Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (38 page)

Since the beginning of July, the Hugo Neu Corporation had been taking, in addition to household metal, the city’s gable-top containers and narrow-necked plastic bottles numbered 1 and 2. I saved plastic bags and large-mouthed plastic numbered 2, 4, and 5 for the food co-op; tied up paper for the curbside collection; put organics in the compost pile; set beer bottles on the street for Willy; saved batteries and other household hazardous waste in a basket destined for the drop-off center; and left everything else—including glass, for which a market had yet to be found—for John Sullivan and his new partner, Mike Perrani (Murphy had finally retired). Unfortunately, the city had dialed back recycling pickups to once every other week (and the co-op accepted recyclables on the same schedule), so the piles grew, and my kitchen was more like a MRF than ever.

The compost wasn’t in such great shape, either. My neighbors on the first floor had taken some “rich, dark, soil-like material” from the bottom, but the bin was still pretty full of recognizable food scraps. One morning I went downstairs to collect some dirt for my houseplants: I’d doused half of them with NYOFCo’s pelletized biosolids a few months earlier, and the hopped-up fertilizer had nearly killed them. I attacked the top layer of the compost with the potato fork and immediately recoiled in horror. My tines had upturned a writhing mass of worms. And these were no gardener’s friend, the slim red
Eisenia foetida
. They looked more like bloated maggots, ribbed, white, and about an inch long. The worms, or larvae, made me think twice about my plans for that ultimate piece of garbage, my own dead body. Cremation is energy intensive and polluting, especially if you have mercury in your teeth; and conventional burial pollutes groundwater with embalming fluids. I’d always thought I’d like to be buried, au naturel, in a wood near a body of water, something like Walden Pond, and let the worms do their thing. Now I had second thoughts.

Deeply disturbed by the pasty grubs, I reburied them and in a zombielike trance went back upstairs.

When I finally sat down to crunch my kitchen garbage numbers, I found that two adults and one child had in ten months sent to the dump an average of 4.65 pounds of trash a week, which was 19.5 times lower than the national average (using the EPA’s per person figure). Over that same period I’d theoretically diverted 680 pounds of metal, glass, plastic, and paper (glass collection was still suspended, so after weighing all those jars and bottles, I regretfully placed them back in the trash), and tumbled 221 pounds of green material into my compost bin. Had all 1,100 pounds gone to Bethlehem on my own private truck, it would have cost me fifty-seven dollars to tip.

I was wondering how other Americans managed to throw away 4.3 pounds of trash a day until I realized that I hadn’t done a major household purge during the course of my study. (I hadn’t included bathroom or bedroom trash in my tallies either, but they wouldn’t have added more than a few ounces a week.) So I went through a burst of housecleaning and placed a lot of unwanted stuff on the sidewalk. Passersby adopted two tote bags, a set of bowls, two dozen children’s books, and two working printers in less than five hours. But there was still some twenty pounds of unsalvageable household chattel in my trash can: a stroller, a mop, a lamp, a Magna Doodle, four rust-stained cotton curtains. Was that enough to seriously spike my daily average? No. But if I didn’t live in a neighborhood where I could leave stuff on the sidewalk for others, didn’t have access to curbside recycling and a compost bin, and had to throw out a major piece of furniture, I’d be right up there with the rest of the nation. The exercise helped me realize I was lucky to live where I did, and that it was easy to be good for a month or two. But after that it got harder. My family members had thrown out, over the course of ten mindful months, an average of three and a half ounces a day. It sounded good compared to the national average, but still: we were no Armantrouts.

I pored over my data, which included the name of every item in my trash can. What would an anthropologist make of my diet, based on these dregs? Because I’d diverted organics and recyclables, my garbage—unlike that of my grandparents fifty years ago—wasn’t really representative. It appeared as though I ate no ice cream, for one thing (I put the cartons on the paper recycling pile). And drank no beer (but plenty of wine, which came in a nondeposit bottle). Once I started bringing plastic bags to the food co-op, my garbage implied that I didn’t eat bread, nuts, rice, or raisins. All evidence of my healthy diet had been diverted to the compost pile or American Ecoboard, in Farmingdale, Long Island.

