closing the loop. Then I got real: I didn’t need to tote mulch home. I was making my own!

“No, thanks,” I said, and turned to ask a Parks Department employee if this year was different from others. “It’s the same,” she calmly drawled. “People bring in their trees.”

Later in the week, the
New York Times
reported that the sanitation workers’ union wasn’t pleased with the freelance tree-mulching projects. It didn’t like other people doing the rank and file’s job, and in what seemed a fit of pique, DSNY closed the mulching facility at Fresh Kills and refused to provide trucks to haul excess mulch from city parks to Staten Island. “It’s stupid internal politics,” Tom Outerbridge explained to me when I phoned. “The union is being immature and territorial.” You mean the san men want to pick the trees up themselves, on an overtime shift, and then bury them? “Sort of,” he said.

Then the other shoe dropped: Manhattan’s DSNY-collected trees had been bound, along with most of the borough’s solid waste, for the incinerator in Newark. But the incinerator, it turned out, wasn’t permitted to accept “bulk vegetative waste.”

“It’s ludicrous that no one knew about the incinerator before,” Robert Lange said when I gave him a call. So what did you do? I asked. “We sent out one round of trucks to get the pristine trees, the ones without tinsel and decorations, and bring them for composting to Fresh Kills, which they did open. Then we sent out another round of trucks to get the dirty trees.” And where did they go? I asked, almost afraid of the answer. “To Wards Island, where Parks Department volunteers cleaned them.”

There was a pause in our conversation. “And this is saving $1.5 million?” I asked, thinking of the latest budget cuts. Lange wouldn’t answer on the record. “It sounds like a debacle,” I said before hanging up.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was a debacle. But it made people feel good.”

Chapter Thirteen

The Dream of Zero Waste

I
t was trash night, and Willy—a grizzled man in his sixties—padded into the yard to peer inside our recycling can, dedicated now just to metal. If the bottle bill covered cat- and dog-food cans, Willy would have been in hog heaven, but tonight there was nothing here to interest him. I’d set out empty bottles of Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter and Samuel Smith’s Organic Lager, but, like everyone else in the recycling world, Willy was particular about what he’d take. Discount Beverage, where he’d roll his overflowing cart at the end of the day, wouldn’t accept what it didn’t sell. I’d have to bring the beer bottles back to the food co-op if I wanted my two nickels back. I didn’t, actually, but returning was the right thing to do—it supported the bottle bill and it kept weight off our city trucks.

Willy, who didn’t offer his last name, made about ten dollars a day on the bottles and cans that Park Slope residents couldn’t be bothered to return. That was two hundred containers plucked from the garbage. Willy thought there were a lot more bottles around since the glass suspension. “But they’re harder to get,” he said. “They’re mixed in with the trash.” Digging them out was a big hassle. Willy didn’t like it, and neither did John Sullivan and Billy Murphy, who ended up with torn and slashed garbage bags.

It’s axiomatic that whenever something is perceived to have value, it will be fought over. And in many communities with curbside recycling programs, glass
does
have value. It is mixed with asphalt for paving, or it is pummeled into shards and used as an aggregate in construction, or into even tinier shards for sandblasting or fiberglass, or it is color separated by an optical sorter and melted down into new bottles. Making new glass from old glass yields 50 percent energy savings over the scratch method, but fewer than a third of the glass bottles sold in the United States are recycled into anything, let alone refilled. Having long ago dismantled their refillable-glass-bottle operations, bottlers and distributors don’t want to haul empties long distances back to their plants. Once upon a time, New York City’s Department of Transportation paved roadways with glassphalt, but then it decided simply to recycle its old asphalt into new. With the elimination of glass from the recipe, the system was thrown into turmoil. Broken glass coated with peanut butter and spaghetti sauce began piling up in recycling centers.

“You could make a snowball out of it.”

“I swear I saw a pile of it move.”

“The rats,” the gentleman next to me whispered in my ear.

We were sitting, more than a hundred of us, in a meeting room at Pace University, in lower Manhattan. The room had been set aside for a two-day recycling roundtable initiated by the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board, or CRAB, and the Center for Economic and Environmental Partnership. This was the Kyoto of recycling, a summit of industry types who wanted to make money off waste and avoid regulation, and environmentalists who wanted to keep waste out of landfills and incinerators. It had been about five months since the mayor had suspended plastic and glass recycling, and the meeting was one response to a city that seemed fresh out of solid-waste ideas.

For sixteen hours over two days, the participants discussed the minutiae of municipal recycling in a fiscal crisis. I heard about truck routes, labor unions, side- versus rear-loading trucks, single-stream versus dual-stream recycling, the effect of short-term contracts on capital improvements, pay as you throw, the virtues of dirty MRFs (materials recovery facilities that accepted recyclables bagged with garbage), the struggle to educate the public, and the scramble to claim unclaimed bottle deposits. Representatives from cities with landfill diversion rates in the 50 to 60 percent range talked about ways to increase tonnage, reduce contamination, whittle away costs, and boost revenue. Through almost all of it, the elderly representative from the Sierra Club slept.

Early on the second day, a student observing from the back row shouted out, “What about producer responsibility?” The room fell silent as industry reps looked around uncomfortably, contemplating a future in which any business that made and sold something agreed to take it back at the end of its useful life. The concept wasn’t new: in 1993, the NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz had written in the
Atlantic Monthly
that “the nation’s economy would be well served if municipal waste was reclassified as manufacturer’s waste—and the waste itself became the financial obligation of the consumer-products companies.” A chill settled thickly over the roundtable until a gentleman from the National Association for PET Container Resources bravely fielded the question: “We would not agree that sticking it to industry is fair.” That got a laugh, and then we broke for lunch.

