Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (5 page)

The engineer at the summit was right: This mountain of trash is impressive. It’s also compelling, revelatory and horrifying all at the same time, possessed of that frightful beauty-beast admixture that can arise when vast natural and industrial landscapes are forcibly grafted onto one another—the Tinkertoy gas pipes snaking through wildflower fields, the scents of fresh pine mulch and fresh garbage vying for supremacy. A road on the backside of the mountain winds along the artificial “benches” that are built at forty-foot intervals, tiers of garbage capped with clay, soil and greenery. The road leads to the trash power generators, the landfill gas pipe junctions, various other pieces of garbage infrastructure, the boundary with Puente Hills’s unlikely neighbor, the sprawling Rose Hills Cemetery, and the active dump site topside. Because garbage settles as the years pass no matter how tightly it’s mashed by the bite and crush of Big Mike’s compactor, the roadbed settles, too, over time. The engineers can calculate this effect on average, but depending on whether the deep underbelly of a particular stretch of road is mostly crushed construction debris or mashed Barbie dolls or old carpeting—it’s impossible to know which without digging it all up—the rate and distance of settling varies yard by yard, causing the road to undulate like a roller-coaster track. This provides a bit of a thrill for the riders on the guided bus tours at Puente Hills, which are almost always full at the landfill that bills itself as the Disneyland of dumps.

“There is no other place like it, and no other job like it, either,” Big Mike says, gazing fondly at his dusty, noisy workplace. This observation is accompanied by a sigh of satisfaction tinged with regret, because soon, Big Mike knows, it will end. Soon the mountain will be finished, though not gone, of course—a landfill is never gone. It’s the question of what’s next that has not yet been resolved, that L.A. and the rest of the country are trying to puzzle out, and that will have lasting consequences no matter how it’s answered: Is it time to dump the dump as the centerpiece of waste? Or time to hedge our bets once again and find even bigger dumps to take their place?

SELECTED PRODUCTS, PERCENTAGE BY WEIGHT OF TOTAL LANDFILLED TRASH

Source: EPA
*

*
Although the EPA data on the quantity of waste generation in the U.S. is flawed, its analysis of the
composition
of trash depicted here continues to be useful and reliable. These calculations are informed in part by studies of real-world samples of typical Americans’ trash—how much of it is plastic, metal, paper, food scraps and so on. These figures are expressed in the EPA annual municipal solid waste reports as percentages of the total waste stream, as in the example of carpets and rugs, which are reported to comprise 2 percent of the total weight of trash sent to landfills. This is a different methodology from the flawed material flow analysis used to calculate total tonnage of waste. Extrapolating national estimates from real-world samples is a tried-and-true, scientifically valid technique.

2

PIGGERIES AND BURN PILES: AN AMERICAN TRASH GENESIS

I
MAGINE A CITY SO FULL OF GARBAGE, MUCK, HORSE
manure and standing sewage that sailors can smell it six miles out at sea. Where a proper gentleman has to toss a coin or two to a broom-wielding street urchin to sweep a path through the knee-high debris just so he can get in his front door. And where pigs trundle down sidewalks and dodge traffic, rooting through the garbage that the locals simply throw out their doors and windows, in vain hope that the ravenous animals will clean up some of the mess.

Welcome to New York City at the dawn of the twentieth century. Welcome to American urban life before the rise of the landfill. Even Charles Dickens, no stranger to the foul side of city life, was horrified by it: “Take care of the pigs,” he wrote in
American Notes
. “Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty, brown backs, like the lids of old horse-hair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches … They are the city scavengers, the pigs.”

The winding road that led us to flawed garbage numbers in Washington and a garbage mountain in Los Angeles begins 120 years ago in the New York of the 1890s. Widely considered at the time to be among the most exciting, vibrant and corrupt cities in the world, it was also the foulest, smelliest and dirtiest—truly a city of garbage. This is arguably the fertile soil in which America’s modern waste-management system begins.

At the opposite end of that history stands Puente Hills, the literal and figurative pinnacle of that same waste-management system, representing both its greatest success (handling huge amounts of waste) and greatest failure (enabling huge amounts of waste). For decades it has been a model for other dumps both public and private worldwide. The mega-landfill’s birth and evolution, then, provide a veritable history lesson on trash in America, which makes it a five-hundred-foot-tall 3-D chronicle of the modern consumer economy as well, the back end of which can be no better represented than by a mountain of garbage.

The modern landfill’s roots can be traced back to a City Hall regime that initially refused to use them: the corrupt Tammany Hall administration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a political machine that ran New York City like a feudal empire. This isn’t just metaphor. At the time, deaths in New York City from preventable diseases such as cholera matched those of Europe in the Dark Ages. The mixing of trash and disease-bearing human waste in the streets and gutters, coupled with an utter disregard for safe drinking-water supplies, made it quite certain that the rotting mess that paved the Big Apple would also breed one epidemic after another. America’s center for high culture had also mutated into its ultimate bacterial culture.