An anthropologist would surmise a child lived in the house (because of the craft projects and the occasional appearance of small, stained clothing), that a great crash had occurred in the kitchen (eight smashed dinner plates and four cracked bowls), that the family had weathered an infestation of pantry moths (full traps), and that allergies had plagued an adult (foil from Sudafed tablets).

My garbage log revealed that just because you’re a child doesn’t necessarily mean you generate less trash (by volume, not weight). Lucy produced toy waste, arts-and-crafts waste, clothing waste, and, because she had the usual dietary peculiarities of a four-year-old, far more food and food-packaging waste than her parents did. A lot of Lucy’s remains were evidence of pleasure—and that heartened me. But just as each additional person on the planet further strained our dwindling natural resources, so did that person’s garbage further strain the earth’s capacity to benignly receive it.

Like anyone with a garbage obsession, I’d begun to pay closer attention, over the previous year, to how grocery items were packaged. If their wrappings were unavoidably “bad,” I could at least buy a larger size, which reduced the amount of packaging per serving (or squirt, in the case of cleaning products). I got better at refusing plastic grocery sacks, until the supply under my kitchen sink dwindled from the size of a compacted laundry load to nothing. I had almost entirely quit using disposables: I went through less than one roll of paper towels the entire year, and Lucy kept asking if we could please bring out the special napkins—the paper ones—when company came.

I’d also begun to act differently around my garbage. If it started to rain, I tried to run downstairs and cover the cans. I tied up my cardboard the way Jorge and Jack wanted, and I taped the ends of anything sharp. I positioned the trash cans on the sidewalk in a gap between parked cars. I cultivated a respect for the men and women who almost invisibly whisked it all away. This is probably one of the hardest places in the world to be a sanitation worker. New York has more people packed tighter, and more garbage with fewer places to put it, than any other city in the nation. The streets are narrow, the languages diverse, and the right to double-park appears to be god-given. Walking down the street now, I’d hear the distinctive knock of a packer truck’s diesel engine and turn to see if it belonged to the Brooklyn 6. Perhaps one of the most important things I’d learned in the past year was the names of the people who took away my trash.

At the recycling roundtable many months earlier, I had met Samantha MacBride, who worked at the Department of Sanitation’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling. “Recycling isn’t saving the earth,” MacBride had said to me that November afternoon, her face arranged in a frown. “Just so long as you know that. There are very few environmental benefits to recycling.” A PhD candidate in New York University’s Department of Sociology, MacBride had written a paper that challenges the value of consumer recycling. Such programs, she wrote, redirect “the focus of environmental concern away from [the] material unsustainability of the current economic system, instead turning it inward on the self.” Individual recycling was not only unhelpful, she believed (because it was such a slim fraction of the overall waste stream), it was also a shining example of how individual goodwill had been perverted by capitalist goals. Household recyclers, she wrote, were “simultaneously uninformed and concerned about ecological problems, as well as enthusiastic and active in largely meaningless solutions.”

Surely my ersatz kitchen MRF would have amused MacBride. By trying to shrink my garbage footprint, I was—in her paradigm—abetting a bankrupt system by doing what the government, educators, and environmentalists (who increasingly partnered with corporations) told me to do. Recycling merely made it easier for individuals to keep consuming and to keep discarding. It also gave waste hauling companies who ran recycling programs an opportunity to look as though they cared. (And to make more money.)

In MacBride’s view, it would have been far more radical for me to opt
out
of recycling: to throw everything into one sack and set it on the curb. A lot of people did that, though absent a political philosophy. In Edward Abbey’s
The Monkey Wrench Gang,
George W. Hayduke chucks Schlitz cans out of his Jeep onto the highways of the desert Southwest. “Why the fuck shouldn’t I throw fucking beer cans along the highways?” he asks his friend Seldom Seen Smith.

“Hell,” Smith says, “I do it too. Any road I wasn’t consulted about that I don’t like, I litter. It’s my religion.”

“Right,” Hayduke says. “Litter the shit out of them.”

