Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (35 page)

To Haley and Bob Besso, landfilling was the ultimate evidence of failure. Avoiding the hole in the ground—which in San Francisco’s case was owned by Waste Management, Norcal’s archenemy—had become a game to them, albeit a game with serious consequences. Haley didn’t use his paper napkin at the restaurant, and he scraped the last bit of curry from his plate. But we all knew there was waste behind his meal—in the kitchen, on the farm, in the factory that made the box in which his bok choy had been carted to San Francisco.

I wondered if Zero Waste really meant anything, considering the limits of our recycling capability and our reluctance to alter our lifestyles. It was as dreamy an idea as cars that run on water. And just as appealing to industry, too. “Zero Waste is a sexy way to talk about garbage,” Haley said. “It gets people excited.” I considered that for a moment. Could we solve our garbage problems by making garbage sexy?

Seeing how little I could throw out was fun for me, if not exactly sexy. I’d gotten caught up in the game, back home with my kitchen scale and Lucy’s blue toboggan. I recorded my weights in a little book, I crunched my numbers, and I measured my success by how many days it took to fill a plastic grocery sack. Being handed a purple Fuzzy Flower Maker, in this context, was like picking up a Go to Jail card in Monopoly: it set me back several turns.

Faced with a child who coveted such a toy, I asked myself, “What would Haley do?” The answer was easy: he wouldn’t have considered buying it. In the Zero Waste world, Fuzzy Flower Makers either wouldn’t exist or they’d be made of “nutrients” that could be reused in some other form. (If Haley had children, and he didn’t, he’d probably make them play with the biological nutrient called flowers, which come with their own colored powder—pollen.)

In the months to come, I’d find people who neither lived nor worked in the Bay Area who were having fun (if not sexy fun) with garbage reduction. Shaun Stenshol, president of Maui Recycling Service, had toyed with the idea of decreeing a Plastic Free Month, but ultimately deemed such a test too easy. Instead, he issued a Zero Waste Challenge. Over the course of four weeks, Maui residents and biodiesel users Bob and Camille Armantrout produced eighty-six pounds of waste, of which all but four (mostly dairy containers and Styrofoam from a new scanner) was recyclable. Alarmed to note that 35 percent of their weight was beer bottles, which they recycled, the Armantrouts vowed to improve. Bob ordered beer-making equipment to help reduce the amount of glass they generated, and Camille promised to start making her own yogurt. Despite these efforts, the Armantrouts didn’t win the Challenge. The winner of the contest, as so often happens, was its inventor. All on his own, Stenshol had produced an even one hundred pounds of waste, of which he recycled ninety-nine pounds.

San Francisco had one thing going for it that New York probably never would: a pay-as-you-throw system. It involved three separate curbside bins. The black one was for refuse; the blue was for recyclables (metal, plastic, glass, and paper); and the green was for “organics,” which included yard waste, kitchen scraps, and food-stained cardboard. Weekly pickup cost $16.49 a month for a thirty-two-gallon container of refuse (the price dropped 20 percent if you used a twenty-gallon container), but recycling and composting were free. Eventually, the city would raise its garbage rates and start charging for recycling, but for now dumping milk bottles into the blue bin was free.

One of the chief objections to pay as you throw in New York City was the burden it placed on low-income residents. Was it fair for them to spend a larger proportion of their income on garbage disposal? “We have a reduced-rate program, but very few people have applied for it,” Besso said. He didn’t care: he was adamantly opposed to the program. “I think everyone should pay for their trash. What are low-income people throwing out? They’re poor!”

It sounded harsh, but it is obvious to anyone who has contemplated the contents of a packer truck that people with a lot of money discard more things than people without a lot of money. Rich people remodel and upgrade; they buy new clothes and landscape like crazy. But poor people, I realized, are often guilty (by necessity) of buying cheap goods, stuff that falls apart and can’t be fixed. I’d done it plenty of times. Instead of buying a more expensive shower curtain that could stand up to repeated washings, I’d buy a cheap plastic one and replace it in six months.

