Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (36 page)

I climbed a metal staircase to an elevated meeting room that overlooked the plant. The floor in here was carpeted and clean, which immediately set this MRF miles above any other garbage facility I’d visited. I gazed through plate glass windows and made out, against a dark wall, a line of workers plucking plastic from a conveyor belt at waist height. They toiled inside wire cages, protected from flying debris. “Could I walk down and see what they’re doing?” I asked a plant manager. “Absolutely not,” came the answer. I wanted to see what the workers—all of them African American—took from the line and what they ignored. Denied access, I wondered if there was a lot of reject material or if the job was dangerous. I knew that worker turnover on the line was high. The job seemed only marginally less miserable than the metal-picking job, handled by elderly women working a conveyor belt, at Hugo Neu. This was one of the dark undersides of the green revolution, I thought: everyone wanted to recycle, but nobody wanted to do the recycling.

When the MRF had first opened, a few months earlier, workers separated plastics numbered one through seven. Now they focused on just two categories: PET and everything else. I asked the manager if he had to reconfigure a lot of equipment when the object of desire switched from HDPE, for example, to LDPE. “Nope,” he said. “We just tell the people on the line to do it.” Thirty-eight million dollars, I thought, and still it comes down to that.

PET was the most valuable plastic that rolled through the MRF. It was sold at a fairly steady rate to a broker, who in turn sold it to clothing manufacturers. A company called Epic, in the East Bay, shredded San Francisco’s plastics numbered 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 into pellets they melted and extruded into lumber. Sometimes, if the market was strong, number two plastic was sold for sleeping-bag insulation. Number three plastic, aka PVC, was the demon seed of recycling, a contaminant to almost any batch of melted plastic it touched. Norcal collected it at curbside and drove it to the MRF. Mixed in with other grades, it soon became Epic’s problem.

Besso made it sound as if Bay Area plastics were, for the most part, recycled locally. But according to California’s Integrated Waste Management Board, the majority of PET plastics and about half of all the HDPE collected within the state in 2001 had been exported. San Francisco’s diversion rate may have topped 50 percent in 2003, but California overall was actually fifth in the nation that year, recycling at a rate of 40.2 percent. In first place came Maine (at 49 percent), followed by Oregon (48.8 percent), then Minnesota (45.6 percent), and Iowa (41.7 percent). Apparently, California was little different from the nation as a whole: it contained a myriad of recycling microclimates that changed from moment to moment. What was eagerly collected in one community was pure garbage just over the county line, and the rules could change overnight. The rainmaker was the buyer, helped along by municipal finances and political will. But mostly, successful recycling depended on markets.

Without getting down among the San Francisco MRF’s conveyors or poring over a schematic, I found it hard to follow a load from the tipping floor through the sorting lines to its proximate destination: bins and bales. I had to be content with pressing my nose to the back window of the conference room and watching as lines of cans and paper, now combed into single strands from the tangle up front, rolled into a hopper. Iron walls closed in on each load, cubing it. A whiplike arm wrapped the bale in wire, and a pushing blade shoved out, like meat from a grinder, a nearly continuous stream of four-by-four-by-six-foot rectangles. Forklifts buzzed around the back half of the MRF, arranging 1,550-pound bales of paper and 1,000-pound blocks of shiny aluminum cans—red, silver, and blue—into walls that rose twenty feet. Pigeons swooped from the rafters. Rats crept from the shadows and, like tourists among ancient ruins, picked their way through narrow passageways.

When New York sold its paper and its metal, the city profited. When San Francisco sold its paper and its metal, Norcal did. “Selling the recyclables is just cream for us,” Besso explained. His company was paid through garbage collection fees and was guaranteed, by the city, a certain rate per ton; if it could supplement that income by selling any part of that waste, then more power to it. “Don’t forget we’re paying to tip at the landfill in Altamont, so we want to tip as little as possible,” Besso added.

Every six to eight hours, a tractor-trailer left the Port of San Francisco for the landfill, laden with broken glass, rubber bands, plastic milk jug tops, and twist ties, among other items. Taken together, these scraps and orphans were the moral equivalent of my purple Fuzzy Flower Maker. How could we achieve Zero Waste in a world where such things fell through the cracks, where no category (or, to be precise, no market) existed to catch them?

