Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (7 page)

Earlier, Morgante had told me that rats tumbled out of the trucks—they weren’t living at his transfer station. Now he told the neighbor that the trash didn’t sit in the transfer station. It came in and it went out. In. And out. He repeated it brightly. The neighbor didn’t care about in and out. He cared about the continual presence of garbage. He cared about its cumulative physical impact.

“This place has given me asthma,” he said.

“You probably had asthma before we ever worked here,” Morgante said. They were getting a little loud. The neighbor waved his arm as if to ward off Morgante’s retort and turned to leave. “You know why the garbage is here?” he asked. “It’s because we’re poor.”

“You know what?” Morgante said to his back. “I’m poor, too, and I don’t live that far from here.”

Apuzzi finally appeared. He was clean shaven, with a neat haircut and what I took to be, in November, a salon tan. He seemed ill at ease here. He declined to wear the orange vest and hard hat that Morgante had forced upon me before I made the ten-foot walk from the bay door, over the knee-high tide of garbage, to an open stairway that led to a small office. Frowning in his dress shirt and polished brown shoes, Apuzzi picked his way over a sofa cushion, across the slippery frame of a foldout bed, and in between two black garbage bags. A sheen of brown muck coated the floor.

The office, which smelled slightly garbagey, contained a cheap L-shaped desk with a computer, a small meeting table, and several ceiling-mounted security monitors. The room had no street windows, but it did have an interior window that overlooked the tipping floor, and that’s what I wanted to see.

At 11:00 a.m., the trash was halfway up to the horizontal yellow line on the push wall. The front-end loader, with its six-yard bucket, was filling a truck. I asked Apuzzi why everything was painted black. “I don’t know,” he said. He seemed as puzzled as I was.

I asked him about his background. I imagined that like many in the trash business, he was a guy whose career had probably started out promisingly enough in another field but had then taken a sudden turn and rolled downhill. “I’m an attorney,” he said. “I worked as a litigator in Manhattan and then Princeton until IESI bought my family’s waste collection business.” Now his boss was Mickey Flood.

“Trucks dump here until about eleven p.m.,” Apuzzi said, gazing down on the trash. “The floor has to be clean by midnight—empty of garbage and washed. Then the garbage starts coming in again.” I watched as a kid from the projects zipped around in a small forklift, picking bulk metal objects from the trash heap—a stroller, a desk, a swing set frame. He piled this stuff in the station’s adjacent empty bay. Metal is heavy, and IESI didn’t want to pay to tip it in someone else’s landfill. The company could sell it for scrap. “The garbage always sits less than one day,” Apuzzi continued. “On Sunday we’re empty.”

I asked how many trucks came in each day. “City trucks bring about eight tons each and commercial trucks bring thirteen. You can do the math.” I divided the station’s permitted 745 tons by 21 tons, the amount in one commercial and one residential truck, and got approximately 75 full trucks entering each day. The tractor-trailer trucks held 20 tons, so that was an additional 37 trucks leaving. They delivered the waste to two landfills IESI owned in Pennsylvania or—if those landfills had met their daily permitted tonnages—to two or three others owned by competitors.

“And you always get your seven hundred forty-five tons?”

“We always make our quota,” Apuzzi said. “When we’re full, we let the Brooklyn garage know, and they divert trucks to other transfer stations.”

The number of truck trips out of transfer stations—450 tractor-trailers a day—was a flashpoint for garbage activists. Environmental and local advocacy groups wanted the city to reopen its marine transfer stations—there was at least one for each borough, excluding Staten Island—and barge the garbage from neighborhoods. The packer trucks would still drive in, but tractor-trailers would be eliminated from the equation.

“If the city opens its marine transfer stations, we’ll do just commercial,” Apuzzi said. His permit was good for 745 tons—it didn’t matter where it came from. But he didn’t think garbage barges were coming anytime soon. “It will cost the city more at the marine transfer stations because containerization is significantly more expensive. Retrofitting the stations will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.” (Apuzzi was right, but just for a year: after announcing it would fix up the transfer stations, the city backed down from the plan, citing its expense, then recommitted.)

