Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (6 page)

When their truck was full, at around ten-thirty, Murphy dropped Sullivan at the garage, then rumbled over the Gowanus and pulled into the courtyard of the IESI transfer station, a white-painted brick building at the corner of Bush and Court Streets, in Red Hook. The drill here was simple: weigh your truck, then pull around to the tipping floor, back in, and pull the lever to dump. If the men had loaded their truck properly, the ejected garbage would extend six to eight feet in a supercompressed bolus before dropping to the ground. Garbage that simply spilled out was poorly packed or indicated that the truck hadn’t been full. The quality of the dump was known as “the turd factor.” According to one designer of packer trucks, “The driver can learn from experience by observing the turd factor and know just how much trash he can put in the truck per trip. If he gets a good turd on every trip to the landfill, that’s a good day.” Judging by the conformation of today’s load, Murphy and Sullivan had done well. The morning’s labors—twenty thousand pounds collected in less than four hours—now lay in a heap, indistinguishable from the heaps dumped before or after. Without a backward glance at what he’d deposited, Murphy put the truck in forward gear.

Integrated Environmental Services Incorporated was founded in 1995 and had grown by acquisitions, gobbling sometimes as many as a hundred companies a year. It bought this facility from Waste Management in 1999. By 2003, IESI was the tenth-largest solid waste company in the nation. In New York it was the third largest, after Waste Management and Allied Waste.

I pedaled down to the Court Street station a few days after going out with Sullivan and Murphy, hoping to speak with the plant manager. The doors on the bays were closed, and no one was about. I saw no trucks, and I smelled no garbage. If you didn’t know what went on inside this building, you wouldn’t, on a cold and slow autumn day, be able to guess. I rode around the neighborhood, noting that it was zoned for industry. Then I turned a corner, from Bush onto—just coincidentally—Clinton, and now the multiple towers of the Red Hook housing projects, home to eleven thousand mostly low-income residents, rose before me.

Garbage follows a strict class topography. It concentrates on the margins, and it tumbles downhill to settle in places of least resistance, among the poor and the disenfranchised. The Gold Coast of Manhattan’s Upper East Side produces far more waste than the neighborhood of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, but city officials have never tried to site an incinerator on Park Avenue, as they did in Williamsburg. Similarly, landfills have no place within the city limits of Grosse Point, Beverly Hills, or Palm Beach. Across the nation and around the world, trash is dumped, metaphorically, upon trash.

Of course, there are, in this era of modern landfills, plenty of communities that say yes to trash, even to trash generated far, far away. The inducement is cash—or its in-kind equivalent. Tullytown, Pennsylvania, population 2,200, has raked in $48 million over the last fifteen years in exchange for burying fifteen million tons of trash, mostly from New York and New Jersey. Literally, this is the town that garbage built: waste paid for its town hall, half the police force, the new fire truck, the marine rescue boat, playground, trees, sidewalks, lampposts, and fireworks. (Towns that agree to host dumps invariably get free garbage pickup, too.) The town of Taylor, Pennsylvania, receives a minimum of $1.5 million a year from the Alliance landfill for hosting a five-thousand-ton-per-day landfill, in addition to a one-time lump sum of $900,000, which paid for a new library and a senior center.

Lee County, one of South Carolina’s poorest, receives a fifth of its annual budget from Allied Waste, which pays $1.2 million a year to dump there. Sumpter Township, in Michigan, turns a fraction of Toronto’s waste into nearly half its annual income. In 2003, Waste Management paid Michigan’s Lenox Township nearly $1.8 million, which it used to improve a park, buy two EKG machines, and acquire two thermal-imaging cameras for the fire department. Charles City County, in Virginia, lacks a supermarket, drugstore, and bank. But after the Chambers Development Company built a supersized landfill there, the county cut property taxes (Chambers pays 30 percent of the county’s operating budget) and started to build schools. In Canton Township, Michigan, the Auk Hills landfill contributed $13 million to build the town’s Summit on the Park community center. (These deal sweeteners aren’t unique to trash and tiny towns: before New York City could build a sewage treatment plant on Manhattan’s far Upper West Side, it promised the community a twenty-eight-acre park, complete with soccer field, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and an ice-skating rink—all sitting smack-dab atop the settling tanks and sludge thickeners.)

