Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (37 page)

After two months in plastic, the compost was released into long windrows that would cure for another thirty days. An auger wormed its way down the row every three days, turning and aerating. At this stage, the compost looked rough—more like mulch and uncut tobacco than a fine loamy soil. It smelled earthy, of fungus and rot and mold, which took the shape of orange blobs and lacy white frills. It was the basis for new life, this evidence of death.

Unlike my front-yard composting bin, or Christina Datz-Romero’s community composting project under the Williamsburg Bridge, Jepson Prairie was a full-on industrial operation. It looked simple enough, but it involved fleets of heavy equipment running on diesel and tearing up the roadways. I shuddered to think of the greenhouse gases and volatile organic chemicals, which contribute to the formation of smog, pouring from the vents in the tubes, but what, really, was the alternative?

Anaerobic digesters! Tom Outerbridge would have suggested. In fact, Norcal would soon be contemplating this tactic, and probably in a spot much closer to the city. Every day, new restaurants and homes were signing on to San Francisco’s organics program—Jepson Prairie’s output grew by 70 percent in 2003. But the prairie could accommodate only so many windrows. And doubling capacity, the company’s goal, would put another twenty-three trucks on the road and pump an additional 1,020 pounds of VOCs into the air daily (938 more pounds than the county’s strict Air Quality Management District allowed). Something would have to give.

For now, though, Jepson Prairie continued to cure and screen its compost, then sell it to local wineries, organic farmers, and landscapers at five to ten dollars a yard. “That’s a good price, and it’s good quality,” Pryor said. “There’s lots of nitrogen in it because of the food. It’s black gold.”

Before we left the area, we stopped in at Eatwell Farm, where Nigel Walker annually spread about five hundred yards of black gold over his seventy bucolic acres of lavender, fruit trees, and vegetables, some of which he sold to the Greens restaurant in San Francisco. We admired Walker’s organic produce, our stomachs growling, and then squeezed into Pryor’s truck. We were so hungry we started nibbling at the lavender honey and rosemary salt that Walker had pressed upon us. Then we started arguing about where to eat lunch. There weren’t a lot of restaurants in nearby Dixon, and dietary restrictions further constrained our choices. Pryor had recently dropped from 330 pounds down to 308 after three weeks on the meat-centric Atkins diet, and he didn’t want to lose his edge. Gokaldis, on the other hand, was not only vegetarian but vegan. We finally settled on Mexican, but only if the rice wasn’t cooked in chicken stock and the beans contained no lard. It occurred to me that Nigel Walker’s produce, while certified organic, had been grown with compost that contained meat, with its attendant hormones and antibiotics, as well as yard trimmings that likely contained fertilizers and herbicides.

We were driving past neat rows of almond and walnut trees now, and the conversation segued to the agricultural value of night soil. Jepson Prairie used to mix biosolids from the local wastewater treatment plant into its product, Pryor said, but once farmers started spreading the stuff on food crops, that practice had to stop. We wondered out loud whether Nigel Walker, an extremely earthy guy, would want biosolids on his fields. Pryor said, in the tone of someone offering inside information, “Nigel isn’t really into using shit.”

I pondered that for a moment. “I don’t think he’s exactly
anti
-shit.”

“Yeah,” Pryor said thoughtfully. “You’d think he’d be pro-shit.”

“I think he’s pro
his
shit,” I said. We nodded in simpatico, then parked the car for lunch.

I didn’t want to leave the Bay Area without visiting Urban Ore, the reuse and recycling center in Berkeley. The emporium, located in a low-slung industrial neighborhood near I-80, bought about 85 percent of its goods from individuals and wrote trade credits for the rest. Two-thirds of sales were building materials, which were stacked outside a corrugated warehouse in an asphalt yard. I saw hot tubs and sliders, wrought iron gates and shower stalls, medicine cabinets, lumber, brick, and pipe. It was like Home Depot, but nothing was shrink-wrapped or new. Inside, Urban Ore looked and smelled more like the Salvation Army, with racks of clothing, shelves of housewares, kitchen chairs, books, toys, and the usual complement of bric-a-brac. I saw stalls of bikes and toilets, tables laden with doorknobs, hinges, and LPs. I saw louvered shutters and appliances, a five-foot-wide Frigidaire in beautiful condition, a midcentury monster labeled “big ol’ freezer.” Urban Ore had been called the “Best Urban Junkyard” by a local newspaper, and its single editorial comment said it all: “Fuck Ikea.”