What garbage collection the City Hall bosses saw fit to make found its way onto barges of refuse dumped into the ocean, where it soon became the Jersey Shore’s problem. This was billed as an improvement for New Yorkers over the earlier practice, discontinued in 1872, of simply dumping garbage from a wooden platform over the East River. Garbage was strewn everywhere on the busy streets of the New York boroughs—food waste, ashes, human waste and considerable amounts of animal droppings, primarily from the 120,000 horses plying the roads in those pre-automotive times. Every day those horses deposited on the order of 1,200 tons of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine on the cobbles and asphalt of New York. Thousands of horse carcasses a year were just left where the overworked animals fell (fifteen thousand in 1880 alone). The wandering herds of pigs allowed to forage through the mess in lieu of regular street cleaning did consume some of the garbage, but they also added their own droppings to the overall muck. Cleanup, to say the least, was spotty; in a city where the population was doubling every decade for most of the nineteenth century, waste had become public enemy number one.

New York was not unique in this regard: Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities large and small were besieged by waste and ineffectual attempts to collect, dump or burn it. More than two hundred towns with populations over ten thousand built piggeries where raw garbage served as the feed, as what passed for waste experts at the time estimated that seventy-five pigs could dispose of a ton of garbage a day—and provide revenue and meat at the same time. New England led the nation in pursuing this waste-to-swine strategy; turn-of-the-century New Haven sent all its wet garbage, 5,400 tons of it a year, to pig farms, while Worcester, Massachusetts, proudly kept two thousand garbage-swilling swine at its forty-acre piggery near the city limits.
¹
A network of private garbage haulers in New York City cut deals with major hotels and restaurants to convert their food scraps into food for swine, which was then sold to local farmers. The piggeries provided more of a boon to garbage entrepreneurs and pork suppliers, along with the avaricious politicians who sometimes favored them, than a reliable means of stemming the tide of trash, and of course did nothing for nonedible refuse. Still, the practice, with the added innovation of cooking the garbage as a means of killing pathogens, persisted until the 1960s, when evidence that it could spread disease to both swine and humans became impossible to ignore.

Even the White House was plagued by the smells of festering garbage back then, not to mention the rats and roaches that nested in it. Presidents traditionally had to hire their own private trash haulers until well into the nineteenth century just to keep the White House garbage-free and the vermin under control.

But it was the legendary filth of New York City that provided the tipping point for the next evolution in garbage. Voter outrage over trash, corruption and endless scandal finally led to the ouster of the Tammany political machine in the elections of 1894. Soon after taking office, the new reformist mayor, William Strong, sought a superstar to accept an unprecedented mission: to bring the city back from trash Armageddon.

The mayor’s first choice, Teddy Roosevelt, turned down the job, taking the post of New York police commissioner instead. He deduced that this position would be a better springboard to higher political office for the future president than garbage czar, letting him build a name for ferreting out corruption rather than manure. The job of cleaning up New York then fell to Colonel George E. Waring, a Civil War veteran who, before his military service, had worked as the city engineer responsible for reclaiming the swampland that would become New York’s Central Park. Waring had supervised the design of a drainage system that created the park’s famously scenic lakes and ponds while leaving the rest of it dry. He had gone on to engineer an affordable and efficient dual sewer and drainage system for Memphis that kept storm runoff and septic waste separate. This protected the city water supply from contamination, ending almost overnight the cholera and other waterborne epidemics that had beset “The River City” for decades. Reforming New York’s sanitation department seemed a natural fit for this leading sanitation engineer of the day, who harrumphed into office asserting that he wished to be called “Colonel,” not “Commissioner,” throughout his tenure. His workers were required to salute.

Waring’s first move certainly drew more on his military training than engineering skill: He amassed an army, with broomsticks and ash cans as their weapons. Waring converted the desultory ranks of street cleaners previously known for collecting more bribes than garbage into a force of two thousand sanitation soldiers who marched in formation, passed by in lockstep for review by city officials, and were clad completely in white, from pants to pith helmets. New Yorkers stood openmouthed in shock when this new legion of street cleaners first appeared.