Giant waste companies don’t mind paying host fees: they help smooth over community opposition and legal hassles. Christopher White, president of Mid-American Waste Systems, explained the historical setting of host fees to a
Forbes
reporter: “It’s something the utility companies and the railroads have done for years.” In the dozens of tiny towns that were exploited, then polluted and abandoned by King Coal before being forced to contemplate megadumps in their scarred backyards, this type of justification, made by an absentee power lord, probably isn’t all that reassuring.

“People get very rich very fast if they’re willing to impose on a poor community that can’t fight back,” Al Wurth, a political scientist at Lehigh College, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, told me. “There are enormous incentives for certain groups to do this. They’re not thinking about the effect of stuff three generations from now. They’ll be gone. But the stuff lingers on.” It is an especially raw deal for neighboring towns that aren’t getting new ball fields and Fourth of July fireworks. They get all the truck traffic, the air and water pollution, the birds, the stench, and the degraded property values, but all the host benefits lie just over the county line.

A decade before Fresh Kills was slated to close, New York City officials went shopping for a new place to dump. One destination under consideration was West Virginia’s McDowell County, near the state’s southern border. Facing acute unemployment and underdevelopment, the town of Welch, the county seat, saw no better economic alternative than to build a landfill in a bowl-shaped hollow at the end of Lower Shannon Branch, a dirt road that winds for six miles through hill country.

In exchange for accepting 300,000 tons of waste a month, most of it from New York City, Welch would receive an $8 million fee from the development company, 367 jobs, and one wastewater treatment plant, a novelty for a county that, by dumping raw sewage into its creeks, had been in violation of the Clean Water Act since 1972. Only a handful of people had questions about the project, but just as the contract was about to be signed, a protest movement materialized. Much was made of the waste’s provenance: accepting garbage from New York and New Jersey, the landfill would surely be tainted with AIDS and by medical waste, it would be run by the mob, and “cocktailed” with toxic and nuclear dregs. (Homegrown trash, presumably, didn’t even smell.) The plan was ultimately defeated by economics, despite a referendum in favor of the dump. In 2004, the landfill’s developers presented a reworked proposal for McDowell to the state legislature. After all, the county was still in desperate financial straits, its creeks still flowed with sewage, and New York was still producing waste.

Across the nation, environmental justice groups have sprung up to fight the siting of transfer stations, landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and other polluting industries within low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. According to a 1987 study conducted by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, three out of every five African Americans or Hispanic Americans live in communities with one or more unregulated toxic-waste site. These environmental justice groups track cancer and asthma clusters, educate their constituents, and work to clean up hazardous waste.

In my travels with trash I learned that more than two-thirds of New York City’s residential and commercial waste flows through transfer stations in just two neighborhoods: the Bronx’s Hunts Point and Brooklyn’s Greenpoint-Williamsburg. (Altogether, the city has sixty-two land-based transfer stations, not one of which is located in Manhattan.) It isn’t just garbage that irritates the stations’ neighbors. Six days a week, twenty-four hours a day, ten-ton packer trucks roll in with their deliveries—at some stations, more than a thousand of them a day. Altogether, they travel a total of forty thousand miles a day, trailed by a diesel plume of particulate matter. According to Inform, an independent research firm that examines how business practices affect the environment and human health, packer trucks account for only 0.06 percent of the vehicles on US roads, but they consume more fuel annually—and discharge more pollution—than any vehicles other than tractor-trailers and transit buses. Why do garbage trucks have such a heavy impact? Because they cover twice as many miles per year as the typical heavy-duty single-unit truck, and they travel less than three miles on a gallon of gas.

Greenpoint, home to sixteen waste transfer stations processing about a third of the city’s garbage, has the highest concentration of airborne lead in New York City, and the second-highest rate of asthma. Epidemiologists link the disease with particulate matter smaller than two microns, the stuff that spews from the stream of packer trucks bringing garbage in, and from the tractor-trailer trucks that idle in a queue, waiting to haul it away.