I strolled around and watched contractors picking through faucets and moms flipping through clothes racks as Johnny Cash spun on a turntable. A sign read: “Wasting is obsolete.” If something didn’t sell it was broken down and recycled: bike wheels into metal and rubber, beach chairs into aluminum and plastic webbing.

What about the clothes that won’t sell? I asked Dan Knapp, the center’s founder. “We try to get textiles to handlers who wash and sort them,” he said. “They either ship them to developing countries or sell them to boutiques or they shred them for fiber. They’re turned into wiping cloths or cloths for cleaning up chemical spills.” Knapp had introduced the concept of “total recycling” in a 1989 white paper, listing twelve master categories of waste. There were reusable goods (including intact or repairable home or industrial appliances, household goods, clothing, intact materials in demolition debris, building materials, business supplies and equipment, lighting fixtures, and any manufactured item or naturally occurring object that can be repaired or used again as is), paper, metals, glass, textiles, plastics (including plastic cases of consumer goods such as telephones or electronic equipment, film, and tires), plant debris, putrescibles (including animal, fruit, and vegetable debris, cooked food, manure, offal, and sewage sludge), wood, ceramics (including rock, tile, china, brick, concrete, plaster, and asphalt), soils, and chemicals (including acids, bases, solvents, fuels, lubricating oils, and medicines).

The list seemed fairly comprehensive, but there was always something, at least in my garbage, that seemed to lie outside the bounds of reuse. When I asked Knapp if he thought Zero Waste was truly possible in its strictest form, he barked, “Yes! But you’ve got to have hundreds of categories—that’s the point of recycling. Garbage is just one category. Urban Ore has twenty-eight categories of doors. Nonferrous metal has thirty-five to forty categories. We landfill less than five percent of the five thousand tons we process each year.”

“What’s in that percentage?”

“It’s painted wood and dust and dirt. Some film plastics.”

I was surprised. “Does that include all those eight-track cassettes and old videos on, like, how to refinish a chair?”

“People buy and watch those, believe it or not. Or they make art out of them.” I held my tongue, wondering how much art made of eight-track cassettes the public could stomach.

“What’s your own trash like, at home?” I asked.

“My garbage is about six pounds a week, for two people. It’s milk cartons and plastics. I bring the containers to a drop-off center. I don’t use the provided recycling system where I live, in Richmond. They mix it all up. Commingled is contaminated. MRFs give you grossly contaminated stuff. Glass producers don’t want sand and grit in it, and paper recyclers don’t want glass in their stuff.”

I was still getting used to the idea that everything in my kitchen trash bin would fit into a master category. “What about rubber bands?” I asked. Every day I got one from the delivered newspaper, one from the bundled mail, and sometimes another from the stems of fresh produce. I refused to throw them out, but I worried my collection would someday rival that of the Keishk brothers, who had built a 2,700-pound ball of rubber bands right here in San Francisco. (The Keishks bought their rubber bands in bulk from a company in Ohio.)

Knapp said, “There’s a company in Berkeley that makes interesting personal goods from rubber—stuff like handbags. But I can compost them. They’re not latex but synthetic, and they will break down.” (One day I had an epiphany: I gave all my rubber bands back to the letter carrier, who was happy to reuse them.)

I told Knapp about the time I’d spent looking at San Francisco’s MRF and the compost operation. He wasn’t impressed. “Norcal is still just a big company making money off waste,” he said. “There should
be
no waste.” And the MRF? “A MRF is just another cover for a monopolistic operation. What I want to see is complex economic development—a quality operation. If you’re going to achieve Zero Waste, you’ve got to use all the tools in the toolbox. You need less packaging, you need manufacturers taking it back, designing things that can be broken down or adapted. You need recycled-content laws. You need to provide an infrastructure for entrepreneurs to function.”