Initially mocked, within a year these “White Wings,” as Waring’s troops were nicknamed, had become icons, their white garb soon an international symbol (and eventually a cartoon cliché) for street cleaners everywhere. Their habit of menacing and occasionally roughing up litterbugs became legendary. They paraded before cheering crowds who marveled at the transformation of whole swaths of the city, the streets clear and the smells quashed—not just in upscale neighborhoods, but in the poorest parts of town as well. The White Wing treatment even extended to the gang-dominated and crime-infested tenements of Five Points, where gangster Al Capone got his start, where the notorious Tombs city prison long stood, and where the Civic Center government complex now resides. The muckraker Jacob Riis, whose investigative reporting on unsafe drinking water has been credited with saving New York from cholera outbreaks and whose impassioned writing about life in the city’s slums sparked the creation of a system of neighborhood parks, wrote: “It was Colonel Waring’s broom that first let light into the slum … His broom saved more lives in the crowded tenements than a squad of doctors.” The
New York Times
reported after seven months of Waring’s sanitation leadership: “Clean streets at last … Marvels have been done.” The paper later would eulogize him by asserting: “There is not a man or a woman or a child in New York who does not owe him gratitude for making New York in every part so much more fit to live than it was when he undertook the cleaning of the streets.” It’s safe to say that no sanitation official before or since has ever been so celebrated. And none have influenced his successors and peers so profoundly, for his model is essentially the one in place now in America.

Waring’s attack on garbage began with street cleaning coupled with a new form of garbage collection in which recycling, “reduction” and recovery were emphasized as never before. Waring’s price for regular and bribe-free trash collection and street sweeping was a requirement that households divide their waste into three bins: ash (from burning coal), food waste, and all other rubbish, which had to be bundled by type. Waring wanted to build a system to recycle useful materials such as scrap metal, rags and paper; incinerate burnable garbage; and reduce (or render) organic waste, including animal carcasses (remember those fifteen thousand dead horses?) into “garbage grease.” The product of the rather noxious rendering plants was then sold for soap, perfumes and lubricants, along with an incineration byproduct referred to as “residuum” that was sold as a cheap fertilizer. The principles of reuse and recycling Waring pursued were not new—various industries, such as printing and paper making, had recycled since before the American Revolution, and trash scavenging had long been a source of work and income, embraced by waves of immigrants as one of the few jobs never denied them over issues of language, race or culture. Recycling in the broad sense appears to be one of the most ancient human instincts, dating back to our pre-human, tool-making hominid ancestors, whose ancient stone implements reveal that they did not throw away a broken flint knife, but instead recycled it, shaping it into some other, smaller tool or weapon. But Waring took recycling to a whole new level in America’s fastest-growing metropolis: He institutionalized and regulated the idea. He set an entire city on course for the kind of sustainable handling of waste that America has been trying in fits and starts to perfect ever since.

His methods included cooking the garbage with steam or naphtha, pressing out the liquid into settling tanks and skimming the grease off the top. In this way, a ton of “summer garbage” (minus the coal ash and other nonrecyclable trash) broke down into forty pounds of garbage grease (2 percent of that ton of waste) and four hundred pounds (20 percent) of “tankage,” which was the stuff that settled and could be used as fertilizer, as it contained ammonia, phosphoric acid and potash. Seventy-one percent of that ton of garbage—1,420 pounds—consisted of water cooked off during the process. From the leftover 7 percent—the “rubbish”—lead from tin can lids was melted and reused for solder, and the remaining tin was pressed into blocks for making window counterweights. Waring reported that one ton of municipal garbage processed in this way could generate $2.47 of revenue from these recovered materials—which would be a respectable $64 in 2010 dollars.

Once the reusable materials had been stripped out of the trash flow, whatever was left would be taken to dumps outside the city. They were not the sealed and antiseptic Puente Hills–style of contemporary American landfills. They were traditional, stinking open dumps prowled by scavengers and infested with rats and insects. Still, they were a vast improvement over using the streets or the ocean as a dump. Their existence helped establish a new principle that quickly became dogma: One of local government’s basic functions was to keep the streets clean by removing refuse to a safe distance for proper, well-thought-out disposal. Waring argued that civilization and human health depended on this basic service, and he became the toast of the town as a result, having succeeded in bringing New York City back to a point that the ancient Greeks had reached five centuries before the birth of Christianity. Which is more than anyone else had accomplished before him.

S
TILL, CELEBRATED
and admired as he and his White Wings were, parts of Waring’s plan didn’t go over so well. He had badly overestimated the public’s willingness to participate in the reinvention of waste. New Yorkers, Waring complained, were too “obdurate” to follow his trash separation rules. When it became clear rigid enforcement—Waring’s preference—wasn’t practical, he instead built a sorting facility of his own, where useful materials could be pulled out of the garbage after collection but before disposal. This innovation was a forerunner of what is now an industry standard for sorting trash, the Materials Recovery Facility (which people conversant in waste-speak simply call the MRF, pronounced “the Murph”). Puente Hills, for instance, has a state-of-the-art Murph. But the concept was pioneered more than a century ago by Colonel Waring. Unfortunately, it was a costly and dangerous process then, and without Waring’s ironfisted supervision, it soon fell by the wayside.