Since Fresh Kills closed, almost all of the city’s waste is trucked from transfer stations to out-of-state landfills and incinerators. According to Keith Kloor, reporting for
City Limits,
it takes about 450 tractor-trailer trucks to complete this task each day, burning roughly 33,700 gallons of diesel fuel. The combined round trips add up to 135,000 miles. An additional 150 packer trucks, carrying about fifteen hundred tons of waste a day, make shorter trips to three incinerators in New Jersey and Long Island. The trucks wear down city streets and outlying highways, and their emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants contribute to elevated asthma and cancer rates, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming.

The cost of shuttling city garbage around the boroughs and out of state is not cheap. In tolls alone, the city spent $2.25 million in 2002. Trucking and tipping fees cost another $248 million. Including the hiring of three hundred additional drivers to relay full trucks to transfer stations, the city spent $257 to dispose of each ton of trash in 2002, a 40 percent increase over the 1996 cost.

My garbage was now in private hands. To get a look at it, I had to call Mickey Flood, the CEO of IESI, in Fort Worth, Texas, and then Ed Apuzzi, the company’s vice president for business development and legal affairs in the Northeast region, who decided we should meet at the transfer station on Election Day, when DSNY wasn’t delivering garbage (though commercial waste continued to pour in). At the appointed hour, I stood at the building’s corner and waited for Apuzzi to show. The sidewalk was litter free but greasy. A truck had damaged the corrugated metal fence across the street, and there was a deep pothole on the corner filled with opaque gray liquid. The building had recently been painted white with blue trim. Under the company logo—a pine tree—was a phone number to call with any complaints.

Casually, as if I weren’t really spying, I glanced inside the transfer station. At first, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. Like a Hollywood soundstage, the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted black, and there were large floodlights mounted on tracks overhead. But there weren’t many of them, and they shed only a dim light on the hilly mosaic of garbage that covered half the floor. Higher up, they illuminated what I at first took for dust motes but realized, when I got a little closer, were droplets of a powerful perfume, which shot from nozzles near the ceiling. The smell was sweetly antiseptic. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I made out large black bags of garbage, small supermarket sacks of garbage, one of which could have been mine, some bulk metal pushed off to one side, a rotted board, chair cushions, a ketchup bottle. But still, the upper contours of the space were indeterminate. I could have been in a planetarium.

At first the jumble of goods, some ten feet high, appeared homogeneous to me: it was just a lot of garbage—dirty, ragged, bagged, loose. But to the practiced eye of a fanatic recycler or a Mexican
pepenador,
a professional trash picker, the pile was actually heterogeneous. It contained metals and textiles, wood and glass—commodities with value. Save for the preponderance of plastic, it comprised almost the same materials found in a nineteenth-century ragpicker’s shanty: bones, broken dishes, rags, bits of furniture, cinders, old tin, useless lamps, decaying vegetables, ribbons, cloth, legless chairs, and carrion.

Back in the day, all of those items would have found another use. Today, they were prodded into a rough pile by a worker in a front-end loader and spilled into a tractor-trailer parked along the far wall of the tipping floor. Using the backside of its bucket, the loader awkwardly patted the reeking mass into one solid rectangular cube. The driver tucked a tarp over the garbage and, with a roar of the engine, was gone.

While I waited for Apuzzi, I made small talk with Frank Morgante, the site manager. I asked him if neighbors complained about the station.

“They walk by here and they give us looks,” he said. “They look at us like we’re garbage. I want to say to them, ‘You want to solve the garbage problem? Stop eating. Stop living. Then we won’t have any more garbage.’”

A middle-aged man walked by, and I asked him what it was like living near a transfer station.

“IESI is
not
a good neighbor,” he said. “The place smells and it’s overrun with rats.”

“We have an exterminator every two weeks!” Morgante interjected.

“That just sends them up there,” the man shouted, indicating his home in the Red Hook housing projects.