Back in New York City, waste capital of the world, I pondered how much energy it took to push around San Francisco’s carrot tops, pinot noir bottles, and sushi containers. The work provided jobs, and it probably kept some natural resources—nitrogen, silica, fossil fuels—in the ground. But I couldn’t help thinking at times that we were, at great cost, shifting our messes from one place to another while a private waste management company greedily toted up its earnings.

I believed that making new things from old things saved natural resources, including vast amounts of energy. (Even John Tierney acknowledged that recycling reduces pollution and energy use overall.) But I knew also that individual recycling efforts were puny compared to the larger world of waste. Of all the waste generated in the United States—including mining and agricultural waste, oil and gas waste, food processing residues, construction and demolition debris, hazardous waste, incinerator ash, cement-kiln dust, and other categories too rarefied to describe—municipal solid waste represented a mere 2 percent. Two percent!

Yet even when residents doubted the efficacy of recycling—and many New Yorkers did, thanks to the suspension and, of course, Tierney—they continued to go through the motions. Across the nation, more people recycle than vote. Recycling is a religion for some, and setting out bottles, cans, and newspapers is redemptive—a spiritual balm for our collective solid-waste guilt. We are powerless to replenish the ocean’s fish stocks, to scour the chemicals from our rivers, to combat rising atmospheric temperatures, to halt the spread of exotic weeds and the global decline in biodiversity, but we can, by god, continue to sort our garbage, to make our offerings at the curb.

In a 1996
In These Times
article called “Pavlov’s Pack Rats,” Joel Bleifuss wrote, “In many ways, recycling can be seen as a perverse form of penance in which individual recyclers absolve themselves from participating in an environmentally destructive culture.” Bleifuss called the penance perverse because it wasn’t individuals producing garbage but corporations—the soda bottlers, the catalog companies, the toy manufacturers, and the food packagers.

I didn’t completely buy Bleifuss’s argument. No one had held a gun to my head and forced me to buy a plastic wind-up fish for my daughter. I did choose naked green peppers at the co-op over plastic-wrapped peppers at the supermarket, but the choices weren’t always so easy. Who made a wind-up fish that biodegraded? Or sold printer cartridges without a blister pack? Too often, our only choices were between one overpackaged, poorly made product and another. I came down somewhere in the middle of the argument: individuals could not shirk responsibility for the waste that passed through their hands, but neither were producers blameless. I had begun my travels in trash writing letters to manufacturers about their excessive packaging, single-use products, and Frankenstein designs. None had responded. I knew it would take laws (like landfill bans on single-use beverage containers and mandates for recycled content), sharp penalties, and massively collective consumer action to induce change. Still, no matter how trivial my kitchen recycling operation might appear, I considered it a moral act. It reminded me of the connection between my daily life and the natural world, from which every bit of the stuff arrayed about me had come.

Chapter Fourteen

The Ecological Citizen

S
orting garbage is the ultimate Zen experience of our society,” the Garbage Project’s William Rathje has said, “because you feel it, you smell it, you see it, you record it; you are in tactile intimacy with [it]. Sometime or other, everybody ought to sort garbage.”

I had been pawing through my garbage for nearly a year, sorting it into piles bound for the landfill, for recyclers, for my compost bin, and for hazardous-waste quarantines. I was sick of the mess in my kitchen, the weighing of bottles and cans, the bags. And yet I couldn’t quite let my garbage go. The budding social theorists in Robin Nagle’s New York University class called garbage “unmarked,” as opposed to marked, which meant it was not studied and was hardly remarked upon. Now that I was done quantifying my waste, would it once again become unmarked to me? Already I felt my attention slipping. Just as I had quit noticing what type of strollers were de rigueur once I stopped perambulating with an infant, would I soon fail to notice if a paper receipt landed in the trash can instead of in the recycling? It made me a little sad to think of mindfulness fading.

And so I retired from weighing my garbage but continued to sort it into piles. It was a habit, and I’d feel guilty if I quit. I knew too much about where my refuse was headed, about its potential impacts on people and other living things. The conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, in his essay “Round River,” “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” I’d always found the quote a little grandiose, but it came to mind whenever I was tempted to put something divertible into the regular trash. I wasn’t convinced my compulsive sorting was doing much good, but it made me feel less bad about so many other things.