First Citizen (17 page)

“Maybe we can short-cut some of that paperwork with a simple—”

“No way, Chief. You just go the whole nine yards with me and then we’ll be in a position to talk.”

“But you see—”

“Am-scray, Redskin. You got no business here.”

What could I do but leave? I put my head down, apologized for bothering him, and walked out.

And came back that night—you have to work fast to make an impression on these people—with a crew from the midnight paving company. We opened the sewer line two feet south of the P&L fence and pumped in nine cubic yards of fast-setting concrete.

They must have had concrete slopping out of the toilet bowls. It closed them down for a week while they laid a new sewer line. This one went the other way, across the parking lot, back under the building, and into the creek under a culvert right on the edge of their property. Inside of another week, P&L was pumping acid again. So we went back one foggy dawn, down into the creek, and pumped that line, too.

This time, the Environmental Director came to me at my hole-in-the-wall office in back of a petshop on First Street in San Jose. He threatened me with a suit for breaking and entering, trespass, and vandalism. I introduced him to Elmo Garcia, who dealt Doberman in pups and who, in turn, introduced him to his breeding stock.

After two more of these counseling sessions and about six weeks’ worth of downtime, the director’s boss got the message that it was cheaper to put in concentrators and filters than to rebuild the sewer system twice a month.

The P&L people were tough, but they never heard about suffering in silence. They complained plenty and to anybody who would listen, especially to their trade association, the Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and the Rotarians over lunch. Word, as they say, got around, and soon I had the cleanest jurisdiction in Northern California.

Now you are probably wondering how I made money on a deal like that. After all, I had to put up the bond, appear before the Environmental Protection Agency to answer complaints, pay for the sampling and testing, and arrange for enforcement. So who was paying me?

When I applied to the Agency for relief, the few remaining bureaucrats in the local office, the lucky survivors of waves of fiscal decimation, grinned at me without any sympathy at all. They surely had no money to pay for enforcement; that was why they had been taken out of the business in the first place, to be replaced by rude amateurs like Billy Birdsong. Let it go to hell, they said behind their smiles. Then the people will wake up to what they have lost. Amendments can be repealed. The budgets will come back. Washington will rise again. As for my problem, the bureaucrats trusted to my “ingenuity and spirit of enterprise.” They were disappointment number one for me.

Well, when I had first gone into the pollution business, it seemed that the State, county, or municipal governments—any one or all in a row—would gladly pay for a cleaner environment. Now I discovered they had no budget for it. And so long as my bond was on the line with the Agency, why should they? The local administrations were growing fat and strong by choosing carefully among the pieces of the Federal mantle they would or would not pick up after the Twenty-ninth Amendment. Disappointment number two.

Up until the P&L affair, I had half-thought that the polluters themselves would pay for my “consulting.” But a few subtle approaches—and the unsubtle responses—convinced me they would only cough up to be left alone. Not to have their sewers broken in the name of clean water. Disappointment number three.

Cash flow—the incoming side—was becoming my biggest problem. I was seriously thinking about abandoning that million-new-dollar bond and going back into the kiddie trade when Jay Corbin came back out of the mountains.

He telexed me from Japan using the old address and blindly trusting that someone would forward the message. He also expected me to meet him at the airport. Probably carry his bags, too. After brooding about it, I decided to meet him anyway. What else did I have going that day?

Corbin was the same man, but different. I could see that even as he walked up the jetway. Browner, quieter, with eyes that were older and saw more. He was more like an Indian, a tribal elder perhaps, than the brash kid who had shot up a pink helicopter in the desert. Corbin looked like a wise old man—until he smiled and showed teeth. Then he looked like a hungry jaguar. And he carried his own bag.

“What have you been doing with yourself, Billy?” he asked as we settled into my car.

“This and that. Losing money, mostly.”

“What, at the beginning of a great flood tide like this?” He was smiling, teasing me. “I thought there’d be opportunities coming out of this fiscal thing that ‘any sucker could fell into.’ ”

Suddenly, I remembered that line of bullshit I had once handed him when he was down on his luck. Yeah, me.