Glass was the most musical of all recyclables. It tinkled steadily down through cracks and onto conveyors with a sound not unlike wind chimes. Unbroken bottles sorted by color provided a steady bottom counterpoint as they rolled,
clunk-clunk,
into bins. Norcal sold the broken stuff to a middleman, who sold cullet for road base, fiberglass, and Gallo wine bottles. Any bottles that completed the journey from the packer truck, through the manipulations of the front-end loader, and out the other end of the MRF in one piece were rewarded with renewed life as a beverage bottle. “Even using cullet,” said Besso, who’d gotten his start in the business washing bottles, “it’s cheaper to make a bottle with old glass than from silica. You use less energy because the glass doesn’t have to be as hot.”

In 2001, nineteen states had dropped glass from one or more of their curbside programs, but other cities forged on. In Portland, Oregon, residents protected their glass bottles and jars from breakage by placing them within paper bags inside their recycling bins; san men placed these bags in a separate compartment of their recycling truck. Seattleites also kept glass apart from their metal, paper, and plastic: it was pulled out at the MRF, then optically sorted and sold to a local manufacturer of glass containers. In cities with single-stream recycling, like Phoenix, paper buffered the glass. San Francisco was still experimenting with different compaction rates, looking to keep bottles and jars in one piece. California and Oregon had strong incentives to recycle: the states had established minimum-content laws for glass products, including beverage containers and fiberglass insulation. In California, said Besso, this law drove the demand for glass cullet, whether mixed or single color.

I wondered if Besso was jealous of Seattle. He had recently sent me an article headlined “Emerald City Isn’t as Green as It Used to Be” and warned me that the only reason Seattle’s rate of diversion from the landfill looked so rosy—rosier than his city’s—was because residents sent so much yard waste to a compost facility. I called Rebecca Warren, who lived in Seattle, to see what it was like living in a recycling mecca, a place on the verge of collecting commercial food scraps for a digester and banning all recyclables from household trash and all paper from commercial waste.

“Every Wednesday morning,” Warren told me, happy to discuss her detritus, “a truck comes for my trash. Every other Wednesday, another truck comes for two different recycling containers. One holds metal, plastic, paper, and gable tops [those peak-roofed cardboard cartons used for milk and juice]; the other is a bin for all colors of glass. On the nonrecycling Wednesday, another truck comes around for yard waste. But I don’t use that truck.” It’s not that Warren didn’t have yard waste—she had plenty. She just didn’t want to give it up.

Instead, she shoved her branches and garden stalks into a four-foot-long composting cylinder. Her leaves, and her neighbors’ leaves, went into a pile for the cultivation of leaf mold. “Leaf mold is killer,” she said, meaning it made excellent mulch for her extensive garden. Debris from that operation ended up in either another random compost pile or, if it was thorny, thick-leaved, and “horrible,” in her truck, which she’d eventually tip at the town compost site. There, it would be transformed with the rest of Seattle’s yard waste into Cedar Grove compost and sold throughout the region.

I thought Warren was finished describing her domestic scrap operations, but there was more. “I put some of my kitchen food waste into a trunk-sized worm bin, which produces a high-nutrient, fine humus,” she continued, “and some goes to a ‘green cone’ composter, which looks like a flat-topped volcano with a below-ground leachate pit.” The cone produced a lower-nutrient compost than did the worms, though with far less effort. Because neither method seemed to be consuming eggshells, Warren recently began collecting them as well, in a jar on her kitchen counter—a way station until she determined the shells’ highest and best use. Twice a year Warren organized a clothes swap; once she brought an old mercury thermometer to a household drop-off site; she hadn’t produced a drop of electronic waste in her life; and she placed her spent alkaline batteries in the trash because the city’s recycling coordinator had told her it was okay.

Warren seemed slightly fanatic to me, especially with those eggshells, but I knew her heart was in the right place, because she regularly gave the sanest sort of environmental advice, under the pseudonym Umbra, to online readers of her
Grist Magazine
column. Though she lived in a city that enabled her recycling compulsion, Umbra constantly urged others to lighten up, to quit worrying about the tiny things. “Readers ask me what to do with a prescription pill bottle if their curbside program won’t take it,” Warren said to me. “I really think people have too many choices. Even the waste stream is confusing.” Where the pill bottle went, she said, wasn’t important. “They should worry about the big things, like transportation and housing. What are they driving? How big is their home heating bill?”