Pay as you throw had been proposed in New York City, but the Department of Sanitation worried about residents dumping their household waste in the streets. More than six thousand communities across the nation—including big cities like Minneapolis, population 373,188, and small towns like Dog Patch, Arkansas, population 608—used some form of pay as you throw. And yes, they had problems with roadside dumping and with people sneaking garbage into cans other than their own. Besso had lobbied to remove litter baskets from San Francisco’s street corners for just this reason, but the Department of Public Works won that battle. It galled Besso that the litter baskets were topped with separate bins for recyclables, which made it easy for street people to poach bottles for the five-cent return. “They’re stealing from us,” he said.

We were driving around town now, following garbage trucks and poking into garbage bins. In some neighborhoods, the bins were padlocked. “The green ones contain edible food,” Besso explained. “We don’t want people putting recyclables into the refuse, and we don’t want people poaching the deposit containers from the recycling.”

Behind a restaurant in the Embarcadero, Besso proudly pointed to a busboy tipping food scraps into green bins. Before the city had introduced organics into its recycling program, its diversion rate was close to New York’s. Collecting the green stuff had raised San Francisco’s rate by 15 percent, and a lot of that came from restaurants. The food scraps were trucked to Vacaville, California, a couple hours away, and composted at a landfill run by Norcal. “A lot of these restaurants buy produce that’s grown in their own compost,” Besso said. “So we’re closing the loop.”

We headed for Chinatown, which had the worst diversion rate in the city. “Their consumptive and disposal habits are unique,” said Besso. “We lose ten to twenty percent of metal from residential bins in this neighborhood to poaching. The Chinese wrap their fresh food in paper, not plastic. We just don’t get a lot of stuff out of them. The route is difficult and tight, and the people just don’t care. They pay to throw it all out.”

Norcal had adapted to some of the city’s many peculiarities. On the narrowest streets, workers hunted down refuse in skinny trucks. In one neighborhood, they used rear-loading dual-bin trucks; in another, they used side-loaders. In the steep-sided neighborhoods near Coit Tower, they abandoned their trucks and went on foot. With burlap sacks, they hiked up and down hillsides fragrant with camellias and magnolias, collecting foie gras wrappings and fizzy-water bottles from maisonettes covered in vines. Each semiautomated truck had one worker, who picked up an average of eight tons of trash and recyclables during an eight-hour shift. In New York, by contrast, it took two men to collect an average of 9.7 tons per shift. (Toronto took the efficiency prize, with workers collecting, on average, twenty-five tons of trash and recyclables during their ten-hour shift.)

Curbside recycling isn’t cost effective by the usual calculations. But like police protection and libraries, it is a service that the public—especially in places like San Francisco, Madison, Wisconsin, and New York City—have come to expect. No one requires garbage collection to pay for itself; why should recycling? John Tierney, who became the nation’s recycling antichrist with his 1996
New York Times Magazine
article “Recycling Is Garbage,” argued that recycling cost more in labor than it saved and that there were no shortages of natural resources to make new paper, cans, and bottles. So why bother? The article generated more letters, two-thirds of them outraged, than any other in the magazine’s history and spurred lengthy point-by-point rebuttals from the NRDC and Environmental Defense. Eight years on, Tierney has not recanted. “I made one mistake in that article,” he told me. “I overestimated the value of real estate taken up by a recycling can in the kitchen.” Still, he allowed that automation at MRFs might make some recycling programs economical. Until then, it wasn’t worth his time, he said, to walk a soda can down the office hall to a recycling bin. “Materials keep getting cheaper, and labor is more expensive.”

Besso poked his head down an alley to look for recycling carts but turned around when he heard the clang of cymbals. A group of Chinese men was marching down the middle of the street. Dressed in saffron robes with burlap hoods, they carried bamboo poles and swung incense. A large photograph, a black-and-white portrait, rode in the backseat of a convertible. “I’ve never seen that before,” Besso said, staring at the burlap hoods. “Those look like our sacks.”

The funeral procession passed, and we moved on to Pacific Heights, where we watched a sanitation worker open a gate underneath an elegant five-unit building. (For a price, workers would even come inside your home to collect garbage from your kitchen.) In an alley adjacent to the garage, both a ninety-six-gallon recycling bin and a ninety-six-gallon garbage bin were full, but the green bin, for organics, was empty. As I was turning back toward the truck, a young man in a cashmere jacket came whistling up the street. This was his house, his trash. “Hello,” I said to him. “I was just wondering where your compost is.”

“Compost?” he repeated.