The city now paid IESI an average of sixty-five dollars a ton to tip residential waste. “What we pay to tip at landfills fluctuates,” Apuzzi said. “If the distance to the landfill is long, it costs us more to get there, but tipping fees are lower.”

“Where do you usually go?”

“Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We own a landfill there.”

“I’d like to visit it, see what happens to my trash next.”

Apuzzi narrowed his eyes and wrote something on his legal pad. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, not sounding confident.

I asked if there was community opposition to the transfer station. “Historically, yes. But since IESI has been here, we run an efficient and environmentally sound operation. We run with the doors closed. We don’t allow garbage to spew out. We use a perfume neutralizer. We have little traffic. We’ve got a ventilation system with a scrubber on the exhaust. Over the years, community opposition has dwindled.” He looked at his watch.

“Let me ask one more thing,” I said. “Do you think we have a garbage problem?”

“That’s a good question,” Apuzzi said, sitting back in his chair. He was quiet for a moment, then, “No, I don’t think we do. We have plenty of room for it. It would be nice to have a landfill within the city boundaries. But I don’t think Fresh Kills is going to reopen soon. That place was an environmental nightmare.” I smiled to myself. Just as individuals imagined their trash was better than the next guy’s, so did dump owners think their operations were better than the next dump owner’s.

“I don’t know a thing about Fresh Kills,” I told Apuzzi. “I’m still waiting for someone to let me in there.”

With that, our interview was suddenly over, and Apuzzi ushered me from the office. I never saw IESI’s vice president for business development and legal affairs in the Northeast region again, despite repeated attempts to meet up with him. In any case, my attention would soon turn from transfer stations to landfills. Although it was no longer the final destination of my garbage, the Fresh Kills Sanitary Landfill was the K2 of trash heaps, and I was determined to make an assault on its closed and forbidden slopes.

Chapter Two

Amphibious Assault

N
ew York City was not unusual in shunting quantities of noxious waste to its backyard. Every American city, up until about the middle of the twentieth century, dumped its rejects on nearby scraps of low-value land—usually in swamps. In 1879, a minister described the situation in New Orleans to the American Public Health Association:

Thither were brought the dead dogs and cats, the kitchen garbage and the like, and duly dumped. This festering, rotten mess was picked over by ragpickers and wallowed over by pigs, pigs and humans contesting for a living from it, and as the heaps increased, the odors increased also, and the mass lay corrupting under a tropical sun, dispersing the pestilential fumes where the winds carried them.

When swamps grew scarce, holes were excavated in dry land and garbage was tumbled in. Sometimes the trash was burned to reduce its volume, a process that created billows of black smoke and toxic fumes. In 1937, Jean Vincenz, the commissioner of public works for Fresno, California, after traveling the dumps of the nation, built in his hometown the country’s first “sanitary landfill” (England had a sanitary landfill, too, but it never accepted household waste). Every day, Vincenz carefully positioned and compacted the city’s waste. Then, to keep down vermin, birds, and odors, he buried it with soil that he’d dug out to make room for the next day’s haul. The sanitary landfill idea began to catch on during World War II, when the US military adopted Vincenz’s methods. By 1945, according to the Garbage Project’s William Rathje, one hundred cities had joined the bandwagon, and by the fifties, the sanitary method was in full flower.

While Vincenz’s approach made America’s trash heaps look cleaner, their subterranean aspects were anything but. A blanket of dirt didn’t protect groundwater from contaminated moisture, called leachate, seeping through the garbage, and it didn’t control or capture leaking landfill gases, which are toxic. It wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that the Environmental Protection Agency, through its Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, began to protect human health and the environment against these discharges by requiring leachate- and methane-collection systems. In 1991, the agency gave landfills six years to modernize or close. But complicated liners made of plastic and clay, and gas-collection-and-monitoring systems were expensive, so most dumps shut down. In 1988, there were nearly 8,000 landfills across the country; in 1999, there were 2,314; and by 2002, there were only 1,767.