“Sucker is right,” I said and proceeded to tell him all about the pollution control business. Corbin heard me through. He was staring out the windshield, down the road, with his lips all puckered up. When I ran out of words, he did not leap right in with a lot of great ideas and free advice. Just held his stare.

After a while he said, “Seems like there should be money somewhere in that mix … somewhere … Have to think about it.”

Then we talked about Japanese culture, the U.S. economy, or what was left of it, and things generally. That night he stayed in my apartment, which was on the edges of the San Jose barrio, and slept on the couch. Corbin was stone broke and alone. Which took me some getting used to, because he still spoke and acted like a Harvard Law grad and senior partner in an East Coast firm. He could never wash cars or cadge drinks with a manner like that; so the world had to find him something decent to do and ripe to live on. It found him me.

Jay spent five days lying on the couch, mooching in the refrigerator, drinking with my friends, and listening to their songs. I still called him “Jay,” but among my friends he introduced himself as “Gran,” or “Granny.” That was short for his first name, Granville, which I had never known.

Sometimes, he did karate exercises in my living room. The quick jabs he would make with his hands at the door frames, and those fantastic spinning kicks with bare feet that ended up half an inch from the chandelier, looked like they would turn the place into kindling and broken glass. But he never touched a thing.

Most of the time, however, Corbin sat and stared out the window. Or went down to the library and took out books that he just flipped through and put aside. I thought he was in some kind of a funk. I should have known he was thinking hard. Finally, on the fifth day, as we sat down to my special California ranch breakfast with chili-salsa eggs, he quietly observed, “You know, garbage is a really undervalued resource.”

“Hunh?” I put down my fork. “Something wrong with my food—?”

“No, no. I mean
garbage,
trash, wastes, what comes out of the dumpsters, pollution, your current problem.”

“What about—garbage?”

“Looked at the right way, it’s valuable. I mean, our thinking is shaped by our definitions, right?”

“Ahhh-ummm.” That was Corbin’s way: leap out onto the loose, leafy end of the limb and work his way back to what he was really talking about.

“Right, definitions,” he plowed on. “And we have always defined garbage as something to be thrown away. Prehistoric peoples had their middens and shell mounds; we have the town dump. Everyone knows that colorful characters can find useful and interesting things in the dump, at the wrecker’s yard, in garbage. But there’s a stink such things have that goes beyond the nose. It says, somebody didn’t want this, it has no value.”

“So, perfesser?”

“So, if you redefine garbage, it works out to be the most valuable product in the natural world.”

“What product?”

“Mineral ore! You look at the big open-pit copper mines that people were digging in Utah, Montana, and Arizona early in the nineteen-oughts, teens, and twenties. Were they pulling nuggets of solid metal out of the ground? They were not. The ore at Ajo, Arizona, was something like one-half percent copper. They’d raise a ton of dirt to get maybe ten pounds of metal—and that was after a lot of chemical processing. And how much copper is there in your average pile of city garbage?”

“How should I know?”

“Two to four percent. Forty to eighty pounds per ton.”

“Of pure copper?”

“Well, some of it, the wire in motor windings and electrical parts. More of it’s in alloys like brass and bronze. And that’s just one metal. There’s steel and tin, about eight to twelve percent, mostly from thrown-away food cans. Aluminum, twelve to fifteen percent, from beer cans, pie plates, and packaging. There’s glass from bottles and jars. All of these products are in an already energized state—”

“What does that mean?”

“These things are refined from their basic ingredients with energy. Huge amounts of electrical energy to smelt aluminum, which is why so many Third World countries that build hydroelectric projects put in an aluminum smelter, even if they have no bauxite. Aluminum is exportable electricity. Look at how many smelters grew up around the Bonneville projects in the Pacific Northwest.

“Steel and glass are also made with energy—that is, heat. The cost of the iron ore or silica is incidental to the energy inputs to the process. And all these products are just lying there in your garbage, waiting for someone to pull them out, process, and sell them.”

“My
garbage?”