The following day, Besso collected Gokaldis and me, accompanied by two NRDC interns, and drove us north through the East Bay toward Sacramento. Within an hour we were in farm country. Freshly tilled fields alternated with freshly sprouted condominium clusters. Just south of Vacaville we turned east, where the sky was big and periodically shadowed by low-flying jets homing in on Travis Air Force Base.

Yesterday had been devoted to the contents of San Francisco’s blue bins. Today we were on the trail of the green bins, the organics. The J&B Sanitary Landfill sprawled for hundreds of acres, but the part we were most interested in was the small portion called Jepson Prairie Organics. Jepson was a sister company to J&B, and they were both owned by Norcal, which was beginning to look as megalomaniacal, to me, as Waste Management. San Francisco sent fifty thousand tons of food scraps and yard waste to Jepson Prairie each year. “That’s wet tons,” said Greg Pryor, the landfill manager. He was bearlike and affable, standing six-foot-five, with wheat-colored hair, tobacco-stained teeth, and a beard that covered only the margins of his cheeks. Every now and then he put a chaw of tobacco in his mouth and spat into a Styrofoam cup, a plastic for which there was currently no recycling market.

Jepson received three hundred tons of food waste a day, some of which came from San Francisco residents, but most of which came from about eleven hundred institutions looking to lower their garbage bills. Accompanied by Pryor and Besso, I walked up a truck ramp to get a bird’s-eye view of the same stuff I was tossing into my own compost bin. The food was dumped into a grinder, which spewed it into a conical pile on the ground. I saw a smattering of parsley tops, some orange peels, a Christmas tree, apples beyond their prime, cardboard, coffee grounds, and, after a slight zephyr came up, the BART card of one of the NRDC interns. “Oh, no!” she cried. “The screener will get that,” Pryor said, unfazed by the possibility of contamination.

There was a chance that the eggshells and bread crusts arrayed before me were the remnants of foodie shrines like Zuni Café and Greens, places I longed to eat at. But the organic matter could just as easily have come from UC Davis’s veterinary barns or even the state penitentiary at Vacaville, which made a daily drop. “You’re lucky,” Pryor said now. “The prison truck is just coming in.”

We heard the
beep-beep-beep
first, then watched the dump truck back up to the bottom of the pile. “It doesn’t dump from the ramp into the grinder?” I asked Pryor.

“You’ll see,” he said. The gate of the truck swung open, and its contents sloshed to the ground. The food, which was wet and predominantly orange, had been precut for knifeless prisoners into tiny bits.

“It looks like vomit,” an intern observed.

“Yep,” Pryor answered, spitting into his cup.

The pile smelled rich but not particularly garbagey at this moment. Still, insects have a keener sense of smell than humans, and that’s why pheromone traps, which drowned flies in a ring of water, dangled under the truck ramp. Pryor also released parasitic wasps, which lay their eggs inside live flies. When the wasp larvae are born, they chew their way out of their host, a surefire way to end the fly’s reproductive career.

A front-end loader arrived now to mix scoops of food with yard waste, then dump them into the hopper of a bagging machine. With a forty-eight-horsepower push ram, the machine stuffed would-be compost into a two-hundred-foot-long, twelve-foot-diameter bag made of black PVC plastic. “It’s like stuffing a sausage,” Pryor said. As the organic material inside the tube decomposed, the temperature climbed.

“We need to get 131 degrees for three readings in a row,” Pryor said, in order to nurture thermophilic organisms. “From 90 to 120 degrees is the mesophilic range. Bugs like that. The pathogens are killed at 131. Let it get too hot and you kill the good ones.” He regulated the temperature with a blower, which forced air through four-inch perforated pipes that ran the length of the tubes.

I strolled the muddy path between bags—there were eighteen of them cooking at once—and kicked at an escaped brussels sprout. I leaned against a bag. It was packed hard and it radiated heat like a furnace. A small ventilation hole gave off enough steam to warm leftovers. I felt a nearly irresistible urge to climb onto a bag and skip down the long fat row, like Dick Van Dyke on the rooftops of Mary Poppins’s London. Already stray cats sprawled up there, basking in the by-product of biotic decomposition, oblivious to the overhead jets and the periodic blast of a shotgun, intended to scare birds from the landfill.