MacBride’s critique of household recycling sprang from the EPA’s mind-boggling statistic, that municipal solid waste constitutes just 2 percent of the nation’s waste, with the remainder (some 12 billion tons) nonhazardous industrial waste (NIW), plus mining, agricultural, and hazardous waste. (About 75 percent of NIW is in liquid form. Think hog and cattle lagoons. But even discounting this watery portion, NIW still outweighs MSW eleven to one.) The average American knows nothing about NIW. It is, in Robin Nagle’s word, “unmarked.” States don’t track its composition or its amounts, and neither the federal nor the state governments regulate its disposal (thanks to industry’s campaign contributions and heavy lobbying, suggested MacBride; the less the public understood the impacts of consumption, the less likely it would be to challenge producer systems).

Adam I. Davis, a founder of the Natural Strategies consulting firm and a former compost and fuel programs coordinator for Waste Management of North America, connected each ton of municipal solid waste with approximately sixty-one tons of waste from primary extractive industry and manufacturing. “For the roughly 210 million tons of MSW the US generates each year,” he wrote in 1998, “we generate an additional 7.6 billion tons of industrial waste, and 1.5 billion tons of mining waste, 3.2 billion tons of oil and gas, electric utility and cement kiln wastes and .5 billion tons of metal processing waste.”

The disparity between my personal waste and the waste it took to produce my waste shocked me, but it didn’t mean that the tiny fraction in my cans was inconsequential. I had seen the garbage piles and the trucks they rode around on, and heard the anger and frustration of citizens who live at the margins where garbage settles. Two hundred thirty-two million tons of municipal solid waste a year, the EPA’s national figure for 2003, isn’t a small pile. But the more important point is that the 2 percent is not unrelated to the 98 percent, which has everything to do with the back end of our upwardly mobile lifestyles. Remember William McDonough: “What most people see in their garbage cans is just the tip of a material iceberg: the product itself contains on average only 5 percent of the raw materials involved in the process of making and delivering it.” And remember Paul Hawken: for every 100 pounds of product that’s made, 3,200 pounds of waste are generated.

No one’s numbers agreed, but the multiplier effect nonetheless kept me working to return steel and paper, if not always plastic and glass, to manufacturers. If a single barrel of waste on my Park Slope curb was indicative of thirty-two barrels of manufacturing waste, then by halving my garbage I could eliminate sixteen barrels up the line. While diverting items to the recycling bin was good (it would avoid some use of virgin materials), not buying quite so many of these things in the first place was far better.

What would happen if we slowed our pace of buying, if we kept our furniture, appliances, and cars for life, or even twice as long as we did now? Would the economy grind to a halt, throwing millions of workers onto the welfare rolls? Advocates of green design imagine a sunny future of high employment. It would take a lot of people to refashion everything using only biological and technical nutrients. (According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, sorting and processing recyclables—of which everything in a green-design world would be made—employs ten times more people than landfilling or incineration, on a per-ton basis.)

A rising tide of fed-up consumers might be able to chip away at the treadmill of production, demand that our government address the disparity between producer and consumer wastes, and offer manufacturers an incentive to produce efficient, reusable products and packaging, but on my own I felt helpless to do anything about the 98 percent. And so I continued recycling and watching what I bought. It was something I could manage. The idea of Zero Waste inspired me because it was linked with serious design and manufacturing changes. Consumer goods had to be less toxic, designed for recycling, and easily returned to their makers. I was more than willing to consume better, if manufacturers would only agree to produce better. Until that time, we have the hierarchy of waste: reduce consumption, reuse consumer goods, and recycle and compost the rest like crazy.

I hoped that some day we would look back on the piles of garbage on our curbs and the compressed bales of paper, metal, glass, and plastic in the transfer stations, and shake our heads at the primitiveness of it all. We were in an awkward in-between stage now: we generated a lot of waste, we worried about it, and we were motivated to take individual action, no matter how misguided. I wanted to believe this moment in garbage history was a blip along our route to sustainability.

Were we on the cusp of some brilliant technological breakthrough? I doubted we’d find something revolutionary to do with all our garbage, like cooking it into inert cubes that we sunk in the ocean or blasting it into outer space (an option put forth by a surprising number of san men). Furthermore, technological fixes might legitimate the generation of waste at our current rate, and they had a way of magnifying our effect on the planet. “All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology,” the evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has written. “There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced.”