“You’ve got the territory and—oh, boy! In Silicon Valley, you’re getting gold salts, specialized acids, rare earths, and other unique chemicals, probably in attractively large concentrations. Billy, you’re a rich man.”

“Okay, garbage has percentages of metal in it. And glass. But most of it is still trash.” I was grumpy because my specialty eggs were getting cold on his plate.

“Definitions again, Billy. Most of it is still paper and plastics, vegetable fiber, and animal fats. Garbage to you, but wood pulp, oil products, and organic chemical feedstocks to an industrialist, or anyone who has studied our scarce natural resources.

“At the very least, you can pelletize this stuff after you take the metal and glass out. The cellulose and fibers, helped along by the fats and plastics, burn with about the same Btu rating as bituminous coal. And just about as cleanly—which is to say, not all that clean, but scrubbers and filters will take care of the smoke. Of course, pellets are just the quick buck. Long term, you will want to fractionate that material into wood and oil precursors, backtracking your enterprise into their natural resource markets.”

Corbin loved words like “fractionate.” I would have to spend an evening with the dictionary just to understand half of what he had been saying. But I could see a problem right away.

“If garbage is such a God-damned delight, why has nobody ever gotten rich off it before?”

Corbin puckered up his mouth and thought about that one for ten seconds, max. “Because,” he said, “no one has taken in the scope of it. Like a kid going to the town dump, everyone has looked for a particular prize. Aluminum, they say, we could take that out! Except the market isn’t high right now. Or the cost of separation is too great. So the project isn’t feasible.

“Or, take the old recycling programs. They’d go after a wider range of products, sure, but only if the people throwing them away—the recyclers’ suppliers—would spend the time to separate the green bottles from the brown, the aluminum cans from the steel, then haul it all in their cars to a collection point. It was too much trouble for most people, so the volume was never big enough to compete, economically, with scraping away whole forests and raping the Earth.

“But when you go after the whole enchilada, ‘every part of the pig but the squeal,’ as the old-time packers used to say, then your separation costs are lumped together. They become a smaller part of the overall cash flow. And by dipping your hand in half a dozen different markets at once, you can weather the periodic slumps. When aluminum’s down, wood pulp may be up, or chemical feedstocks, or gold.”

“How do we get this garbage?” I asked.

“You already own it, under the same legal fiction by which the EPA made it your responsibility for cleaning the garbage up. City scavengers will already truck the solid wastes thirty miles to an approved landfill—so let them send it to your reclaiming station. The sewer system runs twenty miles to a wastewater treatment plant—so build a fractionating plant next door.”

“Who is going to put up the money for all these plants?”

“Anybody who wants to get rich. There’s a venture capitalist born every minute, Billy. All you have to do is dazzle them out of the trees.”

Corbin picked up his fork and began eating the eggs, cold salsa and all.

Dazzle the investors we did, with colored brochures showing an artist’s renderings of processing plants. We gave them reams of computer analysis showing discounted cash flow and return-on-investment projections. We even had tiny lucite capsules made up with samples of real garbage sealed inside. Corbin and I raised such a big chunk of working capital that we seriously debated, for half an hour, putting it in a satchel and flying to Mazatlan. Finally, Jay—or Granny—pointed out that three times that amount was available in credit lines and bond underwritings, but we could only get our hands on it by going ahead with the project instead of running. I had to take that on faith, but we went ahead.

We started with a demonstration plant in Alviso on the edges of the Bay’s marshlands. It was sized to take in 50 tons of municipal solid waste a day. The machinery that worked with the garbage was really simple: It ground up whatever came in, metal and all; cooked it till the fibers and plastics were softened; mulched it to digest the organic matter; and ran the whole mess through a set of centrifugal separators. We could then reprocess the almost-pure fractions of metals, glass, organics, and oils: melting the first two, pelletizing the third, refining the fourth.

The only thing our first plant could not do was separate the green glass from the brown. For a while, we let them mix and added a heavy shot of nickel oxide to the molten glass, producing a deep-purple color. That turned it all into black glass, which has an industrial and artistic market. But we soon found a high-temperature process to settle out the green and brown dyes and make clear glass, which is more widely saleable.