(A historical footnote: Jean Vincenz’s Fresno landfill had, by the time the RCRA rules came out, long been shuttered. But it received a flicker of attention on August 27, 2001, when Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton nominated it as a National Historic Landmark for its importance in the nation’s history of civil engineering. The fuss lasted less than twenty-four hours. The very next day, Norton rescinded her offer: the landfill, she’d just learned, was an EPA Superfund site.)

As illegal dumps closed, fewer but larger regional landfills were inaugurated, usually in rural areas with small populations. Meanwhile, Americans continued to generate more and more trash. The garbage business—concentrated in the hands of a few major corporations—blossomed. By 2001, it was a $57-billion-a-year industry. The economics of megafills covering several hundred acres was irresistible. They were, in relative terms, far cheaper to build than little landfills, even when the millions paid to control pollution and fight community activists were factored in. Because megafills were built in small sections, or cells, with revenue coming in as each section filled, their construction costs could be spread out over many years. In this way, a large landfill could reap gross profits of more than 50 percent.

With urban dumps capped, more and more waste began to cross state borders. Dump owners adopted a “smoke ’em if you got ’em” attitude, working to fill their sites as quickly as possible—before federal regulations could curtail interstate trade in garbage, before recycling could claim an even larger percentage of the waste stream, before environmental regulations tightened up and raised their cost of operations. Just as road builders invited more traffic by adding lanes to highways, so did enormous landfills invite a wanton disregard for waste reduction. If there was plenty of room out there, what was the incentive to conserve space?

In 2002, thirty-two states (reporting to
BioCycle
magazine) imported garbage from other states, while twenty-four states exported garbage to other states (some states did both). Pennsylvania led the importing pack, accepting ten million tons in 2002. In second place came Illinois, followed by Virginia, which shipped its own hazardous waste primarily to dumps in Ohio and New York State. The second-largest exporter was New Jersey and the first was New York, which had contracts to dump its garbage at thirty-seven landfills in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania (with permits to dump in Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina if need be), in addition to four incinerators in three states.

Before it closed in 2001, Fresh Kills had been the largest city landfill in the country, indeed, in the entire world. That honor is now held by the Puente Hills Landfill, in Whittier, California, which has a permit to accept twelve thousand tons of trash a day from the surrounding counties. Not to belittle Whittier, but that’s just half the daily tonnage that was dumped into Fresh Kills, which sprawled over three thousand acres on the western side of Staten Island.

I’d requested permission from the city’s Department of Sanitation to visit Fresh Kills because it played such an important role in New York’s garbage history, but my application seemed to be in limbo (much like my request to visit IESI’s Bethlehem landfill). I asked Sanitation one more time for a tour of Fresh Kills, then took matters into my own hands. Studying a map of Staten Island, I made out a green-tinged area just north of the dump. In fact, it seemed to be connected to Fresh Kills by a tidal creek. I’d never heard of the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge, but it seemed like a good place to start.

“Do you have a boat that I might be able to rent?” I asked the receptionist at the refuge. I implied that I was interested in the area’s native grasses. No, she said, the refuge didn’t keep rental boats, but the resident naturalist, Carl Alderson, knew a lot about the grasses. Without waiting for my response, she patched me through.

I was getting a bit off track, but I liked talking to Alderson. He was refreshingly warm and friendly. A salt marsh ecologist, he had restored wetlands in the Arthur Kill, which separated Staten Island from New Jersey, after a big Exxon oil spill in 1990. (The word
kill
is itself a sort of historical debris. Dutch for
river,
it remains, despite the conquest of the English, scattered throughout the New York area, from Fresh Kills to the upstate towns of Fishkill, Peekskill, and beyond.) Alderson was studying salt grasses on New Jersey’s Raritan River, and he’d completed a three-acre marsh restoration inside Fresh Kills itself. My ears pricked at this news: now we were getting somewhere.

We talked a little about the effect of garbage on the environment, and then Alderson revealed that he had four canoes, a kayak, and a Boston Whaler at his disposal. He asked if I wanted to give him a hand counting spartina grass stems in a week or two at the Raritan site. Sure, I said, trying to temper my enthusiasm. To get to New Jersey, I figured, we’d have to boat right past the landfill.