“Yes, the green bin.”

“I didn’t even know we had a green bin,” he said. “We have no incentive to compost. The landlord pays the trash bill. Besides, there’s no room in my kitchen for another bag.”

It was refreshing, in a way, to see that San Francisco’s trash utopia was a little bit of a fairy tale. The city spent two dollars per resident on garbage education. New York, which spent about a dollar per person, was perennially criticized for shortchanging recycling education efforts. But San Francisco’s Chinatown wasn’t pulling its weight, and neither were the city’s high-rises, where it was administratively challenging to enforce pay as you throw, physically challenging to manhandle tons of bulky recyclables, and entomologically challenging to store quantities of food waste. And in a crowded city where people were all too used to overpaying for their housing, it was easy to see how some would pay a little bit more—call it a Tierney tax—to free up an extra square foot of kitchen space.

Haley thought San Francisco would reach its goal of 75 percent diversion in 2010 by continuing to roll out its three-bin program in every neighborhood of the city. “We’d expand the recycling, go after packaging, mostly—food service and take-out containers,” he said. “We’d also have to make recycling mandatory. If you don’t recycle, we won’t pick it up.” Ultimately, though, achieving Zero Waste would require legislation that mandated high percentages of recycled content in bottles and other materials, as well as the dreaded (by industry) extended producer responsibility, in which manufacturers not only design products made of recyclable materials but also take back and reuse their packaging. In Germany, which is at the forefront of this movement, manufacturers are required to pick up discarded packaging at the point of sale—the supermarket or the department store, for example. The stores don’t like it, but between 1991 and 1997, packaging declined by 13 percent, per capita, compared to a 14 percent increase in the United States.

That San Francisco managed to divert 52 percent of its waste today, I realized, was largely because it collected organics and because commercial establishments were included in the city’s figures. (New York businesses were required to recycle, although the law was not enforced. Private carters handled commercial waste, and the DSNY didn’t include their efforts in their figures.) Like New York’s Department of Sanitation, Norcal collected bulk items from city streets and had drop-off sites for electronics and other items difficult to recycle. But unlike New York, San Francisco didn’t landfill or incinerate those discards. A mattress, for example, was separated into its component parts: cotton and horsehair and springs and wood, all of which got reused.

“The labor costs as much as tipping it in the landfill,” Haley said. “But that doesn’t matter. We’re making a point. We’re taking a long-term broad view and trying to get to Zero Waste.” We were back at Haley’s office now, sitting around a table with a centerpiece of three tiny plastic trash bins: black, green, and blue. I couldn’t help thinking that they’d ultimately end up in the dump. On my right was Virali Gokaldis, who was writing a report on recycling for the Natural Resources Defense Council. A policy analyst, she had been taking painstaking notes on how much the city paid to collect waste and process it. Over and again, she asked Haley for the breakdown of costs and rates and savings. Haley provided no numbers, but he repeatedly spread his hands four feet apart and declared, “I’ve got this many folders on the shelves in my office.” It was unclear whether Gokaldis was being invited to pore over these data, but the momentum was stomped by Haley’s boss, Jared Blumenfeld, who now said, “Shit. If we tried to figure all the costs of recycling a mattress we’d never get anything done. We say, Do we want to landfill this thing or not?”

As one, Besso, Haley, and Blumenfeld shouted, “No!”

Vast and tumultuous with the roar of front-end loaders and the crash of breaking glass, San Francisco’s $38 million MRF loomed before us. Avoiding packer trucks on the tipping floor, I sidled along a wall. Like my transfer station on Court Street, the MRF wasn’t designed to accommodate visitors. There were no waiting rooms or receptionists, no viewing galleries or carpeted hallways. The place was all business.

The MRF appeared to be one single contraption, a sprawling machine composed of hoppers, balers, and bins connected by belts, chutes, and ducts. The place could handle up to fourteen hundred tons of material a day, though it currently processed less than half of that. From where I stood, everything appeared to be in motion: eighty-seven different conveyor belts were lifting commodities up, dropping them down through chutes, and sweeping them through finger screens, disc screens, and human hands. A blast of air floated paper toward six “lines,” where workers sorted and fed it into vacuum ducts leading to balers. Magnets pulled out steel; eddy currents spun out aluminum. The air smelled pleasantly of beer.