Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (39 page)

In the days before e-mail, inventors and entrepreneurs used to burst into the DSNY’s headquarters with “solutions” for the city’s trash “problems” (the widespread use of computers considerably cut foot traffic). “I had one guy who wanted each truck to burn its own load of garbage as its own fuel source,” said Vito Turso, deputy commissioner for public affairs. “That would mean two thousand mobile incinerators traveling and belching around New York City each day.” Then there was the gentleman who proposed stacking tires, along with construction and demolition debris, on the floor of New York Harbor. When the pile rose above high water, he’d build an incinerator atop his brand-new “Recap Island.” Another engineer envisioned trash barrels positioned over a vast underground vacuum, which would suck garbage into a waste disposal facility. “I like to call that one Chutes and Litter,” Turso said, laughing. “People will continue to come up with these ideas as long as we continue to come up with garbage. You try and you try and you try, and eventually one of them might work out.” But as New York’s former commissioner of sanitation Norman Steisel once said, “In the end, the garbage will win.”

New York City is famously resistant to change, but there are plenty of other communities and private companies willing to experiment with waste. There is the Nantucket digester, for example, the green roofers, the recyclers of gray water, the machine in Santa Clarita, California, that chops up dirty diapers, sends the waste to sewers, dries out the wood pulp, and pelletizes the plastic, which is given to the local MRF. Cargill Dow is turning refined corn sugar into plastic bags that biodegrade after a month in a compost pile; Changing World Technologies is building a plant in Missouri that, through thermal conversion, can transform old tires, plastic bottles, sewage, or slaughterhouse scraps into fuel oil. New stuff is coming along all the time—collection technologies that could eliminate all household sorting; MRFs that consume enough bottles, cans, and paper to stabilize market prices and introduce economies of scale.

While waiting for recycling technology to advance, I took heart from the principles of source reduction and the growth of Craigslist and “freecycling” Web sites, which help folks move unwanted goods laterally through their communities. I’d become addicted to cruising these virtual communities. Some opened a window onto private lives (“Free guinea pigs: new boyfriend is allergic”), some seemed more like sociological research into what sort of person answered these ads (“Free coal!”), and some were just funny (“25 crappy futons—not in great condition but they’re also not disgusting or infested so they’re definitely usable.”)

After a year steeped in garbage issues, I know that finding a place to put our waste isn’t the problem. There is plenty of landfill space and incinerator capacity out there. But transporting waste and tipping it are becoming increasingly expensive. New York’s sanitation budget for 2003 approached $1 billion. And no matter how sophisticated their design, landfills and waste-to-energy plants are hardly environmentally benign. They leak and they spill, and their poisons are slowly accumulating in the creatures with which we share this planet. Landfills can’t be safely reused for hundreds of years, if then, and incinerated materials are lost to reuse forever.

If we have a garbage problem, it is that landfills and incinerators make it too easy to get rid of things. Burying or burning waste only spurs more resource extraction to make more products. Our trash cans, I believe, ought to make us think: not about holes in the ground and barrels of oil saved by recycling, but about the enormous amount of material and energy that goes into the stuff we use for an instant and then discard. Garbage should worry us. It should prod us. We don’t need better ways to get rid of things. We need to
not
get rid of things, either by keeping them cycling through the system or not designing and desiring them in the first place.

My interest in garbage had been piqued on Earth Day, when volunteers plucked trash from the Gowanus Canal. I had doubted the value of the exercise and had politely said no to a dip net. A year and a half passed, and a friend asked me to participate in a beach cleanup organized by International Coastal Cleanup in the Fort Tilden section of Gateway National Recreation Area, in Queens.

By now I knew too much about our combined sewer overflows to think that cleaning this sandy strip would do any good. The next big rain would bring a load of trash from the sewer pipes, and a sunny day would bring beachgoers who littered. Moreover, I knew that several of International Coastal Cleanup’s sponsors—including Dow Chemical, the Coca-Cola Company, and the American Plastics Council—had spent tens of millions of dollars fighting bottle bills, which made their support of litter campaigns more than a little hypocritical. I saw the symbolic value of litter collection, to be sure. And frolicking on a clean beach, canal, or creek would certainly be more pleasant than picnicking among someone else’s plastic wrappers or paddling a fetid inlet. But community cleanups had an insidious way of shifting responsibility from those who knowingly produced the mess to individuals willing to pick up the slack. Still, it was a sparkling fall day, and the lure of the beach was stronger than my misgivings. I buckled Lucy into her car seat.