Robert Haley was the big cat at the roundtable, the guy all the media wanted to interview. Apple-cheeked and enthusiastic, with a cap of short dark curls, he ran San Francisco’s recycling program, which had doubled its diversion rate—to 52 percent—while New York had slashed its program in half. San Francisco, Haley told the rapt audience during his PowerPoint presentation, was aiming for 75 percent diversion by 2010. In a few months, the city council would revise that optimistic goal, aiming for Zero Waste by 2020. From New York, San Francisco looked like a solid-waste utopia, with trucks that run on liquid natural gas, a massive composting operation, and happy Italian American workers making thirty dollars an hour, plus triple time on twelve holidays a year.

Before I left the roundtable, I dropped my plastic plate into the trash and chatted with Haley, who was momentarily free of admirers, about traveling through the garbage landscape. “San Francisco is full of kooks,” he told me, grinning. “Now the city is thinking about using the tidal power of the bay. Come on out, and I’ll show you our new MRF. It cost thirty-eight million and it’s just about to come on line.”

The MRF sprawled over 200,000 square feet on a pier in the Port of San Francisco. Approaching its front bays, I thought all the money must have gone inside, because the place looked like any other industrial warehouse in a grimy neighborhood of loading docks, cranes, and gravel mounds.

I had been touring San Francisco’s garbage infrastructure for two days—prowling around the city’s transfer station, poking into its curbside bins, and following its garbage trucks—and my sense of anticipation at seeing the MRF, coupled with jet lag, wasn’t what it could have been. Still, I was having fun. Haley had passed me on to Bob Besso, who worked for Norcal, the private company with which the city contracted to pick up refuse. Dressed in blue jeans and sneakers, Besso had the lankiness of a marathon runner. He was in his fifties, and he’d worked in recycling for decades. His and Haley’s easygoing attitude and their penchant for plain speaking were diametrically opposed to the formal inscrutability of New York’s sanitation operatives. The best part of hanging around Besso was his competitive streak: both he and Haley, over at the Department of Environment, were walking poster children for Zero Waste. Who could throw out less? Who had more radically altered his lifestyle to leave a smaller human stain?

The Zero Waste concept was a growing global phenomenon. Much of Australia had committed to achieving the goal in 2010, and resolutions had been passed in New Zealand, Toronto, twelve Asia-Pacific nations, Ireland, Scotland, the Haut-Rhin department in the Alsace region of France, several California counties, and the town of Carrboro, North Carolina (also known as “the Paris of the Piedmont”). So far, no community had reached this nirvana, a condition perfected only by nature. For humans to achieve zero waste, went the rhetoric, would require not only maximizing recycling and composting, but also minimizing waste, reducing consumption, ending subsidies for waste, and ensuring that products were designed to be reused, repaired, or recycled back into nature or the marketplace. Zero Waste, said Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation, had the potential to “motivate people to change their lifestyles, demand new products, and insist that corporations and governments behave in new ways.”

I didn’t take Zero Waste literally. I considered it a guiding principle, a rallying cry for green idealists. I understood its intensive recycling component, but what about goods that simply could not be recycled? I had in mind the Fuzzy Flower Maker hiding in Lucy’s closet, a craft kit left at my house by a summer subletter. It was a hideous thing: you put glue on the petals of plastic flowers, then stuck them inside a plastic “swirl chamber” where a battery-operated spinner dusted them with colored powder. How was I going to get rid of this thing when the spinner broke or the fuzzy powder ran out? Surely the time it took to mold this toy from virgin resin, to assemble its unrepairable parts, and to ship it to a store was far longer than its working lifespan. The thing weighed just over two pounds (I was still weighing everything) and would seriously skew my garbage average for the week.

Over lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant, I learned that Zero Waste wasn’t just rhetoric to Haley. “I don’t have a trash can at work,” he said. On his desk sat a grapefruit-sized ball of used staples—ferrous scrap that he couldn’t bear to throw out. “If I’m going to be a leader in Zero Waste, I have to live the life,” he said. I asked what effect this had on domestic harmony. “My partner is 99.9 percent with me,” he said, nodding enthusiastically.

“What’s the one-tenth-of-a-percent problem?”

“She draws the line at twist ties.”

“Well, you know you could strip the paper from the wires and—” I interrupted myself. Haley already knew how to recycle a twist tie. At home, he was diverting 95 percent of his waste from the landfill. The 5 percent he threw out was “manufactured goods”—recently some beyond-repair leather shoes. Worn-out sneakers, of course, were mailed to Nike, which shreds rubber and foam into flooring for gyms. The company accepts non-Nike footwear, too, and is also trying to tan leather without questionable toxins and developing shoes made of a new rubber compound that doubles as a biological nutrient—something that can be harmlessly returned to nature. This would be quite an improvement, since, according to William McDonough, conventional rubber soles are stabilized with lead that degrades into the atmosphere and soil as the shoe is worn. Rain sluices this lead dust into sewers, and thence into sludge bound for agricultural fields. According to the National Park Service, which has more than a passing interest in man-made stuff that lies around on the ground, leather shoes abandoned in the backcountry last up to fifty years (if they aren’t eaten, one presumes), and rubber boot soles go another thirty. Aluminum cans, agency workers predicted, would last eighty to one hundred years, and cigarette butts and wool socks between one and five.

McDonough’s 206-page book,
Cradle to Cradle,
was printed on “paper” made of plastic resins and inorganic fillers. The pages are smooth and waterproof, and the whole thing is theoretically recyclable into other “paper” products. The book weighs one pound, four ounces. A book of comparable length printed on paper made from trees weighs an entire pound less. “What do you think of that?” I asked Haley. He nearly spit out his mouthful of curried vegetables. “McDonough’s book will be landfilled! I’d rather cut down a tree!”