At the meeting place, volunteers handed out plastic garbage sacks and gave Lucy a cardboard fan—it read “I’m a fan of clean water”—that I knew would shortly be in my recycling pile (except for its wooden handle, which I’d save for kindling). We were also offered small plastic business card holders embossed with a sponsor’s name. Accidentally drop it in the street, and the odds were good it would end up right here, on the beach.

As it turned out, plastics were the number-one category of litter we collected that day: plastic caps, plastic bottles, plastic wrappers from food. A lot of this came from beachgoers, but most of it had washed off the city streets and into the waterways after a big rain. In thirty minutes, I picked up ten cigarette butts (Philip Morris was one of today’s sponsors). In 2002, International Coastal Cleanup volunteers in 117 countries collected 1.8 million cigarette butts and cigar tips, representing 31 percent of all trash items. By design, cigarette filters trap toxic chemicals before they enter the smoker’s body, but tossed on the ground they leach toxins into the environment. Cigarette butts have been found in the stomachs of fish, birds, whales, and other marine creatures that mistake them for food. A New York City Parks Department gardener, writing in
Slate,
suggested that filters be made of something organic—she suggested chicken poop—which would at least enhance city flowerbeds, where so many smokers insisted on tossing their butts.

Over the course of the morning, two dozen volunteers on our short stretch of beach filled eighty bags with litter while noting on data cards their exact contents. If the others’ bags were anything like mine, they contained a fair share of recyclable cans and deposit bottles. I called later to find out what happened with the trash bags and learned they had gone straight to a putrescible waste transfer station, unopened.

Throughout New York State, more than ten thousand people had volunteered to clean 385 miles of waterway. While I was picking through the sands of Fort Tilden, volunteers on the Gowanus were collecting enough junk to fill more than a hundred bags. In 2002, International Coastal Cleanup had collected more than 8.2 million pounds of refuse, including 16,554 condoms, 16,144 tampons, 22,759 diapers, 255,972 straws and stirrers, 335,070 plastic bags, 347,137 glass bottles, 360,104 aluminum cans, 423,820 plastic bottles, and 675,360 food wrappers.

I had been quick to ridicule the beach cleanup, but there was an ethical component to the activity that I couldn’t deny. The environmental philosopher Andrew Light believes that living in a city entails a form of political citizenship as well as a form of ecological citizenship, which he loosely defines as “a ground of moral and political environmental responsibility for one’s duties to the human and natural communities one inhabits and interacts with.” Citizens engaged in a relationship with the land around them are less likely to harm it or to let it be harmed. Whether a spartina meadow or a cleaner beach, the end product doesn’t matter. What is important in Light’s scheme is the values created in that practice—a relationship with nature, a community committed to the protection of a local environment. “It is a restoration not only of nature but also of the human cultural relationship with nature.” I wasn’t sure how to characterize my relationship with the Fort Tilden beach, but I did feel like coming back here soon, if only to see how long the clean stuck.

A week after my introduction to ecological citizenship, I drove out to Barren Island to meet Andy Bernick, an ornithologist who had helped me gather information on bird counts at Fresh Kills. I wasn’t looking for birds this time, though Bernick had brought his spotting scope. I was here to see garbage.

One of the largest islands in Jamaica Bay, Barren Island had once comprised about thirty acres of sandy upland and another seventy acres of salt marsh. Used by Brooklyn farmers to grow salt hay and graze horses, the island was accessible from the mainland only at low tide and remained uninhabited until the end of the eighteenth century. In the late 1850s, two fertilizer factories opened and began processing dead horses and other animals shipped from New York. According to National Park Service historian Frederick Black, “Between 1859 and 1934, perhaps as many as twenty-six companies [manufacturing establishments] had facilities on the island, although no more than seven or eight at any one time.” The factories produced fish oil from menhaden, which migrated in huge schools along the Atlantic coast and were captured by fishermen in seines. The oil was used in leather tanning and paint mixing; the fish scraps were used as fertilizer.

Menhaden populations eventually declined, but not before scheming politicians arranged to ship city refuse to the rendering factories of Barren Island. In the busy season, resident laborers unloaded seven or eight scows a day, a total of three thousand tons of refuse from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, in addition to the daily horse boat, which held as many as fifty dead horses, plus cows, cats, and dogs. Workers picked through the garbage for valuables, then boiled or steamed the rest in fifteen-foot-high steel cylinders. By 1860, writes Benjamin Miller in
Fat of the Land,
the island had “the largest concentration of offal industries in the world,” producing fifty thousand tons of oils and tens of thousands of tons of grease, fertilizer, and other products (bone black, hides, iron, and tin) worth more than $10 million a year.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Barren Island was home to some fifteen hundred people, with their attendant butcheries, bakeries, churches, and saloons. It was not a pleasant place to live. The raw garbage stank, and the cooked garbage was worse. The stench, according to the Brooklyn Health Department, had “a range, flatness of trajectory and penetration equal to that of our modern coast defense rifles.”

Politics and economics closed manufacturing plants through the 1920s, and by 1935, the single remaining factory on Barren Island was dismantled. Starting in 1909, the area north of the island was filled in with city refuse, and numerous small islands were connected for the construction of houses and, eventually, Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s first municipal airport. In 1936, Robert Moses evicted the last residents of Barren Island, which was no longer an island, in order to build his Marine Park Bridge, which brought motorists to the Rockaway Peninsula and Fort Tilden, where I’d collected the flotsam of more recent adventures. Once again, the roads had brought the people, and the people had brought their trash, mostly the kind of stuff—individually wrapped snacks and disposable beverage containers—that didn’t exist when people weren’t quite so mobile.

I’d visited Barren Island only once previously, long before I understood its place in New York’s garbage history. I had come here from Prospect Park in search of a pastoral experience: I went camping. Eighty years earlier, Barren Island’s schoolmistress had made the reverse trek, bringing her young charges from their soot-darkened confines to Prospect Park. What the children did there is lost to history. I spent half my time on Barren Island in a tent and was nearly run over in the middle of the night by teenagers rampaging in a Jeep across the former salt marsh.

A City University of New York graduate student, Andy Bernick had rounded cheeks and short, glossy black hair. He wore black-rimmed oval eyeglasses, a checked shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Bernick had almost superhuman patience. As we walked toward the beach down a mowed path, I couldn’t help peppering him with excited questions, often interrupting his quiet explanations. He didn’t seem to mind; he was excited to be here, too.

We came out onto the beach along Dead Horse Bay, and Bernick said, “Ooh, this is good.” He meant the tide: it was superlow, and the exposed mudflats were thirty to forty feet wide. Before the rendering plants went up, this now-gentle curve of beach was called Dooley’s Bay, which was actually the outwash of a large creek that had cut Barren Island almost in half. Now, with the water so low, I could barely make out the bay’s shallow contours.

The first thing I noticed on the beach were the rotted pilings that marched out into a channel—the remnants of docks built to unload scows. I looked down and saw the usual New York beach litter: cups, chip bags, plastic bottles and caps, broken glass. “I guess the Coastal Cleanup didn’t make it here last week,” I said. Then we walked a few meters toward the water and, bam, it hit me. The entire beach appeared to be tiled with glass, with brown patent-medicine bottles and ceramics, dainty teacups and bottles blue, green, and clear. Mixed in with the shells of horseshoe crabs, sea lettuce, periwinkles, crab legs, and condensed marsh muck were rubber tires, jug tops, shoe heels, and soda bottles with typefaces long abandoned.

The sea lettuce, which grew in plate-sized sheets, was a product of nitrification: too much nitrogen came from the three sewage treatment plants that discharged into the bay (a fourth, the nearby Rockaway plant, discharged into the ocean, though currents likely swept effluent in here, too). Overstimulated by the fertilizer, the lettuce ran rampant. It consumed oxygen needed by other organisms and it smothered other aquatic life. The city was under court order to reduce the amount of nitrogen it discharged into waterways, and both New York and Connecticut had signed binding commitments with the EPA to reduce nitrogen in Long Island Sound, where another four city plants discharged. The goal was a 58.5 percent decrease, by 2014, over 1990 levels.